Bet On It
Rejoint: juin 2017
Messages: 610
Mentions "j'aime": 230
I'll offer a different perspective as a Sens fan: I think Brännström is a 3rd pairing, powerplay specialist at best. His defensive IQ is and likely never will be of top 4 quality and he's the kind of small player who really, truly is set back by being small. He is constantly muscled off the puck and loses countless battles due to his lack of strength, and while his skating is smooth, it doesn't make up for the areas in which he is poor. He is an excellent powerplay quaterback, potentially even better than Chabot, and really excels when he is mobile on the opponent's blueline. His passing and his shot are both above average and project to be solid tools at the NHL level. If he is anywhere else on the ice though, he's been a detriment to the Sens on a team filled with bad defenders. Fans just put on their blinders to hide from it because he was the return for Stone and because they want to see a future in him. While in Belleville, he put up a lot of points, but this was in part due to an incredibly strong powerplay unit and forward core that chugged along regardless of who was distributing the puck from the backend. All this being said, Erik Brännström has a ton of potential and is also very likely to make me eat all of my words. He's got a tremendous ceiling, I just adamantly believe he's going to come nowhere close to it.
However, I am just an idiot who watches from home. Pierre Dorion is the one who traded the soul of this franchise for him and boldly declared the day to be his greatest as a GM. The fans that herald Brännström as the future saviour of this blueline are going to be much like Dorion, and he's the one who Adams would have to convince with this trade. For that reason, it'll probably take a far-too-large plus from Buffalo's end.