By my eye he seemed quicker laterally earlier in the season, lately I agree he has been painfully slow which is another reason that Larsson should've given up the shot and not the pass.
I can’t honestly say one way or another if he looks slower or not (I’d have to go rewatch some earlier games), but it was still an issue a bunch of us brought up right from the start. I think it’s more that he’s reading the play slower, so he’s starting out slightly behind. He still looked slow in his hot stretch, but he was tracking the puck well, and he didn’t expose his lack of speed nearly as much.
I 100% don’t agree with you that he gave up the pass. He read that correctly. It was a pass all day (Komarov’s head and body were turned to Lee the entire way), and he did give up the potential shot. Komarov just made a really nice saucer pass to get it by him. That happens sometimes.
That’s trying to give up the shot.
I wouldn’t be so fast to want to keep Stolarz around as an RFA. We need to see whether he is at least capable of playing at the level of a quality NHL backup. If he’s not there then we’ll need to find a better backup in UFA and I don’t where Stolarz would fit in that situation. It doesn’t sound like he’s keen to spend more time in the minors and I’m not sure we have room for him down there anyways.
There’s literally no downside to RFA vs UFA. If you get him in enough games to keep him an RFA, and you think he looks bad, and don’t want to keep him, you just simply don’t qualify him.
Wrong. That was Larssons bad. The goalie plays the shot the d man takes the pass. If the goalie makes the cross ice pass he bails you out but 8 out of 10 times that is a goal.
Nope. Blame Larsson all you want, but that was an easily stoppable shot. Like MAYBE a goal 1 out of 10 times, and certainly not 8 out of 10. It was such an obvious pass, hence why Larsson stretched out to try and block a pass. Yet Koskinen didn’t pick up on it, and when he did, he wasn’t able to get over. Players make small mistakes all the time. You can’t have the puck end up in the back of your net every time someone doesn’t play a situation perfectly. Larsson not getting a piece of the puck doesn’t mean Koskinen can screw up even worse, and blame Larsson. I guarantee other scouts have picked up on Koskinen. There’s a reason he was looking pass the entire way in. You don’t shoot when you have another guy because the pass is such an easy goal on Koskinen.