So I'm surfing wiki and come upon Jean Pronovost's hockey bio. Pretty above average career with 391 goals, 774 points in just under a 1000 games. Near the end of his career in 1980-81 he is with the Washington Capitals. Registers an 80 game, 22 goal-36 assist-58 point season. The next season (his final one) he's only in 10 games and toils the remainder of the season with Hershey in the AHL. He produced there too with a 35-31-66pts stat line. So what the heck happened here? Surely with that Cap team there should have still been room for this guy. Any Cap fans have any insight on what may have happened?
Thanks in advance, Cheers !!
A few things ...
1) while 58 points! sounds impressive in 80-81, that was a very high-scoring year and only works out to about 45 adjusted points, which is actually pretty mediocre 2nd line production.
2) in order to get to that mediocre 2nd line production, he was racking up a pile of points on the top-unit PP with Maruk and Walter.
So basically, already in 80-81 there were already a bunch of red flags that this was a very old player declining at ES and being propped up by top-unit PP production.
Then in 81-82, he gets off to a terrible start with 1 goal in the first 5 weeks of the season and is absolutely bleeding goals at ES and is a -8. So he gets sent down and replaced with Chris Valentine as a 2nd line/PP specialist, and Valentine significantly outproduces what Pronovost did the previous year.
Basically, he was finished and then replaced and upgraded on by a rookie. And it's something we see fairly often in this era where guys start to crater at ES but are carried for a few years by PP production. Guy Chouinard is another name that immediately pops to mind.
