I'm hoping he comes around. If you got a rejuvenated Brown and Holloway for the back half of the season in the bottom 6 and could get Perry on your 3rd line then you'd finally be looking at a 4 line team that can score at will on every line. You'd also have a ton of depth waiting in the press box. Thats one thing the '06 Oilers had. Multiple depth options to inject into the line up and it was crucial in several games during that run.
The only fairly recent year that Brown scored 20 was the 20-21 season which seems outlier. He also scored 5 shorties that year which is first indication it was one of those years where everything is going. He also was shooting near 18% that season nearly double what he usually gets. Brown has had multiple seasons under 10% shooting. Its not like he had magic hands in his career.
To wit scoring 5 shorties in 56GP that season was flat out unrepeatable. Would never happen again. He has 8 his whole career. To put into perspective how outlier that season was this is the alltime list of shorties scored in one season. Prorated to a typical length season this is 7.5 goals. That puts Connor Brown top 20 all time in that metric, It also represented a quarter of his total production on the season
records.nhl.com
Over Career Brown prorates to 14Goals a season on 82 game proration. That in itself is misleading as Brown hasn't played an 82 game season in a long time. For a guy coming off a complete missed season due to egregious knee injury its even more improbable the guy could play a lot of games.
Look around the league at guys struggling to score. Once it leaves it ain't coming back. Guys like Silfverberg in Ahaheim completely forgetting how to score. Silfverbert is on a completely different level than Brown as a shot generator and has scored twice as many NHL goals. 181 vs 91. I use him as example because he has a similarly poor shooting % career wise. He's no sharpshooter, he's somebody that needs appreciable volume of chances to score and was always like that.
Jacob, similar to Brown also had a prime of life bubble where he was scoring more consistently for a couple seasons. 2 seasons tend not to define players, their career work does.
