Personally, based on the way he looked on the ice and what I saw from him with Team Russia and on YouTube, he was playing a different game here and missing a good deal of confidence in his decisions. So putting up rookie-esque numbers is not really all that surprising to me.
I know I'm repeating myself, but a lot of Zaitsev's issues are very fixable and come down to more experience with the country, the league, the language, the media, the system. Ugh, intangibles: he took a huge pay cut to come here, transplanted his very young family (now expecting a second child) into a new culture, and was the only defenseman on the team to have never played Babcock's system before. Hitting middle ground on most of the stats with all of that in mind is not really a downside to me.