Last year with a full year of MSL and putting someone as silky smooth as Hayes in the line-up.
The Rangers relied much more on rush scoring and high danger shots coming off of controlled entries to score. And it worked. They added more skill at every position.
This year, they're less suited to play super-rush, AND score of cycles, than ever before. It's essentially the worst of both worlds.
Don't really believe in super-rush scoring, it always more or less require some kind of major mistake from the team you face. You see that this year too when we score of the rush, the other team attack, we break up the attack and just puts the puck in the neutral zone and out of no-where we get a 3 on 1 or 2 on 1 rush. That would never happened out-side the first round of the POs... I think we try to play more of a complete game this year and I like that. Its costing us because we are a bit sloppy and its not our back-yard to play with that swagger with the puck, and we will need to buckle down later on this season and get back to our core game. But it would be good if we could push our overall game forward a bit before that.
Also on MSL, when we had him and he struggled many was of the opinion that he contributed nothing and easily could be replaced by just about anyone. That was of course not true. When a player like MSL is on the ice, even last year when struggling, the team you face relates very much to him. He moves very well on the ice to get into scoring situations, and is very calculative and consistent in that sense. When you face him as a D, you take notice of that and really have to focus on staying with him and making sure that you don't loose track of him.
We definitely lost a dimension that is impacting our possession numbers when MSL retired. In short, if the average D in this league face Jesper Fast or JT Miller they are pro-active, play their game, step up on them, etc etc etc -- if they face MSL they are reactive. They are forced to keep a safe distance. He will pull them E-W, N-S, always with a plan to exploit them. And so forth.
I always think there is a great danger with concluding that a player like MSL for example easily can be replaced just because they are not scoring etc. Its definitely the same with Nash too for example.