49/155 goals = 29.6%. Keep in mind that Gaudreau spent over 2/3 of the season with a Sean monahan that was all but cooked. And it’s funny too, there were people who kept saying that Gaudreau “figured out sutter’s style” near the end of the season, but it really wasn’t that. It was him playing with lindy and tkachuk.Sure, but Gaudreau wasn't shuffled to RW and told to completely change his game last year. In Sutter's first season, Gaudreau scored 49 in 56GP. Is that ratio closer to 35% or 21%? Gaudreau went to a different team but was allowed to play his own style. Huberdeau went to a new team but had to play a totally new style. That's why there's lots of optimism he will bounce back to around 90 points which would be considered regression to the mean.
Lindholm and Markstrom are also expected to do the same. Both are down after the birth of their kids. Gaudreau is also down as of last year which also coincides with the birth of his kid.
Huberdeau largely didn’t have that problem. Now yes, he was stuck with Milan lucic for 1/4 of the season, but he also spent virtually the entire season with lindholm or Kadri. And yes, the rw stuff wasn’t great either, but he wasn’t up to snuff on lw either. Yeah the team didn’t utilize him on the pp properly, but his ES play until the last 20 games was nothing to write home about (and was at points downright awful). This narrative about “style” to me frankly seems like an easy way to put the responsibility off the player. Yes, the coach needs to do better to put him in a position to succeed, but there is only so much that can be done. Quite frankly, what I saw was a total lack of chemistr with anyone on the roster. And that can be fixable and change (see ferland with Gaudreau and monahan for example), but it’s also very problematic when a player is tried with everyone and nothing sticks.
I’d put mangiapane on the sideline of this conversation because he was injured. Regarding lindholm and Kadri, what you saw was career high play regress to the mean. Kadri was smack dab in the career agegerse range, and the season he just had would’ve been better than 2/3 of the seasons he had in Colorado. As for lindholm, same idea. Even if you just want to look at this pts paces since coming to Calgary (on an 82 game basis), it’s 79, 63, 68, 82, 64. Lindholm is a player who will straddle the 60-80 pt range and that’s what he was this year.Huberdeau, Kadri, Lindholm, and Mangiapane collectively scored 57 goals and 121 points less points than they did the previous season. They all struggled to a large degree at times.
Allowing Huberdeau to play his game is absolutely the most simplistic solution. You don't try and change a point per game (+) guy after paying him 80+M dollars. He needs to be deployed and utilized as a 10M dollar player and he might just have a chance at producing at that level. You can't tell him to play a risk averse game while giving him middling second line minutes, on his off-wing, with a revolving door of relatively poor teammates and expect him to produce as a superstar. He was set up for failure by a dinosaur coach who was too stubborn to admit he was wrong, and we all know it.
Keep in mind that tofolli, backlund, and dube had career seasons, and two of these players were in their 30s. For all the ideas about how bad regression was, the team still scored 260 gf. Really, the only player who really regressed hard was Huberdeau. He needs to be better, and he won’t have any more excuses.