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Lightning Bloggers Roundtable on Breakout Players

September 22, 2014, 11:56 AM ET [27 Comments]
Michael Stuart
Ottawa Senators Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
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The Tampa Bay Lightning’s Bloggers Roundtable is back. Each week a collection of independent writers from around Bolts Nation is given the opportunity to respond to a question posed by the good people in the organization.

This week’s question explores the potential for one of the team's young players to be a breakout star. I’ve included my response below; you can check out the other responses right here!

This week's topic: Last season, Tyler Johnson and Ondrej Palat were breakout players for the Bolts. Who's your candidate for breakout player this season?

Is anyone surprised that I’m going to pick Brett Connolly as my breakout player for 2014-15? I’ve been picking Connolly to be a breakout player since he was drafted.

After playing some great hockey during last year’s preseason, Connolly looked like a player who was ready to contribute at the NHL level. Even so, the team elected to send him back to the Syracuse Crunch for a touch more seasoning. Down there, he didn’t disappoint. This is a player who put up 57 points in 66 games as one of the offensive leaders on his team.

What makes this decision to name Connolly a potential breakout player easiest, though, is the fact that his points-per-game rate in the AHL is similar to those of the Lightning's two Calder nominees from last year. Over the course of his two years in the American League, Connolly has put up approximately 0.88 points per game. That’s right in the zone with Johnson and Palat.

With a guy like Teddy Purcell gone, there’s a huge opening for Connolly to make an impact with the Lightning; Steve Yzerman hinted at this earlier in the summer. If Connolly can come into camp this year and do exactly what he did last year, I like his chances to not only make the big club, but to contribute with the big club too. People are quick to forget that this player is only 22 years old. There’s still plenty of time for him to make his mark.


Let me know who you're looking at as a potential breakout player in the comments section!

And, as always, thanks for reading.

Michael Stuart has been the Tampa Bay Lightning writer for HockeyBuzz since 2012. Visit his archive to read more or follow him on Twitter.
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