I still believe the biggest obstacle to koivu's career was linemates post habs strip down after the Roy saga. He was surrounded by some really good players in damphouse, turgeon, recchi, rucinsky and even an end of career richer etc. to name a few. When he came back from his knee they were essentially all gone with nobody coming through the pipeline until plex came through and the kovalev trade...
The big issue to his speed was his decision to wear a knee brace for the initial seasons post surgery for comfort and extra safety. But, he did end up removing it and only put it back on when he sprained his other knee again years later.
I wore my brace for 2 seasons after my ACL and LCL full repairs and it slowed me down significantly. When I decided to remove it, I had zero issue with mobility or speed.
I believe using his cancer, eye injury and knee injury to justify his drop in production from those 50 games in his sophomore season was and is the easy way to make excuses for him. The sad fact is the Montreal Canadiens were stripped down of all there quality and were completely mis-managed for years. We never rebuilt this team properly until the lead up to their Centennial season.
Countless players have their knees repaired and don't miss a beat 2 years post up. Put koivu in a quality top 6 for his first 5/10 seasons and surely his stats would have been in the upper echelons of the league that was staked with +100 point players.
However, taking a 50 game stretch of a 20 year career is an out-layer no different than saying Brian Savage was an elite scorer using only the month of October.
The saddest part of this all is looking back and saying what if...
Koivu has always to me = true champion on a terrible team