I do love watching these three play with only another and there are undoubtedly our best line. My only concern at this point would be does this leave us too thin on our 2nd scoring line to force coaches to make a difficult defensive assignment.
I don't believe that anyone questioned the potential that these three could bring but I don't feel comfortable enough with our secondary scoring that we could afford to stack our top line. In the situation where our top line goes cold or we play a particularly defensively deep team, who are the players that make up the scoring loss from a neutralized top line?
Franzen, Weiss, Cleary? Bertuzzi? Abdelkader? I know many of you think that Nyquist or Tatar would solve that issue immediately, although the issue with most young players is consistency, regardless of potential upside. Although, I won't discount the possibility that adding a player like Tatar or Nyquist to the second line might just "click" and demonstratively change the way that they play. Regardless, if we are going with the top line of Zetterberg, Datsyuk, Alfredsson, early in this season, would be the perfect time to find that optimum mix players, whoever that may be, to establish a legitimate second scoring line.
