Opie
Joined: May 2017
Posts: 1,678
Likes: 654
This injury may complicate the Wood signing. Not a great deal of transparency on the injury, other than "hip surgery", but if this has negative affect on skating (his greatest asset), I would be deeply concerned about the next contract. Very tricky & could hurt his trade value.
Assuming they can come to some kind of agreement on the contract, I'd keep him. There is no obvious replacement for his spot on that 4th line. Yes, there is a long line of hopefuls, particularly Foote comes to mind, but no one as an obvious slam dunk. Wood has a unique skill set, one which I believe NJ is in short supply of. I'm not sold as Kuokkanen or Foote being a good fit there; Studenic, Thompson, Zetterlund meh. Idk, if the skating is still there, Wood is the right piece for this team.