I think a lot of us knew that he was going to burn us that first year after the deal, because that's the kind of emotional fuel he needs to play his best and the inspiration of the money bags at the end of the rainbow were more than enough to keep him focused. The thing that would have *really* killed us were his 2019 and 2020 seasons where he was just.... checked out would be putting it kindly. If you think about how that $9 million of cap space would have felt for his combined 21 goals over those 2 seasons when we were really starting to build an identity, it would have been catastrophic. we cleared the deck of all pointless seniority so that RBA could shape Aho, Svech, Necas, and Teuvo for the task ahead without the exception to the rules needing his 18 minutes a night to hot dog the system and undermine the universal buy in we needed to make this work. we moved to bringing in the type of veterans who were tone setters like Jesper Fast, Nino Niederreiter, Derek Stepan, Vincent Trocheck and emphasizing guys like Jordan Staal, Jaccob Slavin, Brock McGinn, Jordan Martinook, etc. who were going to take the coach's message and run with it. these were good soldiers who were important to establishing the identity of this team and the reverb has been that when some of those players departed, the tone didn't change. it was cultural now.
Jeff Skinner had no place on a bench where the most important player is the guy sitting next to you. I don't think it was in his DNA. there may have been some maturation in the last year or two that I haven't seen from him being out of sight out of mind, but a big part of me doubts it. I think his 7 goal season was enough to embarrass him into a certain level of revenge, that same fuel that leaving here provided him, that gave him enough juice to put together another 30 goal season in which he was on for 84 goals against despite 68.7% offensive zone starts. We shall see how the rest of his season goes should Buffalo enter a tailspin.
There is a big part of me as well that thinks Elias Lindholm was another guy who had a lesser case of not really wanting to play the way we wanted him to play and expected to call his own shots a bit more. He was a hard worker on the ice, but there was always this just under the surface discontent that you could read off him that I think may have limited his buy in with the coaching change as well. He wanted that offensive role and he got the opportunity to play with some $10 million linemates and really helped it work. However, his on ice goals for and against are still incredibly close for a player of his presumed stature. I think he made it work, but it will be interesting moving forward to see if there's a team that believes enough to give him $8 million or more after next season.