El grap's analysis was really good, but aside from that, I feel the discussion around goal counts for individuals is a bit pointless.
Call me simple but if we play really well, then we'll win games, and get top 4. How the goals are shared around will simply come out in the wash at the end of it. We have multiple players capable of goals, and to have the season we want to have, we'll need most of them to beat, or go close to, their personal bests.
When we were top 4 under Ernie, Burns had the best goal return in his career. If we were having this argument at the start of that season, we'd have said something like "well we know Burns won't get that many, so where are the goals going to come from if we're going to make the top 4? We need to buy someone else". As it turned out we didn't need to.
If we play well enough to get top 4, then I'd naturally assume that Krishna will have his best ever scoring season, and that we'd get a good swag from 2 or 3 out of Burns, Williams, Nichols and Singh.
But I don't think there's any real value of taking their average output and assuming that's what they'll get, and then agonising over where to get the rest of the goals to enable a top 4 finish. If all our players give us their average return this season, then we'll finish in an average spot in the league, end of story. If our players have exceptional seasons, then we'll finish exceptionally high. For example look at Sydney FC last season. Bobo and Mirezejewski both had their best seasons in their careers in terms of goals per game. At the start of the season, if their fans had this conversation, they would have deduced that to finish top they were probably going to need a crap load more goals from elsewhere... but they didn't.
I'm not sure if that made sense...