For me, I see things very much like this : remember how FOR YEARS it always seemed way more complicated and difficult than it needed to be to find wingers that Matt Duchene could play with? The whole chemistry thing always seemed to be 'off''? Does that remind you of anyone on the backend at all? Isn't Barrie that very same guy where we're always having a hard time finding him the right partner?? EJ you can pretty much plug anyone and he's good-to-go but Barrie, it's always more complicated. We played one game without him this year and I thought the defense looked frikkin' fantastic. Maybe its a coincidence, maybe it's not.
Whoa...no. No no no.
I don't think the situations are comparable. They have one commonality and I'll go into that in just a sec, but Duchene's big hangup was that his playing style was very similar to Mats Sundin in that he plays a lot like a wing. He needs linemates who do what centers normally do, which is why playmaking wingers (Fleischman, to a lesser extent, O'Reilly) clicked so well with him. So did Kerfoot. In Ottawa you can see they're having the same issues now.
Barrie simply hasn't had a decent partner, certainly no one who has finally taken the job and run with it. And a big part of that is that the Avs still have yet to produce a reliable FIRST pairing. This is still one of the worst defensive teams in the league. That's not on Barrie, that's on the Avs. It's ridiculous that they still can't seem to find a guy who can play a reliable, steady, defensive game as a #4 guy.
Yes, Barrie is struggling right now. I'm convinced like many others that he's not completely healthy, and I'm also convinced his confidence is shaken. You could almost literally see him tighten up the minute Bednar pulled the goalie. I think that's why his passes seem so errant and he's handling the puck nervously on the point. I also think that it's possible Bednar's messing with his game again and not allowing him the free rein that Roy did. Barrie is at his best moving the puck up-ice through traffic, acting like a fourth forward. He needs a reliable partner who can steady the back end so he can do this. He doesn't have to be elite, just reliable. So far the Avs have partnered him with Nemeth, Girard, Barberio (UGH), Lindholm (also ugh), and EJ and Z but in very limited minutes. It's no coincidence that he's looked his best this season with EJ, which still makes me wonder why they don't try it more often, RH/LH stuff be damned.
Look what happened when they put Landeskog back with MacKinnon. You find someone like that for Barrie (AND get a good first pairing) and you will see him work the way he's supposed to. Once again, like so many other players who have come and gone with Colorado, the problem wasn't the player--they failed to build around him.
