from Joe Haggerty of CSNNE,

WINNERS

*Tyler Seguin – the Dallas Stars are struggling defensively as a team, but Seguin has been arguably the best player in the entire league. He’s got six goals and 13 points in eight games, has won 47 percent of his face offs in a big improvement from last season and has two game-winners while topping 19 minutes of ice time per game. You can always make the argument it was never going to happen for him in Boston the way it has in Dallas, but you also can’t deny that he’s definitely turned a corner in the maturity and development departments down in Big D.

*Corey Perry – Ryan Getzlaf was the Anaheim Ducks forward that was getting all of the love in preseason awards predictions, but Perry has nine goals in nine games on the kind of goal-scoring pace that hasn’t been since the Great One’s heyday. Anaheim is once again killing it out in the Western Conference, but gaudy regular season stats and monster years from Perry/Getzlaf aren’t where it’s at for the Ducks. It’s about the playoffs, stupid.

LOSERS

*Luke Schenn – The main player that went back to the Flyers in the James van Riemsdyk deal, Schenn is perhaps the most overrated player in the entire NHL. He’s playing third-pairing minutes for a Philly hockey team short on defensemen, and is a whopping minus-7 in eight games with only a single assist to show for it. Schenn was traded to the Flyers with the idea he’d turn into a top pairing defenseman, and he’s become a liability instead. I blame the Toronto media hype machine that inflates the value of some of these World Junior-type players for Team Canada, and creates both reputations and expectations for them that will never be met. That seems to be the case with Schenn.

*Nathan MacKinnon – It looks like the sophomore slump is hitting MacKinnon hard with zero goals and a minus-5 in nine games for the Colorado Avalanche. Mackinnon hit the weights over the summer to gain a little more size and strength going into this season, and it looks like perhaps he lost some of his speed and explosiveness in the process. That’s the name of the game in the NHL. The struggles of guys like Mackinnon and Gabriel Landeskog are pretty easily identifiable culprits behind the slow start for the Avs this season.

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