How much does Milan Lucic need to do to 'rebound?' (Trending Topics)

Milan Lucic got shipped out of Boston over the summer as part of the team's ongoing efforts to get under the salary cap and remain competitive. This after an underwhelming final season in Boston, which frankly came at a time that made it very convenient for the Bruins to offload him.

Lucic is in the final year of a contract that pays him $6 million against the cap, and he turned 27 in June. It's fair to say that his having scored just 18 goals in 81 games for Boston last season contributed greatly to the team's offensive woes last season, and that the Bruins retained salary in the transaction (to the tune of more than $2.49 million) tells quite a story.

Now, it seems worth noting that Lucic was often overrated in Boston and around the league, but you can see why that happened. He scored 30 goals in a Stanley Cup year as a 22-year-old, and he's big and he's mean and he fights and he “plays on the edge” and he throws his body around. Moreover, his underlying numbers have always been strong. This is a player for which traditional “hockey guys” and “stats nerds” should both collectively be losing their minds.

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And yet Lucic has just 49 goals over his last 207 games (0.24 per), compared with 56 in his previous 160 (0.35 per). That's obviously a huge decline in production over a sufficiently long period of time to lead to asking questions about the long-term viability of The Idea Of Milan Lucic versus Actual Milan Lucic. Boston certainly saw something in his recent performances, plus a few other considerations, as reason to cut bait.

So the question here is twofold: 1) Was Boston right to sell so low on him, given that they got only the No. 13 pick (which they squandered) and Martin Jones, whom they immediately traded for San Jose's first-round pick next year? And 2) How capable of bouncing back from a bit of a down year is Lucic?

The early returns from Kings camp indicate that Lucic will at least start the year on the top line with Anze Kopitar and Marian Gaborik, which likely buoys his chances of breaking the 20-goal barrier again. But Lucic has had some weird seasons over the last few years, and it leads one to wonder just what he's going to do in LA. Certainly, it seems as though, given that deployment, he'll get ample power play time.

That seems to be step one in making up that 20-goal barrier. From 2010-11 (the Cup year, when he scored seven goals on the power play) to last season, he played 651:42 on the power play, or 2:20 per game. Last season, that number was just 1:48. That may not seem like much, but it's a decline of almost 23 percent. That is going to hurt your goal total, and indeed, Lucic scored just two goals on the power play all season.

However, that comes as the amount of power play time the Bruins enjoyed stayed more or less the same (362:54 in 2014-15 was down just a little bit from the 365:24 the previous year). And it's not like Lucic was the one spending more time in the box, either; his PIM declined by 10 last year. So why the decline in power play time? Perhaps Claude Julien noticed a marked decline in his effectiveness on it; he only bothered to get off 26 shots on the power play last season, or 11.3 per 60 minutes. That was down from a little more than 13 the year before, and an average of almost 14.3 over the previous three years.

Now, to be fair, he played the early part of last season while recovering from wrist surgery, and spent portions of the year without David Krejci (who only played 47 games in the regular season), but if you look at these numbers I think it's reasonable to say that he played his way into diminished utilization.

The question, then, is whether he can recover that kind of shot generation ability playing with Gaborik, Kopitar, Drew Doughty, and either Jake Muzzin or Jeff Carter, depending upon the game situation. The Kings are a more or less middling team when it comes to generating shot attempts on the power play; they finished 13th in attempts per 60 last season, and Boston, interestingly, was third. So that doesn't necessarily portend good things.

With this in mind, though, it might surprise you to learn that Carter was 32nd in the league when it comes to shots per 60 when he's on the ice last season, among 267 players with at least 100 minutes of power play time (88th percentile). Muzzin was 38th, Kopitar 59th, etc. So this seems to be more an issue of the second power play unit being a little suspect. For reference, Lucic placed just 180th (and given the Bruins' overall number, one assumes he was a major anchor in that regard) so there's plenty of room for improvement as far as power play efficiency.

And indeed, if Lucic can blame his power play struggles on his wrist injury, then surely that data would show up at even-strength as well. And yet the only month you can probably say it was really hampering him was October, when his attempts and SOG were both down.

And as for playing with Krejci:

The fact that Lucic was actually better without Krejci — despite spending about a month without him to start the year, when his wrist surgery was potentially still healing — tells you a lot about his performance with the Bruins overall. In terms of generating his own shot attempts, with minimal impact on his ability to get them on net — he got an extra 1.4 percent of attempts on goal with Krejci, which is something I use as a shorthand when it comes to shot quality —you can see their cause for concern. Now, some of the tough results here have to do with a huge disparity in shooting percentage (9.1 percent with Krejci, but 13.2 percent without) but if you're not generating as many shots on goal, that's a problem.

I think we can all agree, though, that Kopitar is better than Krejci by a decent enough margin that playing with the former instead is going to make a big difference. Normally, though, Krejci has a huge positive impact on his performance (something like almost 20 percent more individual attempts and more than 12 percent more shots on goal), and it will be interesting to see if Kopitar can get him back to the pre-2014 levels to which Bruins fans had grown accustomed.

It probably doesn't help that he'll be playing for a contract, and again, as long as you keep out-attempting and outscoring your opponents when you're on the ice, you'll be a credit to the cause. Whether that's worth $6 million is obviously up for debate, but as long as Darryl Sutter positions Lucic well for success — and all indications are that he will — then an improvement to his production is probably in the cards.

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However, any long-term bets on Lucic certainly have to take into account that this is, what, two down years in the last three seasons for a big, physical guy who's going be 28 when his next contract starts? Teams should be very wary indeed of adding him even if he has a big season in LA (which, again, he probably will), because if paying for 25-30 goals and only getting 20 is a bummer and a waste of money. The odds that Lucic only provides the latter increase every year, regardless of what he does alongside Kopitar and Gaborik.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via War on Ice unless otherwise stated.

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