I'm just gonna keep saying it until I'm blue in the face: Soda is not a shutdown center. He's not even that great a penalty killer, to be honest.
His defensive numbers aren't that great. His value is in putting up points. Roy realized that, Bednar has not.
And I don't buy this "But who else would you put there!?" argument. They could stack the top two lines, roll out a 3rd line that would do decent defensively, and be fine.
If they don't have a viable replacement (or better yet, upgrade!) by the time a 35-year-old Soda is up for a new contract, then that is an abject FAILURE by management. There has to be a decent option at 3C between Compher, Kerfoot, Jost, Bowers, Kamenev,