If they were smart, and wanted develop him others properly, they should have sent him back with clear and obvious critiques and instructions on how to play his way back onto the NHL roster. I need you to do XYZ and I need your AHL coach to tell me you’re doing XYZ before you come back up.
I finally heard Brindy address this the other day. It may have been in Rosen's NHL.com story on Svechnikov that I read for some reason, despite not really liking Rosen's stuff/fluff. He said that what he likes to get through to the young players is that you only have the puck 20 percent of the time you're on the ice, so you don't have it 80 percent of the time, and what you do during that time is just as important -- if not moreso -- than what you do when you have it. I can only assume that's what he tells the guys going down.
I also assume Roddy came to that 20 percent figure by dividing 100 by the number of players on the ice, because there's *no way* any player has the puck even close to 20 percent of the time he's on the ice, factoring in the fact that a team may have the puck only 55 percent of the time at best, and the puck is loose quite a lot as well. So his 80 percent without the puck number is probably closer to 92-95 percent for a player like Gauthier.
That's a lot of time to be "good" away from the puck.
It was anecdotal from here, someone said they met Forslund or heard an interview maybe where he intimated that when he got sent down it didn’t go smooth. As in he either didn’t want to go down or just didn’t take it well, and then Forslund said it would be awhile before he got called up when we all assumed he was knocking on the door.
Whoever said it can obviously say it better than me.
I think it's great that he was pissed to get sent down. I'd be far more worried about him if he wasn't.
Oh, and dick joke.