Frank Seravalli reported that Brock Boeser's blood clot issue is going to make him miss the rest of the playoffs regardless of the result of Game 7. That is just a brutal circumstance for the winger who had a career season and was such a big part of the team's success. It appears he'll he just fine long-term, which is the most important thing, so hopefully he's back and good to go for training camp.

Vancouver ended up bowing out of the playoff in Game 7 thanks to a 3-2 loss to Edmonton. Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Cody Ceci had the goals for the Oilers, and that tally pushed Hyman to 11 in 12 games so far these playoffs. He has 25 goals in 40 playoff games as a member of the Oilers, which is absolutely nuts.

Conor Garland and Filip Hronek replied for Vancouver. The Canucks managed to fight back to make it a game after the Oilers got out to a 3-0 lead, but they just couldn't create anything in the first half of the game. If memory serves, Edmonton had a shot advantage of 25-4 (give or take) roughly 8-9 minutes into the second period. It just took far too long for Vancouver to get their feet under them, so here we are.

Edmonton moves on to the Conference Final for the second time in the last three years and is looking for their first Cup Final appearance since 2006. Game 1 against Dallas is on Thursday.

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An update on Filip Chytil as the Rangers gear up for their Eastern Conference Final matchup with Florida:

Chytil getting third line and PP2 reps today. Good sign for Wednesday for him.

— Arthur Staple (@StapeAthletic) May 20, 2024

Chytil had missed most of the regular season but did make it back for one playoff game. It appears he'll be ready to play his second when the teams square off for Game 1 on Wednesday night.

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A quick update on Roope Hintz:

Roope Hintz is not at today's mandatory practice.

Jani Hakanpää isn't on the ice, but he's here watching.

— Lia Assimakopoulos (@Lassimak) May 20, 2024

That he's still not on the ice following that blocked shot injury is not a good sign. It has been over a week since that happened, so if it was just a bruise that needed swelling to go down, he'd likely be back skating by now. We obviously won't know for certain until he's back on the ice or their season ends one way or another.

*

My offseason reviews of each of the 16 non-playoff teams continues today. We have already combed through the seasons of the San Jose Sharks, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Anaheim Ducks, the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Montreal Canadiens, the Arizona Coyotes (now in Utah), the Ottawa Senators, the Seattle Kraken, the Calgary Flames, and the New Jersey Devils. Today, we are getting to a fascinating Buffalo Sabres squad. Let's look at what went wrong, what went right, and where they go from here. This is all through a fantasy lens, of course.

Data from Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, HockeyViz, and Frozen Tools with salary cap data from Cap Friendly. Any tracking data is from AllThreeZones unless otherwise noted.

What Went Wrong

We cannot discuss Buffalo without discussing the changes to the offence made by former head coach Don Granato. As I've repeated this season, the Sabres overhauled their offensive approach in a big, big way. In 2022-23, they were one of the top teams at creating shots off the rush, trailing only New Jersey by this measure per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 (the x-axis is rush shots per 60 minutes):

That threat off the rush completely disappeared in 2023-24 as they fell into the bottom-10 of the league:

The Sabres fell from the 4^th-ranked team by goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 last year to 13^th this year. It resulted in 23 fewer goals scored at that strength, and was part of the reason some of their top players saw a scoring decline.

It wasn't as if it was just specific players that saw declining play off the rush, either. It was literally everyone, though some were much worse than others:

Unsurprisingly, there were production declines across the board. All of Jeff Skinner, Tage Thompson, Alex Tuch, and Dylan Cozens saw their points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 fall off, while secondary options like Victor Olofsson and Peyton Krebs also saw their production fall off. Anyone that was banking on Sabres in their fantasy leagues already knows this, but the change in offence hurt a lot of fantasy values. It would have been nice to get that heads up by Granato back in September, but such is the nature of the game we play.

To make matters worse, the power play also saw a huge drop. In 2022-23, the team scored 8.39 goals per 60 minutes with the man advantage, a top-10 mark in the league and in the neighbourhood of teams like Boston and Vancouver. That rate fell off a cliff in 2023-24 as they fell all the way to 5.96 goals per 60 minutes, good for 28^th in the league and just slightly ahead of the Chicago Blackhawks. Ranking next to the 2023-24 Blackhawks in any offensive category is about as bad as it gets.

