Amid a severe rash of injuries (and other ailments) this season, the Buffalo Sabres have seen solid production from aging prospects who were forced into action as a result. One of those players is Swedish forward, Rasmus Asplund.

In the nine NHL contests he’s appeared in this season, the 23-year-old has posted strong underlying metrics. Despite carrying a team-low offensive zone-start rate of 28.57-percent, he currently holds an xGF rate of 50.15-percent according to Evolving Hockey.

He’s also played primarily with players like Cody Eakin, Riley Sheahan, and Kyle Okposo. Eakin has particularly benefitted from Asplund’s presence, experiencing a near eight-percent xG improvement when they’ve skated together. This is especially noteworthy when you consider the fact that Eakin and Asplund hold an OZS rate of just 15.79-percent when deployed together.

On top of his positive defensive metrics, Asplund has done some nice work on the forecheck as well. All three of his goals so far have come at even-strength. As a high-energy presence on the de facto checking line, he’s been the closest thing to a Johan Larsson style replacement we’ve seen this season. It’s also worth noting that he’s contributing on the team’s penalty-kill unit, though his best work is being done at five-on-five.

What’s interesting about Asplund’s small sample of success is the contrast it created to his NHL trajectory leading up to the 2020-21 campaign. As a 22-year-old with the Rochester Amerks last season, he posted 19 points in 31 games, which is relatively pedestrian as it relates to NHL equivalency metrics. Those model were legitimized to an extent when he managed to produce just three points in 29 NHL games last season.

It’s worth noting that his underlying metrics during that stint weren’t nearly as bad as the box score might indicate. Though his xGF mark of 48.7-percent wasn’t very good, it actually ranked him sixth among Buffalo forwards who appeared in at least 20 games in 2019-20.

Prior to the start of the shortened NHL season, Asplund’s optics took another hit when he managed just nine points in 14 games in Allsvenskan (Swedish B-League), a league in which he should have dominated. According to Hockey Prospecting’s trajectory model, Asplund’s D-3 production would have resulted in pretty paltry NHL numbers.

At that point, they game him a 43-percent chance to carve out a legitimate NHL career (an eight-percent reduction from the year prior). Not exactly what you want to see from a player that was selected at the top of the second round in 2016.

From a personal standpoint, I had all but given up on him as a long-term factor in the Buffalo lineup. As an older prospect, his lack of lower-league production was concerning, even considering his primary strengths as a defensive entity. Fortunately, he’s risen to the occasion when finally given a legitimate opportunity. Again, the sample size is still very small, but early returns are at least intriguing.

This is all positive, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the circumstance that the Sabres front office has created here. Had the team not suffered an inordinate amount of injuries this season, Asplund probably wouldn’t have seen very much NHL action. The same can be said for defensemen Jacob Bryson and William Borgen.

Asplund and Bryson are 23 years old. Borgen is 24. All three of them fared nicely when finally given an opportunity with the big club. In fact, they’ll all likely factor into the starting lineup to start 2021-22, given how they’ve out-performed some of their veteran contemporaries.

If the Sabres had stayed relatively healthy however, these aging prospects would have spent a majority of the year with the Rochester Amerks (or perhaps the taxi squad) and remained unknown NHL entities heading into next season. It’s almost as though the Sabres have an internal policy that “B-prospects” must spend a minimum of two years in the AHL before they get a sniff of NHL action.

This is particularly problematic when you apply the Sabres level of stubbornness to the equation. Allowing veteran depth pieces to flounder without the looming threat of being replaced by a younger asset (Okposo and Eakin are prime examples of this) only exacerbates the issue.

The act of creating “veteran roadblocks” is long-standing problem for the Sabres, so this isn’t exclusively a shot at Kevyn Adams. His predecessor, Jason Botterill was famous (and rightly mocked) for it. It’s why Lawrence Pilut couldn’t crack the starting lineup last season and subsequently decided to leave for the KHL. Hopefully Adams learns from this (though he’s currently doing the same thing to Arttu Ruotsalainen).

The benefit of allowing prospects to see NHL time is two-fold, particularly for a struggling team like Buffalo. Not only is the front office getting a proper gauge of asset growth, but it could also eliminate the need to acquire an overstock of veteran depth pieces. If players like Asplund, Bryson, and Borgen received earlier extended looks, it might have stopped Adams from pursuing severely flawed players like Eakin, Matt Irwin, and Brandon Davidson via free agency.

Development is critical, but burning aging prospects to a crisp is obviously detrimental. You can’t successfully cycle entry-level depth if you never take the opportunity to find out what you truly have in an asset. This is a bit less so the case with Asplund, who had a relatively long stint in Buffalo last season, but the sentiment stands.

NHL Equivalency Data courtesy of Hockey Prospecting

Advanced Metrics and Charts courtesy of Evolving Hockey and Hockey Viz

Photo credit: Bill Wippert/NHLI via Getty Images