I'm not going to respond to individual quotes, but to a couple of them in general.
First: Enough "burying your head in the sand" stuff from different posters. It's like media coordination and it's annoying.
Second: The pens won the first two rounds last year with Fehr and Kunitz with Geno, lest we forget. Then we won the next two rounds with Geno centering Kunitz and Rust. Dumb ****, but it worked, because the team's best players were their best players, we caught some breaks, and the stars aligned.
In a cap league, there are are a thousand variables that go into a championship run. I can find way more reasons why we should have been eliminated last spring than come up with reasons why we actually won. Same goes for every Chicago run.
Two of our most important support players at forward are on the shelf. That's going to mess with the lines regardless, and like it or not, Sid has carte blanche on choosing linemates, or at least making it known what kind of players he enjoys playing with *wink wink*
And I suppose it's worth repeating for the slow learners: Kessel on one the top two lines makes us just another top heavy team. Advantage gone. The team that already leads the NHL in goals per game will not suddenly add a half a goal per game more because Phil is playing with Sid or Geno. That's not how any of this works.
What's the advantage of having Kessel being wasted on the 3rd line if they almost do not produce offensively and are pretty likely to be scored on ?
For instance, just making a simple switch between Kessel and Hornqvist to last night lines would increase the overall effectiveness of the team offensively.
Yeah it would worsen the balance of the team but why should we care ?
2nd line would be better, 3rd line would be about the same kind of mediocre line, probably better defensively.
December's lines were almost perfect (without Guentzel that you would now add) but did not please Sullivan for whatever reason.
I mean, it's pretty clear he's pushing for certain lines he would love to work in spite of reality telling him otherwise. (HBK one of them)
One last thing, we shouldn't try to replicate to a tee what we did in last year's playoffs, it's the best way to fail.
Each year is different, there are numerous ways to achieve greatness, let's try what is best for the team THIS year.
That's the reason I wasn't such a fan of seeing so little turnover from last year's lineup.
One thing should be a constant though : building our play around speed and aggressiveness (ie puck pursuit, constantly in your face kind of hockey).
