I guess I'm the only person who has been completely and totally fine with his play. His 15 even strength points put him in a 17 way tie among NHL forwards for 195th in even strength scoring. That puts him right in the upper echelon of 3rd line players in terms of even strength production (with 31 teams, that means that the top 93 is top line players, 94-186 are 2nd line players and 187-279 are 3rd liners). He has also missed 9 games due to injury, so it's not as if you can point to injuries to other guys as a reason he would otherwise be slotted lower. It's not as if he is getting 2nd line usage and putting up good 3rd line numbers. He is being used squarely as a 3rd liner both in TOI (7th among forwards in even strength TOI per game and practically attached at the hip to the one player that this entire board agrees has been just terrible). He had 30 even strength points in 81 game last year, so his 15 in 40 so far this year is exactly on par with his even strength production last year.
His big issue is his powerplay production. 4 points isn't good enough, but how many of us think that the coaching staff is running a good PP scheme? He had 13 PP points on Toronto's 1st unit last year and 18 PP points the year before that. Schenn's PP production dropped from 28 to 19 points coming from Philly to here. Statsny had 5 PP points through 63 games here last season and was on the top unit. He had 4 in 19 games with Winnipeg. How many guys do we need to watch struggle on our PP compared to other PPs before we lay the blame directly at the feet of the coaches? Bozak has made some bad decisions on the PP, but I don't think the coaching staff has put our forwards in position to succeed on the PP.
At the end of the day, Bozak is on pace for 39 points over 82 games. That's only 4 shy of his pace last year (while he was getting top PP usage for one of the best PPs in the league). I think he is performing right on par with reasonable expectations as our 3rd line center. That role almost certainly isn't worth a $5 mil AAV in a vacuum. However, you have to overpay in AAV in order to get a reasonable term out of a 32 year old UFA who was one of the best 5 centers available. Looking at our cap structure moving forward, a higher AAV for 3 years was much more manageable than a fair AAV for 4 years. We don't have cap issues next year. We have a good chunk of roster spots to fill, but should have $20+ mil in space to do so and no one is due a substantial raise. Eddy is probably due the biggest raise and he has played himself out of the salary bracket we all thought he would be in. We'll need to either re-sign one of Gunnar/Bo or find a legitimate 4th D caliber replacement, but that will be cheaper than the combined $8.3 mil coming off the books for them. A few RFAs are due modest raises, but nothing troubling. His $5 mil cap hit is a non-issue next season. So that means that the $5 mil hit is only really an issue for one year, but his limited NTC (which goes away completely in January of 2021) means that it shouldn't be difficult to deal with if need be. Like I said, $5 mill AAV is an overpay in a vacuum, but it is an overpay that isn't hurting the Blues at the moment and shouldn't hurt for very long (if ever). It's not an anchor contract.