Or us trading Pacioretty? God that better not be for a roster player.
If you really think that we're going to score more than 210 goals next season, it's a really interesting exercise to write out who scores those goals. Someone's gotta score them, right? Do we start predicting more goals than like...6 of our players have ever scored? I actually haven't checked. I think it's basically not possible to get there without predicting big years for players who have never had big years if we trade Pacioretty for futures, though.
I tried to make a list. I really did. And it's really hard. I did low-end and high-end projections for every player on the team, even accounting for injuries and past performance and all that stuff. I found that the low-end was much too low, and the high-end was too high. Which makes sense, considering it likely won't ever happen that every single player on a team unanimously hits their low-end projection or high-end projection. Which brings us to the fact that the variance in goals scored likely isn't as high in practice as it is in theory.
We can all speculate that it's possible that all our young players have break out years, Pacioretty and Price bounce back, and everything works out... but the odds of that are extremely low. Possible, just not probable. As are the odds of this team all having a down year. While I do think that last year was definitely more of a down year for most of the group, the real-life variance in goals likely doesn't swing back to make a big enough difference - especially if we lose Pacioretty.
Though I will say that I expect Pacioretty to regress back to his normal production, and that the combined acquisitions of Domi, Armia, and Peca likely outscore Galchenyuk alone - so I do expect this team to somewhat improve in goals scored.
I don't think the swing can be that huge in terms of our offence. This team hasn't scored more than 223 goals since it wasn't this particular team. The mean to which we would revert just isn't that high.
Our goals against though? There's a lot of room for improvement.
As I mentioned above, I completely agree that the swing in practice will not be as significant as it would be if we were to make theoretical projections for the entire roster.
Goals against does have more room for improvement, given the dreadful seasons of guys like Alzner, Schlemko and Price, the injury to Weber in game 1, and it being a rookie season for both Mete and Juulsen. I certainly expect a more significant swing in terms of goals against than in goals scored, but I do indeed expect both to improve this season. This team will be better at both ends in my opinion, but nevertheless is not a playoff caliber team and finish definitely out of the playoffs.
