Yet ancient cities still built walls if they were vibrant, and the ideal was to have both passive and active defences. This can be achieved by pairing Murray with a more mobile, more offensive dman ... Diaz?
Some general notes on the Murray issue, and the fact he doesn't have splendid microstats in his first two games.
1) He is brought in on a 1-year contract, paid 1.5 million, to play 10-15 minutes a game on the third pairing. He is not expected to have splendid microstats. For this pay and role, mediocre microstats are actually better than they appear since you should not be comparing Murray to the league average: 2nd pairing D playing 20 minutes a game, which you automatically do by bringing up microstats and implicitly comparing him to mean performance. The 30th percentile would actually be quite good given his contract and minutes played, as that puts him in the upper half of genuine third pairing dmen (14th to 42nd percentiles, assuming 7 dmen per team). This is leaving aside the fact that Murray is necessarily shortchanged by microstats since they are not optimised to capture his contribution.
ETA: As a sixth dman, Murray's neutral performance range is 14th to 28th percentile, and at 21st percentile he would be exactly median.
1B) It's important to have players like Murray and Drewiske on the roster because then you don't have to deplete your farm system and draft pick allocation acquiring dmen from other teams once the injuries inevitably occur, as we often did in the Gainey-Gauthier era. This is a contribution not captured by Fenwick, and you're not going to get some Subban-type for a 1-year contract paying 1.5 million with no guarantee of playing time. You have to try and get some benefit, like Murray's toughness or Marc-Andre Bergeron's shot.
2) The most direct effect of a guy like Murray might be to disorient opposition players due to devastating hits. That won't be measured by most microstats I'm aware of, as the effect will mostly be felt when Murray is off the ice, and the sample size will always be small.
3) We need more size on the team. We were eliminated by the Flyers in 2008 and 2010, and Ottawa in 2013, because we lacked size and toughness and our players became meek. We have also been humiliated in countless regular season games. Murray, Prust, and Parros have been brought in to help with this issue. They don't completely solve the toughness issue, not by any means, but it's a significant step forward that should help the other players play better even when none of Murray, Prust, and Parros are on the ice.