How about Lehkonen to fill that 2nd line role?
Yes, he's more of a traditional bottom 6 forward, but:
- He has great analytics;
- He's a fantastic forechecker;
- He's an excellent PKer;
- He's good at chance creation (but terrible finishing), which could work well with two shooters (Kadri/Burakovsky); and
- His $2.3m caphit would fit perfectly into our cap structure and allow us to run a 23 man roster.
He just had a down year production wise, but does nonetheless have an 18 goal season in his history.
In the playoffs he fit in extremely well with Danault and Gallagher when Tatar was healthy scratched. The numbers below are Danault and Gallagher's 5v5 metrics in the playoffs, and I've highlighted their stats in situations
with and
without Lehkonen as highlighted.
- With Lehkonen they were a very dominant line as shown by the 64.45 xGF%. That means that with Lehkonen they had 2/3 of the chances in the game, or in other words, twice as many chances to score as the other team. That's a great line.
- Without Lehkonen the line were significantly worse, conceding more chances than they created (41%) and being a negative possession line.
He does seem like a player who could be a good complement to Kadri and Burakovsky and help them excel as a line, particularly given that Lehkonen would do a lot of dirty work and puck retrieval. Lehkonen is also responsible defensively.
Maybe the offense not being enough rules this out as an option, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
