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Linus Weissbach has put together an impressive training camp performance

by Chad DeDominicis - 0

Linus Weissbach is having one of the strongest camps of any player on the Buffalo Sabres roster. Going into tonight’s game against the Columbus Blue Jackets, it looks as though Wessibach will get another chance to impress the coaching staff.

The 23-year-old winger is a seventh-round pick of the Sabres from the 2017 NHL Draft. He played four years of college hockey at the University of Wisconsin under Don Granato’s brother, Tony. Weissbach had an up and down four years with the Badgers and made it difficult to pinpoint his potential at the pro level.

He played his senior year on a line with the Hobey Baker winner and Montreal Canadiens prospect Cole Caufield. That helped boost him to a career-high 12 goals and 41 points in 31 games. It was good to see him bounce back after a disappointing junior season playing with two high-end prospects in Caufield and Alex Turcotte.

Pleasant Surprise

I didn’t have a lot of expectations for the Swedish-born forward moving to the pros. I saw him as a fringe NHL player at his ceiling because of the inconsistency at the college level. That may still be the case, but he has shown the potential to be more than that in his first training camp with the club.

It became evident back in the Prospects Challenge how he was always around the puck in the offensive zone. He had a handful of breakaways and high-quality scoring opportunities in the two games from that tournament. Weissbach carried that right into the preseason and continued to pick up opportunities.

Through three games, Weissbach leads the Sabres in individual shot attempts per 60 minutes at 5 on 5, according to Natural Stat Trick. In two games he has a total of eight shot attempts and a total individual expected goal rating of 0.44, which is also the highest on the team.

The impressive part for me is how Weissbach has continually been able to get to quality shooting areas. He’s second on the team in individual shot quality per 60 minutes. Doing the math on his shot attempts and total individual shot quality in NST’s model, his quality per shot rating puts him tied for seventh among all forwards to play in the preseason.

We’re dealing with extremely small sample sizes here in the chaos of preseason hockey. As such, we need to be careful making concrete assumptions based on the data. The good news for Weissbach is we have the video to back up the numbers on his ability to get quality scoring areas.

His one goal in the reason came when the Sabres had the goalie pulled, but he was at the side of the net where he spent most of the game when he was on the ice. Weissbach has good enough speed to take advantage of small windows to get to pucks or create a scoring opportunity for himself. That’s something that I underrated in his game coming out of Wisconsin. Some players just have a knack for being around the puck and at this point, he seems like one of those players.

NHL Ready?

While Weissbach is making a legitimate push for the roster I’m still not sure he’s ready to step into the NHL at this point. Tonight will be a good measuring stick against the mostly NHL roster that the Blue Jackets are sending to Buffalo.

One of the things that I still question that he has yet to answer is if he has the finishing ability to consistently beat pro goaltending. This wasn’t one of his strong areas in college and if we’re being honest it has continued to be an issue at the pro level. It’s good that he’s getting to the good shooting areas on the ice, but he’s yet to beat a pro goaltender clean. His one goal was on an open net off of a rebound.

It may be wise to allow Weissbach to work on this in the AHL playing in a role where he’ll be relied upon as a scoring threat.

The other concern is his play outside of the offensive zone. He disappears from the game in the neutral zone and the defensive zone. There have been some issues with defensive zone turnovers by the forwards on the roster through the first three preseason games and Weissbach falls into that group.

With the current state of the Sabres goaltending, they have to try to be as clean as possible. They can’t afford to have a player still struggling with the speed at the pro level and turning the puck over in their zone. There’s an adjustment for players coming into the pro game on getting familiar with the pace of the game. I don’t see a need to force Weissbach into a situation where he needs to make this adjustment under fire.

At the end of the day, my opinion is that the best approach for his development is to allow him to start the season with the Rochester Amerks. There is still a lot of his game that needs to be rounded out and that’s not unexpected. He has shown that he may be closer to NHL-ready than most of us have anticipated. At the very least he could have pushed himself to the top of the pecking order of AHL call-ups with this strong training camp performance.

Data via: Natural Stat Trick

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