The Sabres debuted a new look with their forward lineup at Monday’s practice ahead of the team’s western road trip which begins Tuesday in Edmonton at 9 pm. The team also announced that they have demoted forward Anders Bjork to Rochester due to Riley Sheahan coming off injured reserve.
Bjork simply hasn’t found his game since being traded to Buffalo as part of the Taylor Hall trade back in the latter part of the 2020-21 season. With 14 points in 73 games and a -19 rating, Bjork has been easily expendable, and the team has opted to roster Sheahan in Bjork’s place as Sheahan can play center and is a more natural fit for the bottom six. The other 31 NHL teams will have until tomorrow to put a waiver claim on Bjork, but if they don’t, it’s expected that he’ll report to Rochester and the AHL. The problem with Bjork is that other than his decent speed, there’s really nothing he does well, and well, that’s why he's being sent to the Americans.
The other news of the day involve new-look lines at Sabres practice. Here’s how they practiced, according to various media reports:
Skinner-Thompson-Tuch
Asplund-Mittelstadt-Olofsson
Peterka-Cozens-Hinostroza
Quinn-Girgensons-Okposo
Krebs
Sheahan
Following practice, Granato said not to read too much into the lines and that the team was just experimenting with some different things. Fair enough. Still, with the struggles of the first line in the first two games, it’s easy to see why Granato might want to shake things up. The trio of Skinner, Thompson and Olofsson simply doesn’t have the dynamic physicality and energy that Alex Tuch brought to the Skinner and Thompson pairing last year.
The surface numbers will tell the story as well as the fancy stats, but we’ll do both just for fun. Skinner and Thompson both have 0 points to their credit, and they really have generated much outside of one beautiful look for Skinner on a give-and-go with Thompson against Florida. Panthers goalie Spencer Knight foiled Skinner’s shot with excellent vision and anticipation. Beyond that chance? There hasn’t been much from that pair.
Evolving-hockey has Thompson's expected goals-for at .96 P/60 and his expected goals against at 4.31, while Skinner is at 1.33/4.15 for the same two metrics. So the eye test and the fancy stats are both essentially saying the same thing: this line isn’t working. The line is missing Tuch’s ability to dig down into corners and fish out the puck for Skinner and Thompson.
Olofsson is not that guy.
Granato is caught in a potential catch-22, though, if he decides to put Tuch on the top line while moving Victor Olofsson and others down the depth chart. The coach's plan heading into the season was clearly to spread out the talent across several lines while mixing offensive and defensive attributes on each of the four forward lines. By centralizing the talent on the top line, they could end up with a (Jason Botterill voice) “situation where… they have some combination of Jack Quinn, Casey Mittelstadt and Peyton Krebs playing limited fourth-line minutes.
We’ve seen this movie before; Mittelstadt centering Jimmy Vesey and Conor Sheary comes to mind first. Condensing the best talent on the team at the top often leads to certain pieces being cast aside and lumped into a hodgepodge of pieces that don’t necessarily make sense together but are forced together because the team doesn’t know what else to do with them.
Conversely, if the team doesn’t centralize talent – I’m looking at you, Ralph Krueger and your unwillingness to play Jeffrey “not-in-the-dog-house… Skinner with Jack Eichel – then the team risks having precisely zero lines that are clicking well. One potential move to solve this quandary would be to elevate JJ Peterka to the top-line RW spot where he could play his high-octane style in a similar role to what Tuch brought there last year. The downside is that Peterka and Cozens seem to be forming a good connection early on and it would be a shame to break up that pairing.
Also, as an aside, it’s interesting that Krebs was rotating into the lineup as an extra considering his relatively decent counting stats and advanced numbers. The shifty forward had a beautiful assist against Ottawa and he finds himself with a 2.46 xG/60 with a 1.75 xGA/60 in the early going this year. Seems good enough to be in the lineup.
So what do the Sabres do? The second practice line is a good indication that they may try some minor tinkering with Asplund, Mittelstadt and Olofsson playing together. The two swedes bring a decently balanced defensive game and there exists some possibility that Mittelstadt could use his vision to get Olofsson scoring at 5-on-5. This line too suffers somewhat from a vanilla construction due to the lack of physicality from any of that trio.
The optimal scenario would be to find a right wing for Skinner and Thompson who can dig pucks out of corners and try to set them up while keeping Tuch elsewhere on the team in order to create some semblance of a working middle-six. Here’s a shot in the dark look at what that could look like using an unlikely player:
Skinner-Thompson-Okposo
Peterka-Cozens-Olofsson
Quinn-Krebs-Tuch
Asplund-Girgensons-Hinostroza
Mittelstadt
Sheahan
Yes, at first glance it seems insane to put 34-year-old Okposo on the top line – but – he does bring the kind of tenacious forechecking effort that Tuch brought to that line last year and the Sabres have very few options for players who can go stir stuff up in the corner while holding their own offensively at least somewhat. Phil Housley used Jason Pominville with Jack Eichel in a similar role to the one envisioned here for Okposo and it worked pretty well. The other candidate for this job would be Vinnie Hinostroza who also can mix it up in the corners, but I doubt fans would have the stomach to watch top-line Vinnie for 18 minutes a night.
The easy answer here, of course, is to simply move Tuch back up to the top line instead of playing Okposo or Hinostroza on the top line where they don’t truly belong. The problem with that decision would be the reverberations throughout the rest of the lines should Don Granato go there.
Perhaps all of this is premature and the Sabres just need to stick with their lines and wait for chemistry to develop rather than panicking a mere two games into the season.
We’ll have to wait and see what the Sabres cook up on this road trip.