Yes, before the season Brynäs defense was ranked quite highly but that does not really matter since once the season started Brynäs defense looked quite terrible, and some of their defensemen has underachived big time. They sent Zanetti to Hv71 early on in the season because of how poorly he played - he only played 7 games for Brynäs. After that they have had 8 defensemen on their roster (+ Boqvist) for the rest of the season. Brynäs also have had plenty of injuries to their defensemen.
If we look at games played so far for Brynäs defensemen (not counting Zanetti and his 7 games):
Gunderson 41 out of 50 games played
Carlsson 44 out of 50 games played
Fälth 38 out of 50 games played
Kilström 47 out of 50 games played
Bertilsson 37 out of 50 games played
Sundqvist 37 out of 50 games played
Ersson 36 out of 50 games played
Larsson 44 ouf of 50 games played
In total 76 missed games, on average Brynäs have had 1 or 2 defensemen missing every game so far. There have been plenty of games where they could have put Boqvist in the line-up if they thought he was good enough.
If we look at what should have been Brynäs offensive defensemen before the season (Gunderson, Carlsson, Fälth and Larsson) then we can see that Larsson has been a huge let down with 2 points in 44 games, I'm sure Boqvist would have taken his spot a long time ago if he could just handle playing defense, mainly the physical aspect of it, versus SHL-competition but Boqist did not really impress when he played in the SHL.
I'm not saying Boqvist is a bust or anything like that, he is still a great prospects and probably #2 behind Dahlin among swedish prospects in this years draft. He just needs to get some upper body strength and learn how to play to his strengths while playing defense. As it is right now his weaknesses are too easy to exploit for bigger and stronger opponents and it is something you could/can see when he played in both in SHL, Allsvenskan and at times in J20 SuperElit as well.
