He seems to have really improved his skating and seems much more confident
his skating was never an issue though, it was more his effort as he didn't move his feet enough and he was very inconsistent. Clearly he had the skill or he wouldn't have been a top 10 pick in the Q draft but just failed to live up to expectations until now as he's leading the team in scoring and is just inside the top 20 in the league in points.
I tend to give very little credence to out of nowhere PPG offensive production when a prospect is already in his fourth season ( let's call it the Gabriel Dumont special ) but it's nice that he's putting up numbers. I guess he really wants that ELC.
it's certainly something you have to take into consideration. Last year I went into the season thinking Walford was a no sign and then as he started to score goals I thought he would be signed due more to our weak LD prospects. But clearly management felt that he didn't progress enough. It's going to be very interesting to see what their plans are this off-season since we have so many players that need to be signed vs the prospects they might want to bring over/sign out of our Euro/NCAA guys.
Now that we have all these picks and prospects, there's only so much room so clearly we aren't going to be signing some guys despite what could be a lot of turnover among the 50 current contracts.
Its early in the season, but with 17 pts in 11 games, Houde is basically producing at the pace Suzuki was producing last year in junior...
Suzuki had a bit of a down year and then there's the playing for 2 different teams and he missed 9 games. With OS he put up a 1.5 ppg, with the storm he was at a 1.69 ppg, so if he played all year with the storm and played in every game at a 1.69 pp that would have been a career year with 115 pts.
Houde's at a 1.46 ppg so in the same number of games as Suzuki last year that would be 86 pts this year, which would put him at a little better then Teasdale last year but surely would be a very good season for him but would be a red flag in that he would have scored more points in his final season in the Q then he did in his 3 year career.