I like the kid a lot, but honestly I’m getting worried with him not being really that good in what is still always the most important thing for defencemen, and that is preventing the opponents from scoring goals. That is real defence, not some fancy stats or how many takeaways you get, unless they altogether lead into the opponents really scoring rarely against you when you are on the ice.
It baffles me that people nowadays look at something like takeaways and right away on the basis of them decide if a player is great defensively, when honestly takeaways by themselves tell NOTHING about how good a player is defensively. If you are a defenceman and you are playing often with players like Benn, Seguin and Radulov in front of you and you yourself are a defenceman, then no way in hell you should be getting the kind of minuses that Miro is getting at the moment, if you are truly playing well defensively.
The truth is that he hasn't been very consistent defensively. He shows great flashes of brilliance defensively for sure, but he does make mistakes positionally too often at the moment. He is young though, and it is still his rookie season, at a tough spot as a top pair defenceman in a relatively weak or at least mediocre team. He is definitely a super talent, but there’s no way around it that he is still making too much of mistakes defensively, and thus gets way too often scored against. No reason to use excuses for it.
