Alright, so I got stuck on some work and left my sh*t on campus, and it's Saturday anyway, and I anticipate being unable to watch any more preseason hockey and being quite busy between now and October 4, so I'm going to lay out what I'd do for the start of the season based on what I've seen. I'm going to try to use the logic I described in the season preview thread last month, with the benefit of actually seeing these guys play a little this time. Of course, our sample size isn't nearly big enough, but for most of these guys we at least have some idea where they are compared to their resumes to date.
Warning: This is pretty similar in nature to my last long post in that thread, so it might be a waste of time to read this. I’m seriously going to be repeating a lot of the same things, but more firmly since we have some real hockey to watch now. And I mean seriously. It feels like I’m plagiarizing myself.
The key point is establishing our team identity and making our decisions through the most important players on our roster. Any time you give one player to somebody, you take that player away from someone else. So to make a pair/line of players, you need to look at all involved and make sure you're getting the most out of the players that are most essential to your season going well. I think we can all agree that for this team to have its most successful season, Jack Eichel needs to be as good an offensive player as he can possibly be. We want him to be good defensively, but he can still develop defensive chops (he has a long way to go) in a role that tries to optimize his offense, as the best offensive-specialist players in the world still spend 40%+ of their ice time in the defensive zone.
Sam Reinhart is probably our second-most-important forward to get going, but he's a lot easier to work with.
On Defense, I really think that Dahlin will be our best hockey player before long, and that Risto's deployment is key.
With this in mind, and also noting that I don't quite have enough info on some of the prospects, this is how I'd build the 23 man roster.
Starting with forwards:
Guys who are 100% locked in
Jack Eichel, Sam Reinhart, Jeff Skinner, Conor Sheary, Patrik Berglund Guys who basically have made the team but there’s a tiny chance something crazy happens
Kyle Okposo, Evan Rodrigues, Vlad Sobotka Guys who have probably made the team but there’s a non-negligible chance they don’t play/get sent down
Tage Thompson, Jason Pominville, Casey Mittelstadt Guys who are on the fence for various reasons
Zemgus Girgensons, Alex Nylander, Rasmus Asplund Interesting guys you’d want to be the first callup:
CJ Smith. Olofsson is interesting but he’s not getting called up this year unless he dominates Guys the Sabres could keep around who I have no interest in
Justin Bailey, Nick Baptiste, Scott Wilson, Johan Larsson, and the Rochester guys like Cornel
From this group, my forward list is as follows (I keep 14):
1.) Eichel
2.) Reinhart
3.) Skinner
4.) Sheary
5.) Berglund
6.) Thompson
7.) Okposo
8.) Rodrigues
9.) Mittelstadt
10.) Asplund
11.) Nylander
12.) Girgensons*
13.) Sobotka
14.) Pominville
Girgensons and Sobotka will fill a very similar role, and I know people here are sick of Zemgus, so his spot could just as well go to an 8th defenseman. I think the defense is easy: I only care about the best players, and so the starting 6 are Risto, Scandella, Dahlin, McCabe, Bogosian, and Pilut, with Beaulieu as the 7D.
Now that we have the pieces, we can focus on implementing them in a way that maximizes our winning and enjoyment as fans.
We want our team to play fast, to pass fast, and to think fast. We want them using structured passing plays to spring their transition and to open up scoring opportunities in the offensive zone. We want support coming from everywhere to help our defensemen defend and then exit when the puck is recovered. We want to dominate the puck. We don’t care about the spreadsheet, except to note that if we’re doing these things, the numbers should also confirm that we’re pretty good. But it’ll be pretty clear just from watching whether or not we are successful at these things. So keeping this in mind, along with the idea that we need our best players maximized, I propose the following (I’m not sure how different it’s going to be from my original take in August and I’m not going to reread it to see).
