On the one hand, this is classic Botchford trash. Take something, twist it around and spin it into an attention grabbing hyperbole of a headline.
I think there is something to the idea that they want Horvat to concentrate on building himself into the two-way "Bergeron type" he was drafted to
hopefully become. He
should be able to eventually do both. There's some salient point nestled into the twisted WillieD logic somewhere there.
Let's be frank, Bo was
not good defensively last year at all on the whole. He
was cheating here and there, taking shortcuts to generate that impressive second half output (and those lapses were especially prominent early when he wasn't even scoring either). He wasn't minus 30 by accident, especially while scoring 40pts of his own. There were serious problems, and he was clearly in way over his head with responsibility last year. That's not the kind of player who you're going to match up vs Top Lines, and despite the production...still often a net negative on the whole.
I actually sort of "get" the idea of trying to scale back Horvat's responsibility, let him focus on just getting the bedrock of his game as a defensive/two-way forward in order. Trying to relieve the pressure on him to produce offensively...if that's what's getting to him (and from some of Horvat's comments even, it sounds like that may be a bit of the case).
Problem is, i don't know how much faith i or anyone else have in Granlund and Sutter to carry lines that actually produce enough offensively to truly alleviate that burden on Horvat. Which kind of defeats the purpose, unless those lines are scoring a ton. In which case, having Horvat playing with a pair of offensive black holes in Burrows+Dorsett is just worsening the pressure immensely.
I think WillieD's distorted perception of others like Sutter/Granlund, and massively overinflated perception of Dorsett is where this really falls of the rails though, more so than his perception of Horvat. In WillieD's mind, i'm sure he
thinks he's giving Bo a rock solid shutdown winger to play with, which is...
. But Burrows
is a guy who i think really belongs back on a checking line at this point in his career. So if Dorsett actually
was the player WillieD seems to see him as, and Granlund+Sutter could actually hold up offensive lines to take pressure of...this might actually be reasonable in trying to take a long-view of Horvat's all-important development.
But one of those things is straight up delusional. And the other is tenuous at best. So it ends up being pretty baffling, even if there is a tiny shred of actually sound reasoning in there somewhere.
It's interesting though...for a coach so apparently on the hot-seat, WillieD doesn't seem very concerned. The "easy out" would be to just let Horvat cheat his way to points in soft sheltered minutes. Not the best thing for Horvat long-term, but probably the quickest ticket to safety for a coach like WillieD with a team that simply couldn't score last year. Even if you don't agree with the reasoning...it's undeniably a "long term development" sort of decision to scale Horvat back from offensive responsibility. WillieD seems to be approaching this like a coach with a long-term mandate and some serious job security. Which is either very odd, completely ignorant of his situation, or indicates he may not be nearly as much on the hot seat as it looks from the outside.
