Rejoint: août 2020
Messages: 9,527
Mentions "j'aime": 8,968
So I decided to take several teams’s projected top 6 for next year and average out their totals to get the average goals/points you’d expect each player in that top 6 to get in 82 games, based on their numbers from last year. I also calculated average age for the top 6. Yes this exercise was done to see how Ottawa stacks up. Top 6 generally just stolen from the capfriendly depth charts, I’ll indicate where I deviated below.
Edmonton (27.5): 35 goals and 81 points
Toronto (27.2 for Kerfoot, 26.8 for Engvall): 34 goals and 83 points (Kerfoot) or 81 points (Engvall)
Ottawa (24.5): 32 goals and 70 points
Tampa Bay (28.2): 31 goals and 72 points
Florida (26.2): 36 goals and 79 points
Boston (32.7): 27 goals and 71 points
Carolina (25): 28 goals and 65 points
Colorado (27): 33 goals and 75 points
St. Louis (27.3): 28 goals and 76 points
Note: Cirelli replaced Namestnikov, Duclair replaced Hornqvist, Marchand replaced DeBrusk, Krejci’s 20-21 stats were used.
Honestly it’s pretty respectable. Basically already as good as Boston and Tampa, ahead of Carolina. Only a couple goals and like 10 points behind some of the other high end offensive teams. And several of these teams have guys projected to miss time (Marchand, Cirelli, Duclair, etc.). Not to mention Ottawa has by FAR the youngest top 6 (only Carolina comes close), and Giroux raises the average age by nearly 2 full years on his own lol (he’s actually the oldest player in any of these top sixes, excluding Boston). Given that I think Stutzle in particular has room to grow significantly (I wouldn’t be shocked if he was a 35 goal 90 point guy in his prime, which is a significant step up on the 22 goals and 58 points he had last year), and there’s probably some untapped potential in the rest of them too, even if Giroux regresses a little, Ottawa should still be able to score with the best teams. Their average goals per top 6 player is top 5 among these teams, and I looked at most of last year’s highest scoring teams and specifically the 4 Atlantic teams that made the playoffs.
I don’t think it’s really that much of a stretch to suggest that if Ottawa is able to bring in a top 4 RD, they could get off to a hot start and take away a playoff spot from one of the aging teams in the East that is suffering from injuries. Forsberg+Talbot should provide solid goaltending, Chabot+Zub are good top 4 guys and Sanderson should be too, so as long as we get a top 4 guy to make a rotation of 2 of Holden/Brannstrom/Hamonic be the 3rd pair and Zaitsev isn’t playing at all, the back end suddenly doesn’t look half bad.