He’s a passable #6 on a bubble team. A guy who does everything okay but nothing particularly above average. Decent skater, doesn’t get pushed around too much, not too nightmare-ish defensively, a passing semblance of an offensive game. You get the picture. The problem is that the vast majority of the points he scored this past year came in like the last month, in which he saw a corresponding implosion of his defense.
I was actually pretty high on him in 2016. He was playing really well with Dillon, and I was starting to think that he was going to be the next Sharks iteration of Demers/Braun (a late-round RHD pick who blooms into his mid-late 20’s), when suddenly the Sharks traded for Polak, who was absolutely atrocious and was one of the biggest reasons that the Sharks failed so badly in the finals against Pittsburgh. The following off-season, the Sharks got Schlemko. The Schlemko-Dillon pairing was awesome, until the Sharks stupidly let Vegas take Schlemko, but it left DeMelo on the bench pretty much all season, which I can’t imagine helped his development. This season, he and Tim Heed were fighting for the #6 spot. At first, it looked like Heed had it locked down, but suddenly DeMelo got inserted and just never came out, despite the fact that Heed was clearly superior. He wasn’t Polak bad, but he turned out third pairing from a strength (Dillon-Heed) to a weakness (Dillon-DeMelo), which you cannot have when your team strength is supposedly depth, as the 2017-2018 Sharks’ strength purportedly was.
I think the biggest fear I would have if my team signed DeMelo would be the fact that he seems to be a coach’s pet. Roy Sommer loved him in the AHL despite the fact that he was their #4D on a weak D corps. DeBoer loved him, as evidenced by the fact that DeMelo being DeBoer’s son has been memefied on our board. DeMelo is basically the anti-Burns/Gardiner type: he is consistently bad, but he doesn’t make many highlight-reel bad plays. That isn’t to say that he’s good defensively, just that he doesn’t make the type of egregious error that has you screaming at your TV like Burns does because DeMelo is a very passive, defensive player and doesn’t take offensive risks.
We’re all very shocked that Wilson let him go. A lot of us think this is a case of a GM removing a bad player that the coach just won’t stop playing; Wilson did this with Adam Burish too, whom Todd McLellan loved.
So in a nutshell: passable #6D who does everything at a below average level but is appealing to coaches due to his lack of high-profile mistakes. We are absolutely thrilled to see DeMelo go, not because he’s the worst player on the planet, but because we have a better option in Heed and DeBoer loved DeMelo to the point where he was the sixth man when we pulled the goalie in playoff games. Seriously. I’m not kidding. It was horrible.
(Sorry for the essay, that’s probably more than you wanted to know
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