Defensively, no. Offensively, yes.
Imagine what he'd do if we had a competent PP coach and not Dan ****ing Bylsma.
Let me tell you the story of an 18 year old me who, beginning in 2005, listened to my much less informed dorm neighbor in college rant and rave about how terrible Kronwall was defensively.
At first, I brushed him off. This was Kronwall: the renowned young Swedish defenseman! And my neighbor could barely name half the guys on the roster. What did he know? He clearly didn't see Kronwall's ~20ish game stint as a 23 year old rookie where he looked ready to take on the world. He clearly didn't know Nik was one of the best defense prospects outside North America.
He probably didn't even know that he spelled his first name differently than St. Nick himself. How
dare he even speak up! But because other dorm mates whose company I enjoyed would gather in my room to watch the games on my box TV, I tolerated him and just brushed off his comments as ignorant nonsense.
Well, as fate would have it, the program I was in required students to stay in a particular dorm for their first 2 years of college. So this guy was watching Wings games with me for
two straight seasons. And by the end of that second season, I had to question everything I knew about hockey because - dammit - that asshole was right. Kronwall was repeatedly turnstyled on defense. He was shaky on the back end. He was inconsistent shift-to-shift, game-to-game. And thats probably why, despite being 25 years old, Kronwall was 6th in PK time, a full minute behind the vaunted PKer Mathieu Schneider. That's probably why, despite it being Kronwall's first full year, Lidstrom/Chelios saw an increase in their already obnoxious PK time. That's probably why the Wings felt the need to add Danny Markov and why Kronwall was
still dead last among regulars on the PK at 26 years old.
No, Kronwall was nowhere near good defensively at Hronek's age, in North America at least, and it'd be a long time before he reached the level of comfort that Hronek is at right now despite much more support.
The silver lining to that story is that it really showed me how much hype can affect one's ability to accurately judge a player. And that's bidirectional. We see past a player's many mistakes and flaws because of the hype and it takes us far longer to recognize a player's value without it. I saw the mistakes Kronwall was making but because it wasn't supposed to be this way
(he was already a goddamn Olympian Gold Medalist ffs), his mistakes carried less value. They couldn't mean that he was bad defensively, just that he was bad in that singular moment. In other words, because his perpetual mistakes didn't jibe with his popular image, they couldn't possibly mean what they mean. But Hronek's mistakes? Well, we still don't believe what we have in him cause we were never really sure what we had with him. His mistakes could very well mean that he will never be exceptional defensively, we think. We require more "proof" that he is what he is whereas with Kronwall, Brendan Smith, Svechnikov, et al, we require more proof that he
isn't what he is.