He had a sophomore slump. His rookie year he played 94% of his even strength minutes next to Serge, Cole, and Heddy. Serge had a career year, Hedman obviously cleans up a lot of mistakes, and takes control of the puck out there, and Ian Cole was a solid defensive minded 3rd pair guy.
45.8% - Sergachev
34.6% - Hedman
13.6% - Cole
and this season 95% of his even strength shifts looked something like this:
31.6% - Hedman
19.7% - de Haan
18.6% - Lilleberg
9% - Cernak
8.2% - Sergachev
4.7% - Fleury
3.4% - Raddysh
The main things:
- less time with Hedman
- almost 20% of his time next to de Haan, maybe the worst dmen on the team
- 18.6% with a rookie who went through some ups and downs
- Serge, his main partner from 2023, struggled himself this season
The constant shuffling of d partners (the Bolts used 14 dmen this season), having to play on the left side instead of the right at times, not playing in front of competent goaltending the first half of the season with JJ in net, and the increased ice time and responsibilities in year 2 all effected who is still a young dmen himself. But I don't think Lilleberg will face a lot of these same issues in his seond year (or at least hopefully). Vasy should be back to 100%, he plays on the left side behind Serge and Hedman who are going to do most of the heavy lifting for this defense, and Lilleberg already has some preexisting chemistry with Crozier who might stick around. We'll see. Hard to compare both players since they have different skillsets, different things each one has to improve on, not to mention Lilleberg played this season as a 22-23 year old, while Perbix was 24 all of his rookie season.