Following a lackluster slate of summer moves, fans of the Buffalo Sabres yearn for optimistic narratives. In terms of talent acquisition, it’s tough to say definitively that the roster is superior to 2023-24. In the front office, $8.5 million in unused salary cap assets continues to gather theoretical dust.  

Though none of the popular models have been released to date, we can reasonably surmise that the annual agglomeration of public standing point projections will not be kind to Buffalo. So, for what reason do fans have to be optimistic? Is there any tangible force to lean on?

Perhaps.

As we are all painfully aware, Don Granato was a lamentable optimizer, by almost every definition of the word. Poorly contrived forward lines, confounding skillset deployments, and maddening in-game management spelled his demise as the Sabres’ bench boss.

The question of coaching impacts is a convoluted one. Of course, coaches have an impact on wins and losses, but the extent to which they can tangibly impact a team is up for debate. For that reason, I became curious about Lindy Ruff’s past impressions, specifically in his first year as a given team’s new coach.

Ruff’s Past Inaugural Seasons

As we know, analytics didn’t exist when Ruff took over as the Sabres’ head coach during his first stint here, which began with the 1997-98 season. Still, there were two other instances in his coaching career where he took over a previously struggling team. The first came in 2013-14 with the Dallas Stars, and the next in 2020-21 with the New Jersey Devils.

In those instances, we do have underlying data to dissect. Going into this exercise, I had two primary points of interest. For starters, I wanted to see the extent to which Ruff impacted the performance of skaters who both played in his inaugural season and the season prior. Next, I wanted to see if certain player prototypes tended to experience more marked improvements (or perhaps the opposite) under Ruff.

Some of the results were what I expected. Others were less anticipated and somewhat in contrast to some previously established narratives about Ruff’s “system”, for lack of a better term.

Year-Over-Year Ruff Effects – Dallas Stars

Let’s go through this chronologically, shall we? In 2012, the Stars were coming off a year where they ranked 25^th in the NHL in team xGF rate, which was driven by their atrocious defensive impacts. In that lockout-shortened season, Dallas finished last in the Pacific division. It would have been worse if not for an outstanding season in net from Kari Lehtonen, who sported a 13.97 GSAx mark in just 36 games (good for fourth in the NHL).

Loui Eriksson was the only roster regular who held an xGF rate over 50% on the year. By every demonstrable metric, the Stars were a tire fire in need of serious changes. It would have been difficult for Ruff to avoid even a remote semblance of improvement, given the existing circumstances.

Fortunately, the 2013-14 improvements in his initial season behind the Dallas bench, were anything but marginal. Not surprising since he took over a bottom-five team in the league and led them to the playoffs just a year later.

One of the things the Stars had going for them was roster turnover. Of the 20 highest TOI players on the roster from 2012-13, only 12 of them returned to the club in 2013-14. That’s a significant shift of assets.

My primary interest was to hone in on those 12 regulars from the previous season and examine if they improved, where they improved, and to what extent. On the chart(s) below, the bars to the left (gold) represent the season before Ruff’s arrival, and the bars the the right (green) represent his initial season with his new team(s).

To my surprise, only one of the 12 returning players experienced a decline in their overall xGF rate (and it was an extremely modest reduction from a 41-year-old player to boot). Nearly every returning player showed marked improvement in the new system.

Young up-and-coming superstar, Jamie Benn finally came into his own, and an elder statesman in Erik Cole saw his career revitalized. The real story, however, is what lies in between.

We’ll start with the defense. There’s a narrative surrounding Ruff that insinuates that his system tends to hurt a team’s defensive impacts upon its introduction. Based on what I’m seeing here, I would argue the opposite took place in Dallas. In fact, of the five returning blueliners from the year prior, nearly all of them showed xGA improvements to go along with unanimous upticks in xGF/60.

As for the forwards, the idea that Ruff’s system brings offensive prosperity proved true as well. Only the then 41-year-old Ray Whitney saw an xGF/60 decline. Otherwise, every forward (and defenseman for that matter) on the team experienced improved offensive underlying.

We’ll circle back to Dallas in a bit, but the flyover view of Ruff’s year-over-year impacts on his individual players was outstanding. Again, an improvement of some sort was almost certain to take place, but the unanimity here is impressive.

Year-Over-Year Ruff Effects – New Jersey Devils

When I went to essentially perform the same research on Ruff’s first year in New Jersey, a disappointing realization hit me. The 2020-21 campaign was what is commonly referred to as the “COVID Season”, which involved a shortened slate of regular season games, as well as isolated divisional play. It’s a year that is largely assessed with a grain of salt by a lot of analyticians in hockey.

With that in mind, I was still interested to see the results. As a team, New Jersey was just as bad as the Stars were pre-Ruff, if not worse. The only thing they had going for them was an up-and-coming stable of youngsters in the system.

Comparatively speaking, the Stars’ average age of returning players when Ruff took over was over 29 years old. That’s a solidly veteran team. On the flip side, the Devils’ average age of returning players in Ruff’s first season was 25.38.

You would think that normal aging curves would account for some of the improvement in New Jersey’s case, and that assumption proved accurate. Jack Hughes, Pavel Zacha, Jesper Bratt, and Miles Wood all experience positive progressional growth.

Ruff’s introduction and the subsequent installation of a new system certainly didn’t hamper their development. In fact, for Wood and Zacha, it proved to be exactly what they needed to cement themselves as NHL regulars.