Again, there was a clear change in the approach on the power play. Here is their shot map from the 2022-23 season, with the purple areas being where they shoot less than the league average and brown areas are where they shoot more. They didn't shoot a ton from the slot, but they did have a small area where they were creating another point of offence:

It isn't a lot, but it's enough to keep the opposition's penalty kill on their toes.

That change in 2023-24 as they completely abandoned any semblance of attack from the middle and kept everything to the perimeter:

This isn't to say that focusing on perimeter shots is a bad idea; getting those seam-pass one-timers and bad-angle tap-ins are something a lot of top power plays thrive on. However, even teams like Tampa Bay and the New York Rangers are able to create from either the slot or the front of the net, and that additional point of attack goes a long way into keeping the PK guessing, and giving your team a better chance to score.

All this change was felt keenly by Thompson as he scored just 29 goals in 71 games, a clear decline from the 39 goals/71 games he averaged across the prior two seasons. His points per game rate was 53% higher in 2022-23 than it was in 2023-24, and he ended up with the same point total as Shayne Gostisbehere. Not great.

It should be noted that Thompson still led the team in contributions off the rush (shots plus assists on teammate shots) so that's a positive. However, to take full advantage of his talents, he needs to be more than a forechecking forward at 5-on-5 and a stationary shot-bot on the power play.

Jeff Skinner also saw a big decline. His 46 points were the lowest total for him in any season he's played at least 60 games since 2014-15. The big decline came in his assist totals as he went from 0.48 per game across the 2021-2023 seasons to a paltry 0.30 in 2023-24. A decline of nearly 38% crushed his point production so even if he had scored 30 goals (he finished with 24) it still wouldn't have been an overly productive season.

Another culprit was a loss in ice time as Skinner dropped 1:24 per game when compared to 2022-23. It is likely related to the production problem as he's not good enough defensively to make up for the offensive shortcomings, so there is hope for a turnaround in 2024-25.

For the final note on Skinner, what happened with him on the ice at 5-on-5 mirrored what happened with the team on the power play. In 2022-23, the team had no problem creating offence from basically anywhere in the offensive zone:

That omnivorous offence disappeared in 2023-24 as they could not create anything around the net with Skinner on the ice:

Skinner is far from the only culprit here as this was a case of the team generally being allergic to the front of the net, but when your top players can't attack the low slot area, it limits what the team can do offensively and makes them easier to defend.

Alex Tuch saw a 20-point drop as well, but the big change was a drop in shooting percentage. That was somewhat predictable as he shot 16.5% in 2022-23, the highest mark of his career by a wide margin (had never cracked 13% and his three-year average before that career mark was 10%). He can be a 30-goal scorer, but it's tough to rely on him to be a point-per-game player as he was in 2022-23.

While Thompson's drop has gotten a lot of coverage, it is really Dylan Cozens that was the massive disappointment in 2023-24. He fell from 31 goals and 37 assists in 2022-23 to 18 goals and 29 assists in 2023-24. It was a drop by over 20 points and despite two fewer games played, he earned nearly 45 more seconds per game, so he had more total ice time. A drop of over 20 points despite earning more total ice time is just an absolute crash for a player that seemed to be ascending.

When something like this happens, there are always a multitude of factors:

• Cozens's regular winger from 2022-23 was Jack Quinn, but an Achilles surgery and subsequent injury caused Quinn to miss 55 games in 2023-24.
• Cozens saw the largest drop in rush contribution rate at 5-on-5 as he fell from 14.4/60 in 2022-23 (that led Buffalo forwards) to 6.1/60 in 2023-24, which was lower than Krebs.
• He saw a small decline in share of the team's power play time from nearly 52% to nearly 48%.
• There was a 31% drop in per-minute power play production besides that drop in usage.
• His shot attempt rate rose while his expected goal rate dropped, so he wasn't getting to the net as often as he did in 2022-23 (that is a theme for these Sabres forwards).

On the bright side, Cozens had 108 hits, which was not far off from the total he posted across his first three seasons (201 games, 120 hits). Silver linings, and all.  

We will include Rasmus Dahlin here as he had 59 points, a drop from the 73 he had the year before. He did reach the 20-goal mark, though, and had more shots than in 2022-23 (+31), more blocks (+22), and more hits (+90). His big problem was a drop in assists, a lot of which was caused by the poor power play as he fell from 26 PP assists in 2022-23 to 14 this past season. If he gets to just 25 PP assists, he reaches 70 points, and he's arguably the top defenceman in multi-cat formats. The point drop is why he's on this list, but it really wasn't a bad multi-cat year from Dahlin.

