Also, he's talented enough that we should be able to work on him giving and receiving passes.
That's back to this organization's inability to have their guys do basic skills somehow.
Even Zibanejad, who is amazing, can't really stick-handle at the most remedial level and it's incredible to me, in a bad way.
In his defense, a guy like Schneider who needs actual work is in big trouble here.
People say "oh we suck at developing forwards, it's not the defense." It's them too. None of them can pass.
So Ola always went off about the size of our players and its disadvantages with regard to quickness, transitions, and puck battles, but this is another area that size can be a detriment to. Zibanejad is a big, lanky dude and he uses a pretty long stick too. That impacts his handles. He's actually got great hand-eye and soft hands, but he can't stickhandle close to his body as well as even Trochek (who has markedly worse hands) and there's very rarely room at the NHL level for him to do so away from it. Our defense as whole suffers from this; it's how lindgren looks much better than he is as far as handling the puck goes; and it's a bit of why Miller looks worse than he is with it.
Some of the issues you're getting at fold into an earlier conversation about 'heaviness.' I don't want to 'go there' with anyone about it, but heaviness is less about what you do and moreso about how you to it, to whom, when, and where, and to what end. We play like a small team insofar as we look to carry the puck too often when we don't have speed under us, try to play stop and go transition hockey when we lack the quickness to pull it off, prefer high, east-west cycles when which often leave our players too large a gap to effectively cover on the backcheck. In the D-zone, we don't get in the other teams way enough. Every other competitive team in the league runs interference constantly to slow a forecheck or a pinching defensemen just as much as possible, to give just a split second more time to a defensemen recovering the puck to get his eyes on it and handle it.
That's to say that I don't think these guys aren't skilled, but the way the roster's built and the way they prefer to play do not match. With a team as big as ours, I think what the players without the puck are doing (in every zone) becomes that much more critical in order to keep speed under our team, stay above the puck when defending, and transitioning more effectively given a little more room to make a deliberate play in your own end.