I agree with you on a mix of player skill sets…
but if a player is one the ice for more goals against than goals for he’s a net negative, no matter how many goals he scores. This was the case with Laine in CBJ last year. I believe his goal differential was the worst on the team. I know some of that is line/roster related — in the same way people don’t care for +/-. But the player must take responsibility for that as well. And the eye test backed up the stat in this instance.
I expect him to be much better this year but to suggest he wasn’t bad and that you should overlook his shortcomings is a mistake.
He had a disaster of a season, and I don’t think anyone can say anything against that. But we who have been following his career since juniors, have seen that he can be a real winner, if his strengths are used right and his weaknesses are covered a bit by his teammates. He was absolutely magnificent in his last Liiga season as a 17-18 year old, and especially in the playoffs when he was the best goalscorer and was voted the MVP when he lead his team Tappara to become champions.
But the regular season wasn’t really that great and easy when he was more sheltered with reliable defensive players that were not much at all about good playmaking, but good defensively. He seemed often frustrated and had quite long occasional scoring droughts, until finally at the end of the regular season Tappara’s head coach Tapola started to use Laine more often with the team’s best playmaker Kristian Kuusela and the best puck hound and battler Jani Lajunen.
After Laine got to play more with those players, especially in the playoffs, it raised his confidence a lot and helped him play much better his own game, which can be really quite dominating as long as he has those right kind of linemates. Just don’t be foolish and expect him to dominate much by himself. We have seen it also in the 2016 WJC tournament when Finland won gold with Laine-Aho-Puljujärvi being the top line, while one of them was an underager and two of them double underagers. And the same thing was seen also when he played for the Jets.
In Winnipeg in his first season they had for some time a line combination of Laine-Scheifele-Perreault, which was practically by all stats the best Jets line for the last five years. But then relatively soon Maurice for some reason just decided to break that line although it worked really well with the strengths and weaknesses of those exact players. And the line was never tried again, which in my opinion was pure lunacy, as each of the players was playing great hockey and being very efficient. They also had a very good positive goal difference on 5 on 5 hockey.
I still don’t see why this couldn’t work as well in Columbus. It doesn’t matter if the playmaker is the other winger and the puck hound the center (this was how it was in fact in Tappara), as long as those roles are more or less combined well with Laine’s talent. Of course it will not hurt if all will be pretty good even at everything. But still, you can’t expect Laine to be the really good defence playing winger, as much as you can’t expect his linemates to shoot the puck like he does.
