"a stick infraction that you conveniently glossed over"

holy shit are you actually trying to say it was a bad game because he took 1 (one) penalty?

I'm saying he was the best player on the ice while the team played awfully. The ideas were there in an offense that he had absolutely no influence on prior to actually yesterday. You're literally using +/- and a penalty to ignore the fact that he completed more zone entries than anyone else on the team, led the entire forward squad in ice time, had a few great looks, completed some really tricky passes with ease, and was one of the most defensively responsible forwards on the Jackets.

Your "actual measured stats" are a single stick infraction after a two week break from conditioning and an empty net minus when they had him on the ice to try to get their offense back into the game against the defending Stanley Cup finalists. How you could honestly expect more from that game than what was delivered is beyond me, but I guess if you ignore all the context and pull the "scoreboard" argument you can bypass any genuine discussion and return to believing what you believe.

My jimmies aren't rustled, man. You're defaulting to that "I disagree with you so you're mad" thing. Great look on you, btw.

But if we wanna talk real stats with a better reflection of an actual single game sample size, Laine was a positive impact player in terms of high danger chances for: +8.1 CF%, +5.4 FF%, led the team in iCF (total individual shot attempts created), and he even drew a penalty to counteract that one glaring stick infraction you're so caught up about.