Not only has it been a rough few years for the Buffalo Sabres, but it has been a particularly difficult time for Jeff Skinner. The goal-scoring forward has failed to live up to the eight-year, $72 million contract he signed in the summer of 2019.

His production has been down and he has even found himself in the press box as a healthy scratch this season. Skinner came to the Sabres as one of the best 5 on 5 scorers in the league, but he has only lived up to that in one of his three years with the club.

The 28-year-old winger is in perhaps the roughest stretch of scoring luck in his career that has lasted over two seasons. While there’s still some bad luck occurring with Skinner, it may be time to accept that he’s never going to be the player he was in terms of production back in the 2018-19 season. As a matter of fact, he may not ever get close to that again.

Diminishing Finishing

Throughout his career, Skinner has never been a consistently elite finisher. He has been able to have success more often than not but has never been able to sustain it. We see a lot of volatility in his production levels because of his fluctuation in finishing from year to year.

You’ll see in the chart above that over the last five years he has shot right at expected at 5 on 5 or slightly below in all but two outlier seasons. We also see a two-year trend developing where his finishing hasn’t rebounded like in the past.

When you look at his shooting percentage at 5 on 5 you can see the downward trend in that regard as well in the chart below. Three out of the last four years we have a shooting percentage below 10%.

Again, I don’t think his finishing ability has diminished to such a rate that we’re seeing this season, but we’re at nearly 90 games of this. It’s time to move out of this is some really bad luck to accepting that a 28-year-old forward may be showing signs of a diminishing talent. This is earlier than you’d expect to see a player begin to show signs at this stage of the aging curve, but it’s not unheard of.

Try drive the point home, let’s look at some charts from Micah’s site and focus on his finishing in wrist/snap shots in all situations. That’s where Skinner made his money throughout his career. We’ll start with his big 2018-19 season.

Now, take a look at 2019-20:

Lastly, this season:

Remaining Impactful

It’s not all doom and gloom here with Skinner. Of course, it’s not ideal that he’s never going to live up that $9 million cap hit. That’s just where we are and need to accept that because nobody is coming to take that contract off the Sabres’ hands right now.

Having said that, I think it’s important to remember what Skinner is. He’s supposed to be one of the best 5 on 5 scorers in the game. Believe it or not, he still led the Sabres in 5 on 5 goals per 60 minutes last season. That didn’t translate to one of the best in the league like years past, but still worth mentioning.

At this point in his career, I believe he is a player that will shot at expected plus or minus a goal. If he’s shooting at expected this season he would have six goals at 5 on 5. That would put him at 0.91 goals per 60 minutes which would be good enough for second on the team, but outside the top 50 forwards in the league.

Patrik Laine had an interesting quote yesterday when talking about his scoring struggles. He said that he only gets concerned about his game when the scoring chances stopped and that has happened with him. I feel the same way about Skinner.

The good news is that scoring chances haven’t stopped for him. They’ve actually remained fairly consistent over the last few years, as you’ll see below.

There’s that outlier 16-17 season mixed in, but he’s been in the same ballpark in individual shot quality at 5 on 5. Over this five-year stretch above, he ranks fifth among all forwards to play at least 500 minutes in 5 on 5 individual shot quality. This season he ranks 20th in the league among all forwards to play at least 200 minutes.

The Sabres may be able to boost his production if they give Skinner more opportunity to see scoring chances. To start, he should see an increase of ice time at 5 on 5. According to Natural Stat Trick, this is Skinner’s lowest time on ice per game played since his rookie season (12:44) at 5 on 5. This is the first year since 2011 that he has averaged under 13 minutes per games played. Last season was his fourth-lowest time on ice time per game at 5 on 5 (13:28).

Giving Skinner more ice time allows him to see more scoring chances because he will generate them when he’s on the ice. As a result, it should bring up his goal total.

The next step would be to put him around better teammates. The quality of teammate has a bigger impact on player results than the quality of competition. You can see below in Micah’s chart the type of teammate that Skinner played with last season.

No offense to Curtis Lazar, Riley Sheahan, and to an extent Casey Mittelstadt; those players are not offensive dynamos in the NHL. Those are his most-common linemates this season.

Conclusion

The Sabres need to make a decision moving forward what the role of Skinner is going to be on this team. He’s never going to score 40 goals again with the lack of power play time, but you can have him be a good 5 on 5 scorer for you still in the right situations.

They need to decide if he’s going to be a top six forward for them or they want him to drive offense from a third line role like he has this season. However, the latter is going to give results like we’re seeing this season. Especially when you take into account the diminishing finishing talent.

The ceiling for him moving forward is a player that can cap out at 20 goals with 18 of them coming at 5 on 5. That would still make him successful at what he’s paid to do (scoring even-strength goals), but the days of a 30-goal scorer are likely gone for Skinner.

Data via: Evolving Hockey, Natural Stat Trick, and Hockeyviz.com

Photo Credit: Len Redkoles/NHLI via Getty Images