It’s a curious move for me. I would happily jettison Ritchie for him, but I haven’t watched enough of him in LA to know whether he can be an upgrade at wing.
Can he not play RW? Does he refuse to play anything else? or does he just suck at it?
I’m probably overstating the RW/LW thing. He’s predominantly been a LW in his career (kind of a Russian thing, they develop players on their off wing), but I’m sure he’s had enough RW experience that he could do it.
His LA experience was a weird one. They went all in on the old guys thing and it lasted about a month. In 2018 he started off with 11 points in 13 games, getting a shade over 19:00 TOI per game. They were 4-8-1 during that stretch and fired John Stevens. They hired Desjardins to be interim coach and he never seemed to be a fan of Kovalchuk. He slashed his ice time by almost 4 minutes per game, dropped him to the 4th line and removed him from the PP. There was a game in there where Kovalchuk was healthy and played 6:20. In Kovalchuk’s first 12 games under Desjardins he had 3 points and then he got hurt and missed almost a month. Upon returning, he was decent, 20 points in his remaining 39 games. He had 9 points in 17 games this year before they shut him down in advance of the contract termination.
It is hard to parse out how much LA’s stink effected his play. The underlying numbers are abysmal, but that is an abysmal team. He ended up with 19 goals and 24 assists in81 total games with LA. I’m coming around on the idea, I think I’d take that kind of production from a 2nd/3rd line winger, and maybe he’ll really benefit having a better supporting cast around him.
