New Offense Not Near As Potent

I've been taking a cursory look at the revamped Thrasher line up and though I feel that there is a lot of potential and I'm excited to see some of our roster moves, I still feel like there are some pieces missing and that Duds job is not done.

Last season the Atlanta Thrashers combined to score a total of 639 points, this includes all scoring done by any player donning an Atlanta Thrasher's uniform last season. With trades, unrestricted free agency moves, the upcoming arbitration that will most likely see the departure of Clarke MacArthur and the trades bringing in the Blackhawk contingent you are currently set (based on last years numbers) to see 136 less points scored than last year. That's a lot folks.

The Thrashers could cut that margin to 75 less goals with the signing of Maxim Afinogenov, who finished the season as the second highest scorer on the team behind center Nik Antropov. The problem with this seems to be that Dudley has in his head to only pay for one season and the Afinogenov camp wants a little more security. For the record I think Duds is being cheap on this one and he needs to cough up a 2 year 4 million dollar contract. Don't tell me that we don't have it, and if we can pay 2 million this year for Todd White's waste of space than I think it's only right pay somebody who contributed 61 points to your bottom line last year.

Another reason we could use the services of one Mr. Afinogenov, how about the fact that for the moment we only have 3 legitimate Right Wingers on the team. We've got a glut of Left Wingers and if management stands pat then you can expect somebody to have to move to the other side of the ice. Now that's not an impossible task for most players, but it takes time to re-tool your game to the other side of the ice and that means a possible reduction of production until you come up fully on line...and who do you ask to make the switch?

We've added a lot of size, youth, and grit; and those are all good things to have, but if you're not depositing the puck in the back of the net then it's going to do you no good to shove your opponent all over the rink. I do expect that with the size and speed and grit we've acquired you'll see a certain amount of space open up for our forwards that have scoring hands and maybe a jump in the offense of other players but I don't think you're going to make up 136 points worth.

We also lost a significant amount of points in defense that have as of yet to be made up. With the loss of Pavel Kubina to free agency we lost 38 points, for a defensive player this is a nice little chunk. We're basically replacing him with Brent Sopel who was good for a total of 8 regular season points last season. What this means is that we're losing offensive potency from the blue line also.

The argument of course is that though we are losing some potency on the offense we will be gaining some on defense. I'm a little skeptical right now that the improvement will be enough to sustain the loss in offense.

What are your thoughts..are you ok with the Thrasher roster so far? Do you think we are still missing a piece? Do you think our new defense will overcome a drop in offensive production? Let me know