Quoting: dopplsan
Increasing your sample size is important (coming from a CBJ fan who is constantly chided by people who seem to forget last season wasn't Patrik Laine's first in the league, I understand), but two seasons feels like a convenient and arbitrary way to measure someone like Kassian, whose 19-20 season was a clear outlier in an 11 year career that has largely shown him to be nothing more than a replacement-level bottom-six winger, when he is not otherwise benefitting from skating with one Connor McDavid.
He's a cap dump.
He scored 15 goals in both 18-19 and 19-20. If I was trying to game the numbers I would suggest going back 3 years, but I'm not. I think the truth is somewhere between 19-20 Kassian and 20-21 Kassian, which is why I'm using an average of the two (by combining the seasons). That and I generally look at 2 years as I don't think what someone did 3+ years ago is generally very relevant.
I get the argument about how he plays away from McDavid, but honestly if you look at who he was playing with when away from McDavid you'll see why he didn't score much. His other centers are hardly even NHL players: Brodziak, Haas, Sheahan, Turris, Granlund, Shore, etc. In any case, over the past 3 years
he played 1190 minutes with McDavid and scored 20 goals (all numbers are 5v5) for a scoring rate of 1.01 G/60, without McDavid he played 1037 minutes and scored 9 goals for a scoring rate of 0.52 G/60, which is a 3rd line rate. When you factor in his linemates, that's not bad scoring.
I suspect we'll have a clearer picture of what he brings this season given that he'll have actual NHL linemates in the bottom-6. I don't think he gets moved until next summer and his value at that time will be influenced by how he performs this season.