First, we note that there are roughly 4 people on this team whose point totals are relatively independent of who they play with. Jack put up 78 point paces with various groups of mediocre forwards and some time with Kane. I don’t see him scoring much more than 85-90 in a best case scenario with this roster, meaning that it’s not NECESSARY to put him with Sam Reinhart, the guy who is the second best offensive player on the roster, IMO, even though I WANT him to have better linemates than he’s had. Similarly, Skinner does what he does regardless of the trash Carolina saddled him with because his playstyle is all about what he’s doing and less about what his teammates can do. Then, we have Sam, who is consistent as long as you don’t strain him too much (cough Griffith and Moulson cough), and Berglund, whose goals (and he really only scores goals) are consistent, if not the product of Soviet-style artistry. In theory, then, you want most of these guys separate from each other, spread throughout the lineup. But with Sam’s asterisk for needing good players, and with his general skill-set and hockey sense theoretically fitting Jeff’s pros like a glove, I think dudacek hit that pairing bang-on. And I don’t think we’re missing much with Jack&Jeff, they haven’t clicked in a way that makes you say wow and I don’t anticipate that happening, so why not let the puck hogs be puck hogs on their own.
Now we look at players who, historically, have needed to be with other good players to get their points. This is true of Sheary, who was an effective ES player with Crosby, and who, according to Pens fans, had a tougher time without him. It’s also true of Zemgus, who has been shown to have decent scoring rates in his top six time but whose rates plummet when left out. It’s also true of Sobotka - he had decent production, but in the games I saw (10+) he wasn’t in a top six role and consequently I am almost positive the only production I saw from him in those games was a single secondary assist. He DID get time with Tarasenko/Schenn and guys like that so I’m assuming that generated his point totals. Most other skaters, IMO, are somewhere between these extremes, or complete unknowns. Keeping this in mind, and noting that, hey, we have an open spot next to a superstar center where we need a guy to score ES goals and skate fast and not do much else, well, that’s the definition of Sheary innit? (Are we allowed to say “innit” in places where it actually makes grammatical sense?) So Eichel’s left side is figured out for now. It also satisfies the condition that a relatively important offensive player (we need Sheary to be a good top six winger) is in a position to succeed. Since our season doesn’t hinge on offensive production from Vlad/Zemgus, it’s okay that they miss the boat here. More on them a little later.
So we’ve got
Sheary - Eichel - xxx
And
Skinner - Reinhart/xxx - Reinhart/xxx.
Incomplete, but getting there. An important aspect of these lines scoring goals is the level of puck skill we can squeeze into them. Space is great, but it’s forever limited on NHL ice. You need guys that can handle a puck in high traffic, guys that can come off the boards and squeeze through corridors and emerge with their heads up, and the puck on their sticks. Retain possession at NHL-game-speed with quick, efficient decision making. I call all of this stuff combined “puck skills” for short. The vast majority of our veteran players with puck skills are on these lines, already accounted for, and we need to finish filling the lines with, first and foremost, puck skills, to fully maximize our offensive pieces the way they need to be. If I were to rank forwards in this regard, I’d say that Jack and Sam have no-BS-very-good puck skills. I’d say Skinner, Tage, Nylander, and Mittelstadt are in the tier right below that. In Skinner’s case, his are above average but decreasing as a function of nearness-to-the-boards, and in the other three players’ case, they are well on the way and getting better every day. Of players on my final team, Rodrigues, Pominville, Sheary, Berglund, Asplund, Sobotka, Wilson are all on a spectrum of passable-but-unremarkable puck skills. Actively bad hands: Bailey, Okposo, Larsson, Girgensons, Baptiste. These are guys that mishandle and flub the second their space gets closed, and who rarely emerge from board battles with the puck on their sticks and the energy/ability left in the tank to make a positive play. That doesn’t preclude them from having an effective hockey presence on the boards, maybe in the form of a grungy cycle, but it’s not what you need on those top two lines. I would say only Bailey full-blown-fails when all of these facets are considered.
With this in mind...Let’s leave those top two lines alone for a moment.