The last guy we'll add is Devon Levi. Many analysts (present company included) thought this would be the breakout year for Levi, who had some very good outings at the end of the 2022-23 season. However, he had just eight starts before American Thanksgiving and that resulted in an .879 save percentage with a 3.67 goals against average. He had a few very good games at the end of the year, and there is still a bright future here, but a sub-.900 save percentage with just 10 wins is not what some of us were hoping for.

What Went Right

Despite what is seen as a disappointing Buffalo season, there were still good fantasy performances.

The name at the top of the list is JJ Peterka. He improved to 28 goals and 22 assists while playing all 82 games, a very successful sophomore season. Though there wasn't much for multi-cat stats (18 blocks and 27 hits), he did add over 100 shots to his rookie season, finishing with 226 overall. By the end of the season, he was regularly skating 20 minutes a night as the team was hoping to push for a playoff appearance. They fell short, but Peterka had more ice time than any forward not named Alex Tuch over the team's final 12 games.

Peterka finished the season with the most rush contributions per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 of any non-top line Buffalo forward, and he was second for percentage of zone entries that were carried in:

Notice that while Skinner was higher, Skinner was not tasked with nearly as many zone entries as Peterka was (largely thanks to Thompson doing a lot of the work on the top line). Peterka was helping the team in transition, even if some of his playmaking numbers left us wanting. There is a clear upward trajectory to Peterka's game and a full season with him and a healthy Quinn will make a big difference for secondary scoring.

Owen Power saw a virtually identical points-per-game mark in 2023-24 as compared to 2022-23 despite 138 fewer minutes played; doing that on a team that saw such a huge decline offensively is a great sign for the young defenceman. He lost some of his shot volume but added both in the blocks and hits columns, so we'll call that a wash. Overall, he can be a 40-point option as soon as 2024-25, but he won't get top power play usage and that caps his fantasy value.

Lastly, it was a great year for Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. He finished the season with a .910 save percentage, 27 wins in 51 starts, and a 2.57 goals against average. He had a .916 save percentage in the second half of the season and that was with a decline over the final few weeks of the season. He took the net from Levi, and is now, at worst, the 1A in a split-start situation.

Where They Go From Here

Granato was fired and the team hired Lindy Ruff. Whatever people think of Ruff – and I talked about how he was improperly maligned for New Jersey's 2023-24 season in my review of their season linked at the top of this Ramblings – he had the Devils playing very fast hockey, relying on rush shots and counterattacks. If he can get Buffalo's offence back to what it was in 2022-23, that is great news for fantasy managers. His teams usually push the pace, and for a team like this, it's what fantasy owners want to see.

Buffalo has about $23M in cap space but there are a few key RFAs to sign: Henri Jokiharju and Luukkonen both need new contracts. They also have four players hitting unrestricted free agency and traded both Casey Mittelstadt and Kyle Okposo. Not including prospects, they have just eight forwards signed for 2024-25. However, they do have a slew of high-end prospects like Jiri Kulich, Noah Östlund, Lukas Rousek, and Matthew Savoie that can fill some depth roles. It depends how many young players they want on the roster, but they have the cap space to make a big signing and then fill in the bottom-6 with cheap prospects.

Maybe they go the trade route, though. They already shipped out Mittelstadt, but he was older, and his next contract was likely to be a big one. Maybe they trade a couple of their prospects for an impact RFA to give them more high-end depth, and a bit of insulation in case Cozens doesn't rebound. With Skinner, Thompson, Tuch, Cozens, Peterka, and Quinn, they have their top-6 forwards figured out. It is a matter of what they do with their third and fourth lines.

There is doom and gloom in Buffalo, but I genuinely think Ruff will help them regain their offensive potency. There are still a few high-end veterans at the top of the lineup and good secondary scoring with Peterka, Quinn, and (hopefully) Cozens. Add that to a blue line with Dahlin, Power, Jokiharju, Bowen Byram, and Mattias Samuelsson, with Lukkonen and Levi in net, and there is a lot to like about this team in 2024-25. With all the negative press around them, there is likely to be a lot of good fantasy values come draft time in September, and I will absolutely be buying into a rebound on a lot of their players.