Quoting: TrueCanuck
This whole statement is so contradicting it's hilarious!
I find it quite hilarious how you still sit there and say that Leddy is "capable of playing solid d in the right role" yet all the stats say he isn't and if you watch him he isn't. When Rielly's show that there's some defensive side to his game, not the best but still better than Leddy's, yet you continue to be bias. If you believe that analytics are still heavily team reliant, shouldn't Leddy have extremely better defensive numbers than Rielly since he played on a far superior defensive team? Your logic seems to make no sense there. Then you try to pull the whole fists round exit stuff as a narrative? Come on now kid. You just said analytics are team based, yet you don't think getting past the first round isn't a team thing? Seriously? Rielly was Toronto's best player this year. It's not his fault and his fault only that the rest of the team didn't show up. On the contrary, it's not Leddy's fault that Nee York made it to the 3rd round and it's definitely not just his fault that his team won a cup - wouldn't he have been the Conn Smythe winner if he was? Wow. Then we get to you trying to blame a "god awful Northern division" for whatever - which is the biggest overblown thing that came out of this year and you call me ignorant? Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. How does a division with the best player in the world, the best pure goal scorer in the world, at least 4 of the top 15 players (at worst), a top 5 goalie in the league, the most travel in the league between timezones, oh and that division was in the Cup Final? So how is that weak? It was actually the closest division in terms of competition. But people like you and the media jump on it being an "easy division" because it's the easy narrative that gets all the attention because Canadian markets run the league.
But hey, if you really wanna think Leddy is better than Rielly, especially defensively, be my guest. We've all been wrong before, you'll just be wrong again 😂
You do realize that when you play bad teams, stats get padded, right? Look at the North this year. Montreal and Toronto made improvements, Ottawa's moves didn't really work out all that well, Winnipeg and Edmonton stayed mostly where they were, Vancouver got much worse, and Calgary did too much and threw off their team dynamic. If you take 2 teams from the top half of the league (not even top 10, mind you), add two from the middle that got worse, and add a couple more bottom feeders, that doesn't make a good division. When a team is remarkably better than their competition, stats get padded. Rielly's stats were padded because the North wasn't very good. Simple as that. Also, you claim that the North has 7 great players. There's 140 players on the active rosters. Think back to your gym class. Take 1/8th of the best players in any sport and fill out the rest of the team with middling at best players. That team probably doesn't win much, now does it?
Leddy has experience and success in the playoffs. He's not the sole driving reason that the Isles made it that far, and I never claimed he was. Nice strawman there. Quite frankly, it's better to have young guys learn from somebody who has actually been in the Finals more so than someone that has only fallen out in the 1st round every time. That's less of a measure of the player and more of a measure of experience, so whatever narrative you're trying to make there doesn't click.
As far as Montreal being in the Final, it was a nice story. What was their major test that they passed in the playoffs? Beating Vegas is a fair test, sure. A Canadian team was guaranteed the Conference Finals one way or another, and they had to get through Toronto (lol big accomplishment there) and Winnipeg (minus Mark Scheifele). Again, literally the only good team they faced was Vegas. If you want to compare, the Isles took the Lightning to 7 games. Montreal lost in 5. But don't worry, the North produced all the bestest teams ever and everybody's just a hater, right?