We all know what we want Okposo to be, and what we saw quite a bit of in the 16-17 season. However, since the ICU scare, he’s not as good offensively as he’d like to be. I’m not going to sit here and rail on him, I’ve done that enough over the past year and you all know exactly where my issues lie (hands and feet and most importantly, inability to get pucks or himself to space in the slot). So let’s just focus on what we can do with him to help the team and get the most out of him. Every metric out there agrees with a general eye-test consensus (at least as far as I’ve read here) that he shouldn’t be Jack’s RW. So does the puck-skill-pyramid. Not just because of his erosion, but because Jack is very peculiar and you can usually just tell when someone doesn’t mesh with him at ES. Furthermore, until his WOWY charts stop dragging everyone to the abyss, we also don’t want him with Sam and Skinner, as these two lines are our two precious scoring lines that we need to get just right. I have just the right place for Kyle.
Patrik Berglund is not an integral part of a well-oiled possession machine. He’s a guy who can move enough to get to where he needs to be, and heady enough to not screw up. You won’t see high skill or brainfarts. And most notably, he scores his dirty goals and his timely slot-one-timers like clockwork, to the tune of ~15-25 per 82 games, and it doesn’t matter who he’s with. That’s not somebody you want on those top two lines either, because you’re neither maximizing them nor him - he doesn’t need it. He is a low-event player, meaning that all opponents’ and teammates’ scoring and shooting rates drop when he’s out there. The other player that has this trait established in NHL games with a significant sample size is Zemgus Girgensons, as I’ve outlined before.
Now, Zemgus, Kyle, and Patrik fall at the bottom end of the puck skill pyramid I described above. Because of that alone, you don’t want them spread throughout your lineup if you’re broadly looking for fluid passing hockey with pace. You don’t want the low-event-trait on separate lines either - we need MORE events. That more shots against will come with it is a necessary evil at this juncture - we just need Jack and Sam/Skinner shooting. We need more goals first and foremost. So when we stick Zemgus (who can’t score without good teammates, but whose production isn’t important) OR Sobotka in Zemgus-haters’ iterations, who has the same traits in that sense, with Berglund and Kyle, we are limiting potential damage from weak links to one line, keeping it away from volatile and susceptible-to-being-hemmed-in pieces that we need to be scoring, AND sticking the guys together who are statistically our best bet to stop the Marchand/Kucherov/Matthews lines from going absolutely ham on us, all together. This is two birds with one stone. Limit the damage while wringing out of it everything you can. And that “third line” will certainly score you some goals, even though you’ve designed it with the idea in mind that you don’t really NEED them from those players. You then don’t have to worry about the fact that Berglund made one single pass that resulted in a teammate scoring a goal last season (his other assists were shots that got tipped in and missed passes and things like that). You don’t need to worry about THAT, and Zemgus/Kyle’s known passing warts, being relied upon to get the puck to guys we need to have the puck.
So now we have basically dealt with our known entities. We’ve done what we can to best use the weaker pieces without harming the ones that are so touchy and yet so full of potential, and we’ve filled in ⅔ of each important offensive line. The pieces left are: Thompson, Rodrigues, Mittelstadt, Asplund, Nylander, and Pominville. Pominville is my 13/14 forward. He’s a low-event piece that you use if one of your third line goes down with an injury. He also can play a role on the last line we’ll discuss. But for now, we have five kiddos. All five of them have or will have an adequate amount of puck skillz. They’re varying shades of green. For example, I could see Asplund and Jack being a bizarre-but-awesome pairing, a la Hecht-Briere, (really, I want Jack to be 05-07 Danny Briere, and to be used that way, I don’t think he can be Sid and I don’t think we should use him like Sid) but that probably won’t happen right away. Nylander looks exponentially more confident with the puck, but still feels more towards the Casey/Asplund side of almost-but-not-quite there, relative to Thompson. So I’m zoning in on Thompson-Rodrigues. Obviously, people will object to Evan in a top six role. But I don’t look at it as a top six role, as our main roles have been fleshed out already. We’re looking for the complementary pieces. Grier was often the other guy on that Briere line. Mike goddamn Grier. Will Carrier was a cog in the best possession line the Sabres have had since their last playoff trip. Weird things work sometimes.
