the idea that AV's deployment of the sedins won them both an art ross is a myth.
in 2010, when henrik won his art ross, here are the zone starts of other top centers in the league:
rank | season | player | percentage of o-zone starts
6 | 2009-2010 | JONATHANTOEWS | 58.8
8 | 2009-2010 | EVGENIMALKIN | 58.1
9 | 2009-2010 | NICKLASBACKSTROM | 58.0
10 | 2009-2010 | HENRIKSEDIN | 57.7
16 | 2009-2010 | SIDNEYCROSBY | 56.7
29 | 2009-2010 | STEVENSTAMKOS | 54.6
it's not until 2011 that AV went totally nuts and gave the sedins historically high, and unreasonable, offensive zone starts.
but no, i obviously would not want keith and weber and suter against tanner glass' lines. i certainly wouldn't mind the kesler and torres/lapierre/hansen lines sharing some of that load though.
and yes, obviously if manny and hamhuis were healthy, we'd have had a much better chance of winning against the bruins. maybe even sweeping them. but the point is: in the case of catastrophic injury, which we did indeed have, and which is not super-uncommon for teams on deep playoff runs to have, we didn't have our two best scorers fresh, or even close to a reasonable level of freshness. they were destroyed. i blame that not only on having to face big dudes like seabrook and weber more often than they should have, but also on the fact that for the sedins, unlike most forwards except the ryan smyth and holmstrom front of the net types, o-zone shifts are harder on their bodies than neutral zone or defensive zone shifts because their game is absorbing contact to make the play.
Huh, I fell for the myth I guess. Thanks for that. How about Daniel's Art Ross then?
I dunno. You have a point about offensive shifts being tougher, but AV limited their ice time to a reasonable level to compensate for the abnormal usage. Henrik was 15th among centers in the playoffs in TOI/game.
http://www.nhl.com/stats/player?rep...&season=20102011&gameType=3&aggregate=0&pos=C
It's not like Torts where he was riding them 25 minutes a game in October. Maybe AV could have had the foresight to roll the lines a bit more throughout the playoffs, but when you have players as good as the Sedins, you want to play them in every critical situation (unless you're a moron like our current bench boss).
You might be right that the Sedins could have been rested more, but by the end of the SJ series, everyone on the team was banged up. I'd actually argue the real killer in that playoff run (aside from injuries of course) was not wrapping up the Chicago series early. To which you could make the counter-argument (and the basis of the question in this thread) that if they had played more aggressively to start Game 4 or after taking the lead in the third period of Game 6 against the Hawks, maybe they end things then. That one or two games might have made the difference.
(Wow, talking about 2011 in hindsight is depressing. Let's agree to disagree hahaha).