Prospect Info: Tampa Bay Lightning prospect rankings 2017- #10
- Thread starter Steazy Doo
- Start date
LightningStrikes
Champa Bay Lightning
- Nov 24, 2009
- 26,139
- 9,894
His "bad skating" is regularily brought up. I don't get it either. He's no Karlsson or Hedman but I always found him to be quite agile on his skates with good speed and acceleration. On reason why he matched well with "my backwards skating is faster than you skating forward" Hedman.
VoluntaryDom
Formerly DominicBoltsFan / Ⓐ / ✞
Dotchin is not a good skater. He is average at best. Has decent speed once he gets going but not the best acceleration or agility. Hopefully he worked on his foot speed over the summer because teams will start to take advantage of his meh skating if he keeps getting spoonfed top pairing minutes.
Dotchin has improved his skating but it's still lower end NHL quality. Now the skating improvement wasn't the reason he went from a barely bottom pair AHL defender to the NHL, he got extremely lucky in that Blujus was injured, Witkowski was called up and moved to wing too. His skating helped him in a few of his bad areas like gap control and 1 on 1 defending as his lateral mobility was improved. But his defensive IQ is still questionable as his off the puck defending leaves a lot to be desired and he still makes dumb decisions. With the improved skating he has become better with the puck on his stick, a bit more confident with it and less rushed so fewer mistakes but still a heavy forecheck can get to him. His improvement in skating got him a nice little two year contract but if he wants to stick past that and be a legit NHL defender it needs to improve even more.
VoluntaryDom
Formerly DominicBoltsFan / Ⓐ / ✞
I'm I've been firmly in the pro-Dotchin camp for a long time but what has he done to make you say his defensive IQ is awesome? That isn't one of the attributes which makes him my favorite Bolt.
