A pair of priorities govern Mike Sullivan's new life as Blueshirts' head coach.
1. ROOKIES: Sully's and his vast new cabinet of aides are making their final choices for which freshman can make the team and who goes down to Hartford or below.
2. VARSITY PROBLEMS: The rookie plucking will be taken care of quickly. Right now, Sullivan's has plenty of fixing to do starting with the offense. To wit:
What does he do to restore Breadman's efficiency? Panarin slipped from 120 points in the Presidents' Trophy year to 89 at the end of the past season. Perhaps it was just a one-year slump. Or worse, is it age? Either way it's an issue Sully must solve.
Likewise, he must address similar slumps suffered by Mika Zibanejad, Vincent Trocheck and Alexis Lafrenière. Restoring Mika to old-time form might be as easy as teaching the Statue of Liberty to swim to Manhattan.
The Maven is not worrying about Trocheck but a confounding forward such as Lafrenière, who is in his playing prime, should not have slipped from a 57 point year to 45 points, especially since he was gifted with a delicious, obese contract.
J.T. Miller will go a long way toward compensating for the above flaws if he can maintain what was better than a point a game average when he donned the Blueshirt past the half-way point last season.
"Another plus," says The Old Scout, "is that Will Cuylle is on a scoring upswing and we know that he's a 100 percent hustler every night. He had 45 points last season; he could finish the new term with 55, or more."
No less critical will be fixing the power play which slipped to 28th in the league; pitiful when one considers the scoring potential mentioned above.
"The fixing onus will be on Sullivan to be sure," The Old Scout concludes, "but also on Drury who imported a bunch of new assistants. They all have to chip in and repair the broken machine."
