Quoting: Josh
I hope so. Extremely doubtful. It will be tough to keep him under Zibanejad's 5.25m, IMO. Maybe arbitration gets him under 5, but then his value continues to go up for the extension.
Anisimov played with Calder Panarin and Hart Kane and still didnt raise his stats. Strome had a good season for himself, regardless of line mates.
Whilst Strome does have the speed and playmaking ability to keep up with fast players, it seems to me like Strome is a sub-0.5ppg player up to now who's had one inflated year while riding shotgun with Panarin. There are many tell-tale signs of this being a one-off career year for him, including:
- His career average is 0.52ppg. This season he's at 0.84 ppg (which vastly inflates his career average).
- His last 6 seasons his points totals were 28, 30, 34, 35, 35, and 59....... Not hard to spot the outlier.
- This season he is being spoon-fed minutes with sheltered offensive minutes with 54.6 oZS% and 19:35 ATOI, by far the highest in his career.
- Shooting % in 2 years with Rangers is 15.4%, which is 5.1% higher than his career average.
- 104.4 PDO this season, which is 9th highest in the league among forwards with at least 50 games.
- He has raked in PP points playing with Panarin, Zibanejad, and Deangelo, with 14 PP assists. Before this season he had only 26 PP assists in 7 seasons combined. Needless to say it's likely that he sees a big drop in assists if he gets taken off PP1 if and when Kaako or other forwards develop.
All of those combined are signs of a player with heavily inflated stats, and it's unlikely that he'd be anything more than a 35-40 point player without PP1 time and tons of offensive ice time.
He's basically an offensive 3C that depends a lot on linemates for production. Based on the stats above I doubt GM's are going to be lining up to acquire him to be the sucker that gives him a raise, particularly as there's every chance that he reverts back to his Edmonton production if he doesn't get a lot of heavily sheltered offensive minutes.
Due to the flat cap it's also going to be a buyers market, and so I don't think you're going to get good value for him in a trade. And on top of that anyone who acquires him is going to be paying him based on 1 year of heavily-inflated production.