Can most of this be simplified down to some of the North-South vs East-West type of play we started hearing about for centre men, or is it more than that?
I don't personally subscribe to these black-and-white concepts of North-South vs East-West. The Lightning won the cup playing a pretty North-South game last year, but the dynamic ability of guys like Point and Cirelli at their top two centre positions was still paramount to thier success, and I'd argue that on paper, Point would be classified as an East-West style player.
There's a lot of situational fluidity on how to identify these different situations and react. Bennett's actually great at it contary to popular belief. Other than Backlund, he's probably our best centre at walking the line between making plays and making safe plays. These kind of strong details in his game get lost when certain people try to boil the game down to the various extremes (Monahan scores points! Bennett doesn't score points!) (Bennett has tunnel vision [when his wingers are lagging so far behind the play that a risky drop pass would be the only option outside of a nonthreatening dump-in]! Monahan finds open ice!!).
Ultimately, I don't think east-west and north-south are useful descriptors. You play a direct game when there's no time and space being conceded. You play a higher risk-higher reward game when you can exploit the opponent. And every shift is different.
On a positional level though, you need to impact the game. You can't just coast on production while having no positional value-added.
Which brings me right back up to Point and Cirelli. Where's the Steven Stamkos part of that equation?
I'm not sure there is one. That doesn't mean Tampa wouldn't prefer to have Stammer back, but it means that they're probably worse with him back at centre, which would be blasphemous to the Flames organization's sensibilities. Players like Monahan and Stamkos have no positional value-added. You can make them play north-south, and they can. You can make them play east-west, and they can. But you can't make them into impactful centres, because they don't notably affect the game, shift-to-shift, from the middle of the ice where centres are required to spend most of their time in the defensive and neutral zones.