Kreider needs to be stapled to the third line and told to just go. Open up space for his line mates. Play a simple game. Set an example that hopefully the entire third (and fourth) line follows.
Keep doing what he is doing on the PP. No issues there.
I am confident that Gallant will set him up for success.
could not agree more, been saying the same for months. he can be effective in a role where its straight lines and simple hockey - his contract can still be made fair value or close to it if he can be part of a fast, physical, aggressive 3rd line and add 15+ ppg's. i loved when we put him and chytil together, i actually thought that gave us half a chance going into the islanders games. unfortunately he went down just prior, trouba died 5 mins into game 1 and the rest is history.
i do think him and chytil could be the foundation of a fantastic 3rd line. thats some big boys who can FLY and are at their best going north south, winning puck races / battles, going to the net. would love to see gauthier get a look there because that has the potential to be a problem. regardless, i do think kreider/chytil, and this kind of line specifically could be big beneficiaries with gallant - and i'm someone who wanted to keep quinn. one of my biggest gripes with him though was we really didn't have any attack in our personality as a team...like when guys would get a breakout pass, no one was ever really purposeful in taking ice on a breakout (sidenote we were also horrifying at normal 5 on 5 breakouts - idno if its a stat anywhere but id guess we created less than 10 high risk chances the entire season coming ice from out of our zone), we were generally very conservative in pressuring deep - which was a bit ironic because we had 0 awareness or concern with RIPPING no look high risk passes from behind the net into the slot that regularly led directly to an odd man rush nor with continually trying cross ice passes into teams packing the middle. but we sure were diligent in not getting getting too many bodies on a forecheck. anyways, thats an area i think gallant shines. his teams always push the pace for better or worse. very curious to see what that can look like with guys like chytil kreider and gauthier.
