Quote (Hizkuntza @ 1 Oct 2021 00:32)
more worried about Hughes honestly. the guy just isn't a dynamo in the scale of Makar or Heiskanen. he's more like Ehrhoff right now. plenty of room to grow of course but I don't know how Green's "system" and the RHDs we have are supposed to help him play defense any better.
I'm not too worried about Hughes, if makar and Hughes swapped teams it'd be similar situation. If Hughes played with Graves, he'd be basically what he did with tanev, arguably better on a team like the avs where they have depth everywhere. If makar was put in a situation to do it all by himself in the backend, he'd be exposed too. He already got exposed in the playoffs and lost the series.
Hughes already played well once in greens system with a "declining" tanev, but also had an extremely bad year in his sophomore season as rest of the team with Hoglander being an exception. It's funny how analytics work, it showed that Hughes was carrying tanev and tanev was holding Hughes back, however that wasn't the case and they were equally benefitting from each other, more Hughes than tanev.
Hughes is clearly not ready to be an all around dman like Hedman, especially considering his age and his small frame. It'll take time for him to find his game and play like neidemeiyer using his skating to his advantage than size. That's why I think it's huge that we acquired OEL because he will take a huge burden off Hughes and he can just do his thing til oel falls off and becomes edler 2.0
This post was edited by Secksii on Oct 1 2021 05:58am