Again, Krejci has played at his best the past few seasons when he moves his feet
The only reason he could slow the game down so well was because we had guys like Horton and Lucic to make a ton of space for him. The game is faster now and we have no such players worthy of playing on his line.
The game now should be elevating Krejci to match pasta, not demoting pasta to give Krejci some imaginary perfect line mate we do not have
I'm not opposed to pasta playing with spooner and Beleskey from the jump though for the purposes of spreading out scoring, but pasta will inevitably end up with Krejci when we need to break games
I'd love for spooner to take a big step though and become our new number 2 center, all things considered
Every player is at their best when they “move their feet”. I don’t think this is any justification to play Krejci with guys that are significantly faster than he is. Traditionally, as you said, DK has always seemed to play his best when he had big bodies flanking him. That being the case, why wouldn’t you start off with Beleskey/Kuraly and Backes as his wings and see what happens. Or maybe DeBrusk and Backes.
Krejci can operate and produce with slower players, whereas Spooner seems lost unless he has at least one burner that can skate with him.
For the Top 9, I would have started with:
Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak
Beleskey/DeBrusk-Krejci-Backes
Beleskey/DeBrusk-Spooner- Bjork