He's not good. He's small and he hasn't developed the defensive positional sense or decision-making instincts yet to make up for his lack of size and leverage. He uses his speed well at times and, of course, he's excellent at breaking the puck out which is helpful defensively in that it cuts down on the amount of time that he actually has to play defense.MoGator71 said:I haven't seen a ton of Krug, but is he that bad defensively?
Claude definitely doesn't have full faith in him - his O/D start percentage is about 62% which is the highest on the team this year.
edit: that's 8% higher than what Meszaros had on the Flyers. Although that might have more to do with philosophical differences between the coaching staffs or relative talent levels on D than anything else. It looks like the Flyers' O/D start percentages are clustered much more heavily towards 50% than the Bruins'.
It's also 10% higher than the next highest defenseman's, Doug Hamilton.