When the St. Louis Blues first traded Zach Bolduc to the Montreal Canadiens for defense prospect Logan Mailloux, it was a bit of a head-scratcher. Bolduc, in his second season with the Blues, had scored 19 goals and tallied 17 assists, good for 36 points in 72 games--not bad at all for a 21-year-old. Mailloux, conversely, had only played eight NHL games with the Canadiens across two seasons, posting two goals and three assists for five points.
At the start of the season, it looked like a clear loss for the Blues: Bolduc posted a goal in each of his first three games with the Canadiens, while Mailloux was getting barely any ice time and would find himself healthy scratched on a regular basis.
As the season's gone on, though, Mailloux's been showing there's plenty of developmental runway left.
From the start of the season through the Winter Olympic break, Mailloux played 42 of 57 possible games; he scored one goal and two assists for three points, was averaging 14:23 of ice time, and had an abysmal minus-23 goal differential. Without sugarcoating it, he was bad and actively hurting the team.
Since the Olympic break, however, Mailloux looks like a completely different player. In those 13 games, he's scored two goals and registered four assists for six points, carries a plus-6 goal differential, and is averaging a whopping 22:17 per night. Whatever reset he had during the break has done wonders for his game, and trading Justin Faulk to the Detroit Red Wings at the trade deadline provided the perfect opportunity to keep Mailloux in a top-four role.
Granted, 13 games is a small sample size, and doesn't necessarily make up for the rest of Mailloux's disappointing rookie season. Still, it's a good lesson that not every player succeeds immediately, and that teams patient enough to develop their prospects may ultimately come out ahead.