The one thing that always kind of bothered me about Jake Guentzel’s time with the Pittsburgh Penguins was the perception of him outside of Pittsburgh. No matter how many goals he scored, no matter how many BIG goals he scored, there always seemed to be an underlying sense of, “well, he plays next to Sidney Crosby.”
I am not going to pretend that having one of the top-10 (top-five?) players in NHL history as his center wasn’t an advantage for him, but it really took away from how good Guentzel has been. And how productive he has been.