Martin St-Louis had tried a few times to run a one-two punch down the middle with Nick Suzuki and Kirby Dach in the first half of the season, but with offence hard to come by, he kept feeling the need to place Dach on Suzuki’s wing. Following a terrible stretch that extended beyond the holiday road trip that erased any thoughts of the team making the playoffs, the coach decided to just stick to his plan to have those two players pilot their own lines.
The strategy was to pair Dach with Mike Hoffman, and that duo has stayed together while a cast of options including Josh Anderson, Evgenii Dadonov, and Jesse Ylönen rotated through the opposite wing.