What really baffles me here are the motives for people here to jump at each other, make assumptions that are not in anyway in line with what the other person is saying , take stuff entirely out of the context and just make assumptions without really even bothering to understand what the other person was pointing out. If person A thought that the world was flat, B thought it was infinite and C knew it was around. What would be the benefit of any one of the three to jump at each other's throats because their ideology didn't match? Should anyone of them look into horizon, none could negate the other's arguments. Conversations take place and so do debates, but since we aren't discussing our ways of living or anything else that is in any way intimate, none of that should be personal. Of course hockey is a way of life sort of thing for many folks and I treat it as one, yet we are here to discuss, not judge. If you do not share someone's ideas and viewpoints, that doesn't give you the right to judge and persecute that person. If you absolutely have to lash out, there's always the main boards.
Anyway, that's enough for that. As for the expectations coming into the final ELC year, there are so many moving variables and many of them are out of Laine's hands. With a 36 and 44 goal campaigns behind him it would almost, just almost realistic to expect him to break that 50 goal barrier. If he's assigned to a primary scoring role, there's not a shadow of a doubt that he will break it. If he instead is kept in the secondary scoring position and w/o Stastny I think it would be realistic to expect something alike that was displayed in 17-18, production wise. I'm hopeful he gets a bigger role though and that he could keep defying the odds, and accomplish something unexpected once again.
Patrik is known from his goal scoring but I've always seen that dynamic side in him where he's capable of doing much more than just shooting the puck into top shelf. This young man has really terrific hockey IQ and he sees the ice so damn well. Some of those breakaway passes to Ehlers have been pretty breathtaking. Also I haven't seen many guys who can pull out a grade A hard backhand tape-to-tape pass from the left wall to the blueline or even to a linemate at the opposite wall who might be closing into the net despite the traffic involved, and actually do that consistently (often at display in the PP). His passing is so underrated but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the edges in his game are still so raw that he hasn't always been able to generate that much open space as he will in the future. He has the ability and vision in the game and I really expect his G/A ratio to settle down sooner than later, since Laine has never been a volume shooter (that's just not his game).
There was/is that Ovy vs Laine non-sense discussion in the main boards and the content wasn't exactly mind-blowing. I expect there's a lot of noise around this since he's going to be at the same age when Ovechkin jumped to NHL. Apart from that terrific ability to score goals the guys haven't got much in common. Laine seems more creative and isn't north-south type of a coaster, but more like a hybrid of a e<->w and n<->s player, and it's actually another quality about him I find intriguing. Anyway, I'll temper with the expectations but I'm pretty confident we will see a new layer from him and much more complete package come 2018-19. The start of October couldn't come much more slower to be honest.
There are vets fans saying he is 8th best forward on the Jets even though he scored 44 goals. Some even said he would be benched or sent to AHL in any other team (or atleast under coach Q). He has been Jets whipping boy for sure. That is understandable though, newcomers tend to be under microscope. 