Here’s where things get interesting. While Ruff’s first season with Dallas resulted in major offensive improvements, the Devils’ offense remained rather stagnant in year one under the veteran coach. The impressive defensive uptick we saw in Dallas, however, was replicated, and then some in New Jersey.

So, for a second time, the narrative that Ruff’s system results in negative defensive trends is proven false, at least in his first season with a new club. That’s not to say that his teams boast high-end defensive acumen, because they generally don’t, but in his defense (pun intended) he does tend to take over and improve clubs that were previously atrocious on the back-end.

Show Me the Trends

Now we have a flyover view of how consistently rostered players tend to adjust to Ruff’s system. In general, the overwhelming majority of returning players produce superior underlying numbers in Ruff’s first season as their coach, versus the season prior.

For the Sabres, this is good news. They’re coming off a year where most of their top-end players produced lackluster results. If you’re looking for a coach with a penchant for kickstarting previously stagnant production, Ruff seems to be a good bet.

Now let’s sharpen our view a bit. My next endeavor was to take a sample of players who experienced the most dramatic xG deltas (whether that be good or bad) and examine if there were any prototype trends. Essentially, I wanted to get a gauge of what types of skaters tend to adjust most seamlessly into Ruff’s system.

I narrowed the field into four subcategories – Young Dynamic Forwards, Puck-Moving Defensemen, Speedy Bottom-Sixers, and Depth Defensemen. Three of these groups were representative of players who thrived in Ruff’s inaugural season with their given team. One group, however, struggled across the board, and I think I found the reason, which I’ll expand upon shortly.

Young Forwards

This category is a little tricky. I want to give Ruff credit for the continued progression of players like Hughes, Bratt, and Benn, but part of their growth, when he took over, had to do with the normal progression of high-pedigree talent. That said, not all of these players “hit” so to speak, so Ruff does deserve some credit.

Benn in particular is the example I like the most. Entering his age 24 season he still hadn’t popped. Then Ruff takes over, and he reaches stardom. The same goes for a player like Pavel Zacha. While he didn’t necessarily remain on a steady developmental path throughout Ruff’s tenure in New Jersey, his initial reception to the system was extremely positive.

This, in theory, bodes well for highly drafted young pros in the Sabres system like JJ Peterka, Jack Quinn, and Zach Benson, who continue to come into their own as NHLers.

Puck-Moving Defensemen

As previously explained, Ruff’s system results in initially improved defensive impacts. The defensemen are a bit of a mixed bag in this regard, but one style sticks as most receptive to Ruff’s system.

As Sabres fans from the mid-aughts can attest, puck-movers tend to thrive under Ruff. The Stars and Devils’ respective offensively-inclined defensemen were no exception. Just look at the improvements experienced by veteran assets like Sami Vatanen, Jordie Benn, Alex Goligoski, and Trevor Daley. All of them had either offensive or transitional chops.

Conversely, players like Brenden Dillon and some other stay-at-home fringe types (who we’ll touch on momentarily) either improved ever so slightly, or not at all, but not nearly to the same degree as the superior puck-movers.

This is good news for players like Owen Power and Bowen Byram. Both of them boast impressive acumen as puck-moving defensemen. Perhaps Ruff is the right coach to squeeze some use out of Henri Jokiharju as well who, at one point, was a proficient transitional blueliner before his development stalled.

Aggressive Forecheckers

This is the most interesting subsection, and perhaps directly pertains to how the Sabres approached the 2024 offseason. The most consistent trend I noticed in the data above was the vast xGF deltas experienced by the returning depth forwards. Specifically, those who bring a degree of speed and tenacity.

Miles Wood is a prime example. Albeit young, he was borderline useless before Ruff arrived in New Jersey. The same can be said for players like Vernon Fiddler, Ryan Garbutt, and even Cody Eakin (yeah, I said it) in Dallas. All three of them experienced massive xG upticks under Ruff.

With the introduction of Ryan McLeod, Nicolas Aube-Kubel, Beck Malenstyn, and Sam Lafferty (all of whom are hard-forechecking depth players with excellent skating ability), it will be interesting to see if this past trend is replicated. If so, their arrival could have a greater statistical impact than we realize.

Depth Defensemen

Now for the group that tends to struggle in Ruff’s first season. Of all the returning defensemen Ruff has coached in year one, only Connor Carrick, Matt Tennyson, and Will Butcher experienced significant downturns in their xGF rates. Aside from the fact that they’re all career third-pairing defenders, they hold another similarity.

In the year before Ruff’s arrival, Butcher, Tennyson, and Carrick averaged five-on-five TOI rates of 17.52, 12:08, and 14:25 respectively. The following year, those rates increased to 19:02, 14:30, and 18:40, respectively.

Those are some substantial increases in workload. It lends credence to the idea that Ruff’s penchant for balancing ice time among his defensemen has an adverse effect when third-pairing caliber players are asked to do too much.

Ultimately, a struggling third pair is nothing new in Buffalo. If that ends up being the only aspect of the skater corps that doesn’t experience a marked improvement next season (i.e. one that aligns with Ruff’s historical trends above), I think fans in Western New York would be okay with it.

Data via: Evolving Hockey and Hockeyviz

Photo Credit: Andy Marlin/NHLI via Getty Images