One of the bright spots of another disappointing season for the Buffalo Sabres was the emergence of the “LOG” line. It was the line that consisted of Johan Larsson, Kyle Okposo, and Zemgus Girgensons. That trio was considered the Sabres fourth line, but in reality, they weren’t.

They were one of the most consistent lines throughout the season. Also, two of the three players on that line finished in the top nine among all forwards in time-on-ice per games played in Okposo and Larsson.

The Analysis

I know how well that line performed for the Sabres by watching games and have the underlying numbers to back it up. I always wondered how they measured up against the other “fourth lines” around the league. With the NHL season suspended, now was my opportunity to see if my theory of the LOG line being one of the best fourth lines in the league held any water.

Before we get into the analysis let me break down a few things. First off, this isn’t a perfect exercise. I did the best I could to go through each team using Evolving Hockey’s line tool and made a determination which line was the most-common fourth line on each club. Thus each team is represented with one “fourth line.”

There probably isn’t a realistic way to determine the best line, but we can get close by looking at a few data points. Teams deploy their fourth line a certain way and are asked to do different things to help their club win. For example, the Vegas Golden Knights use their fourth line to forecheck and generate offense. The Sabres deployed their fourth line to be a shot suppression group against the opponent’s top line at times.

Therefore, we’re going to look at a few different data points to try to make a determination. We’re going to look at the offensive and defensive impact. Then compare that to deployment and see what we come up with.

League Comparison

Let’s get into the fun stuff. The line of Larsson, Okposo, and Girgensons will be shaded a dark grey in all of the charts below while the other lines will be read. Also, the size of the bubble represents the minutes played by each line. The larger the bubble the higher time on ice together for that line. It gives you an idea of sample size.

We’ll start by looking at the offensive side of the game.

It’s no surprise to see that the LOG line didn’t show particularly well offensively. They were below average in shot attempts for (CF/60) and close to average in shot quality (xGF/60). One of the knocks for that line has been their inability to score and generate offense consistently.

In this area, the Ryan Reaves, Tomas Nosek, and Will Carrier line from the Vegas Golden Knights grades out the best. Followed closely by the Koivu line from the Minnesota Wild and Bonino line from the Nashville Predators.

Up next, we’ll explore the defensive side of the game.

Again, probably to no surprise, the LOG line grades out well defensively. In fact, it checks out that they are one of the best shot suppression lines in the league, not just compared to the other fourth lines.

As I mentioned before, the various lines were given different roles on each team. So, I wanted to look at how they were deployed against their offensive and defensive impacts to get an idea of which lines performed well while taking their usage into account.

Again, we’ll start with the offense.

The LOG line was one of the heavier defensively deployed fourth lines in the NHL. They had an offensive zone start rate of 35%. When you take that into account, it’s not bad that they’re essentially average in offensive impact in shot quality at 5 on 5. Therefore, we can safely assume that the LOG line was an average offensive trio compared to other fourth lines in the NHL.

This chart above solidifies that the LOG line executed what they were asked to do and did it very well. They were deployed as a shot suppression line to shut down the opponent and some nights the best line of the other team.

They did it so well that two of the players on that line finished in the top 30 in even-strength defense in Evolving Hockey’s goals above replacement (GAR) model among forwards to play at least 300 minutes this season. Larsson ranked ninth and Okposo was tied for 30th.

Conclusion

We can safely make a few assumptions based on the data that we’ve gone through. The LOG line was not the best fourth line in this analysis. That distinction probably belongs to the Bonino or Koivu line. However, we can conclude that they were in at least in the top 10 of the fourth lines in the league and perhaps higher.

They were average in offensive output, but that isn’t what they were asked to do. Their objective was to shut down the opponent defensively and that’s exactly what they did at a high level. Any offense they provided beyond that was a bonus.

Larsson even gave the Sabres more outside of being a fourth-line winger when called upon. His line with Jeff Skinner and Conor Sheary was one of the best the Sabres put together. It was a shame that they only got to play 54 minutes together. They created a lot of quality offense and continued to shut down the opponent defensively.

It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Larsson and Girgensons in the offseason. Both are set to become unrestricted free agents. Do they bring both, one of them, or neither back for next season? In my opinion, Larsson should be re-signed without hesitation.