Anyway, in extremely limited ice time, Rodrigues + Jack created a f*ck ton together. Sure, they were a bit of a mess in their own zone. But that’s going to be the case with Jack in the first place. It was with Pat Kane when the Hawks were winning cups too. Irrelevant. If it works the way we need it to work, offensively, you use it. ERod can make hockey plays and even though he plays above his talent level, the hair-on-fire attitude is something we need more of near Jack, and not less. He can skate too, and has a hockey brain. With the caveat that it might blow up and so be ready to switch E-Rod to Tage quickly, we’re done with Jack’s line.
Now, Tage has impressed everyone to this point. He can move and he can stickhandle. He needs to quit the toe-drags, or at least limit them to once per period, but I’m confident he’ll adjust that as the skill he faces rises (I don’t remember seeing that at all in the St. Louis games I watched, and we saw it far more in the prospect tourney than against Columbus than against Toronto). He is the closest to NHL-ready (he IS NHL-ready) and has the skill we need to emerge from the boards, to get the pucks places, to get himself places (really, on this line he won’t be doing too much passing - he can lead transition plays and get himself open for sauces from Sam.)
Sheary - Eichel - Rodrigues
Skinner - Reinhart - Thompson
Girgensons/Sobotka - Berglund - Okposo
Mittelstadt - Asplund - Nylander
Line 1: they’re going to see their fair share of tough opponents, but do what you can to maximize their offensive zone time. And because Jack is going to get a lot of ice time, even though he’ll see Barkov a lot, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to face the many bad 4th lines in the East. Let them play with the best puck movers we have (Dahlin and hopefully Pilut soon) and, of course, they need to backcheck and figure things out defensively along the way, but they should not have checking-line duties in any real sense. The aim here is to get Jack fun, fast-transition ES minutes (watch Sheary highlights and watch the Jack-Erod 2 on 1 at Arizona in 16-17 to see what I mean) that complement his heavy PP production well. He’ll give up a lot of goals, but he already does that anyway in his garbage Crosby minutes that also limit his offense.
Line 2: Still not a lot of defensive soundness here,but whatever. We want goals, and these three smart hockey players will be just as exciting to tune in for night in and night out.
Line 3: Chase the big guns as much as you can, anybody you don’t want taking lots of shots. Fluid possession hockey will not happen on this line, but because this line exists it will happen on other lines, and this line will do a great job disrupting the fluid hockey of the other team.
The last line: Mitts - Asplund - Nylander. Have a blast, guys. Get your 12-14 minutes per night. If Kerfoot, Compher, and Jost can do it on a playoff team, you can do it here with our expectations. No pressure whatsoever, just look like y’all did in Toronto on Friday night and we’ll be happy. Enjoy and learn the NHL game. Pominville has a role here as a safe vet with puffy fancy stats and good bits of wisdom sprinkled in.
As injuries and development take place, adjust lines accordingly with the same broad themes in mind. I think this forward group as laid out can be a lot of fun. There’s a reason to be excited/interested in every single shift. Avoid the traps of a “traditional 4th line” that “lets” you develop kids in rochester while we get to see Larsson - Wilson - Pommers get tanked and give us so much hope and inspiration for the future of the team.
And stick with Risto-Scandella, Dahlin-McCabe, Pilut-Bogosian, 23-24 minutes for pair 1, and 18 each for the other 2.
Don’t use Jack or Sam on the PK (well, use Jack for the last 10 seconds or so, that’s always fun), Don’t use Kyle on PP1 without ROR over there as aid in 50/50 battles. I’d go
Jack-Sam-Skinner, Risto-Dahlin on PP1, and whatever on PP2, and I’d be looking for a Skinner replacement during practices, as his PP play has never been anything special.
But I really don’t know what’s going on, and this could all be nonsense. Let’s watch and have fun eh? Wheel snipe celly boys!
