vanuck
Now with 100% less Benning!
- Dec 28, 2009
- 16,804
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Definitely Manny Malhotra.
Guy was the ultimate role player. Not only was he an animal on faceoffs throughout his time in VAN, he was a key cog for us in 2010-11 as our 3C and a major reason for our drastic improvement defensively from the year before. That season he took important draws, was thrown out late in games to help protect leads and anchored the No. 2 ranked penalty kill that year. He actually featured on both special teams (being used on PP2 as well), thus why he played big minutes for a 3rd line forward. AV buried him in the defensive end (under 30% OZ starts IIRC) so the Sedins could be free to focus solely on scoring, in one of the first examples of heavily skewing zone starts to fit a player's deployment - something that most coaches seem to do nowadays as well. Despite his heavy defensive usage and not being the most offensively gifted, he still scored like a low-end 2nd liner at ES and was a big part of our depth up front.
Of course, this was all before the eye injury... Malhotra was more important to that team than a lot of fans realized.
Guy was the ultimate role player. Not only was he an animal on faceoffs throughout his time in VAN, he was a key cog for us in 2010-11 as our 3C and a major reason for our drastic improvement defensively from the year before. That season he took important draws, was thrown out late in games to help protect leads and anchored the No. 2 ranked penalty kill that year. He actually featured on both special teams (being used on PP2 as well), thus why he played big minutes for a 3rd line forward. AV buried him in the defensive end (under 30% OZ starts IIRC) so the Sedins could be free to focus solely on scoring, in one of the first examples of heavily skewing zone starts to fit a player's deployment - something that most coaches seem to do nowadays as well. Despite his heavy defensive usage and not being the most offensively gifted, he still scored like a low-end 2nd liner at ES and was a big part of our depth up front.
Of course, this was all before the eye injury... Malhotra was more important to that team than a lot of fans realized.
