Boumeester's hit will be his undoing
I haven't looked at them recently, but if I recall his possession numbers are quite poor; certainly he's overpaid, but the data indicates that he's not even that good to begin with. No, Bouwmeister was never the answer, and he's always underachieved relative to his hype and perhaps his potential.
This is a point where I would really like to see Lombardi's "moneyball" tactics in action. Given our cap constraints and our relative lack of movable assets, we need to find a guy who is undervalued relative to what he brings to the table, which almost certainly means someone who's not huge, flashy, or a big scorer; instead, we just need someone who is solid positionally, fairly light on his toes, and makes a good first pass, all things that will be generally reflected in good Corsi and Fenwick numbers. Put a guy like that with Doughty and we could have a winning combination. Doughty really just needs someone to enable him, to just not hold him back. Doughty is, after all, Doughty: he's going to make the players around him better because of his incredible gifts. The problem at the moment is that Regher is so bad that even Doughty cannot rescue him, and this is what is so frustrating about the Regher trade and especially the subsequent signing: it was OBVIOUS statistically that Regher was not a good player. His advanced stats were literally at the bottom of the league, even accounting for the quality of competition and the quality of his teammates. Everyone on his team had better numbers when NOT playing with him, and that's a huge red flag--and yet Lombardi and Sutter, who have in the past indicated that they follow advanced stats, did not see this. That's unfortunate, because they've taken what could be a Cup contending team, and hamstrung it.
