I think it was a few things:
1) The system works for stronger skaters than he is.
2) He started out on the third line and was probably mad about it.
3) I think he came into camp a little out of shape and wasn't in shape until ingury #1.
4) He always was lazy on the backcheck and maybe personality/role perspective conflicts with Roy.
All in all, I thought he was offensively gifted and could dangle but always played a lazy looking game, especially on defense. He was smart enough to be in the right places once he got there and had a good set of hands but just never worked hard enough outside of a few really good games this year.
See most of those things I think are true, but he'd be able to compensate for them to an extent and still not be a turnover machine most of the year. He may have had an issue with starting the season on the 3rd line, but he was playing with a highly touted 1st overall draft pick. It's not like he was on a grinder line.
That's where I start to wonder a bit about your issue #3 maybe being true, and he never really recovered.
I read somewhere about someone calculating the average speed of the top NHLers using their times in the speed contests at the All Star games. It broke down to about 28mph for the fastest guys, but that was the average speed of the lap. I don't know how accurate that is, but it probably at least puts us in the ball park for speed.
So say Duchene and Mack are 30 mph skaters at their top end. Next level guys like Landy, Stastny, or O'Reilly are 25 mph guys.
They can probably hit near their top speed a couple times during a shift, and then fall off just a bit after that due to fatigue.
Then there's PAP, who we'll say is a 20 mph skater. Again foregoing accuracy, it's just for the sake of argument. He's probably good for one, maybe two bursts at his top speed, but then I think his problem is he falls off a cliff after that.
That's where we get into conditioning. It's not just a matter of speed, it's how long can you maintain that speed, or near to it.
I have a feeling Iginla at this point in his career probably isn't that much better of a skater than PAP, and may have a similar top end speed. The difference will be that he's known to work very hard in the offseason to prepare himself.
I'd bet that he'll be about as good a skater as PAP, but hustle a lot more on the ice, and won't have the same issues with speed because he won't fall off a cliff after one or two bursts. He'll still manage to not be a big liability despite skating hard and trying to play a 200 foot game, the way Landy does.
When PAP tried to play a 200 foot game, I think it wore him out. So his entire 200 foot game suffered. Just a guess.
