To be fair, that was a rare time when Walker wasn't wrong.
His performance in 2021 - both before and after the injury - was absolutely horrific. Looked like an absolute zombie, horrific body language, zero effort, zero effectiveness outside of some PP points. It was ghastly and I don't think I've every seen a player perform further below his abilities than the Pettersson of late 2021.
Then a switch flicked in the second half of last season and he went from an outright liability to playing the best hockey since the first 20 games of his career almost overnight.
The whole thing was f***ing strange and I wonder if we'll ever get the full story.
He really did look completely shot, for like a full calendar year, and the bulk of 2 seasons.
It's his skating, it's insanely miles better now. Skating is connected to everything, can't shoot or handle the puck if your skating and stamina are trash. Always gonna be outta breath and out of position.
These guys all have public instagram pages, the youngins are quite actively posting, usually every other day. For anyone following their stories over those couple off-season's, the reason for his falloff should be quite obvious. Dude pretty much lived at the beach, other than the occasional clothing line photoshoot. Literally every other player had some semi-regular documented training/practices mixed in.
