The 2021 season for the Buffalo Sabres has been a wild one and we’re only 14 games through. They’re going through some outrageous poor shooting luck as a team and had a Covid-19 outbreak mixed in the middle of it all.

Now, Jeff Skinner may be a healthy scratch. We won’t know until later tonight if Ralph Krueger was bluffing on his practice lines and comments after. As of now, the signs point to Skinner sitting in the press box tonight when the Sabres visit the New York Islanders.

This is truly an outrageous situation to try to parse out. The obvious thing here is we have a $9 million winger that has zero goals this season and only one point in 14 games. That’s not ideal. It’s important to say before getting into anything else that he needs to score some goals at some point. Regardless of how he’s impacting the game, the puck needs to get into the net.

Shooting Luck

The good news is that the numbers tell us that he should start to see a positive regression here soon. Skinner has struggled for the better part of two years. However, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Skinner still led the Sabres in 5 on 5 goals per 60 minutes last season. According to Evolving Hockey, his 1.06 goals per 60 minutes at 5 on 5 was the fourth-highest rate of 5 on 5 scoring in his career.

Where the goals dried up was on the power play. He had no goals with the man advantage for the first time in his career and played his sixth-lowest time on ice per game on the power play last season. For what it’s worth, this season has been a career-low in power play ice time, but that was expected going into this season with the roster additions.

I’m saying all this to make the point that Skinner is paid to score at 5 on 5. While he hasn’t done it this season, he did continue to do it at a decent rate last year.

This season is just getting out of hand. In Moneypuck’s model, he is tied for 17th in the NHL in individual shot quality (ixG) per 60 minutes. What that means is that he’s still getting quality scoring chances. I’ve long maintained that if he continues to keep that up I won’t worry about his production level.

Since he has no goals and is generating chances at a good level, he leads the league I guess you could say, shooting three goals below expected at 5 on 5 according to Moneypuck. That data is saying that based on his shot quality, he should have at least three goals this season. Another sign that this is going to turn at some point.

What is His Role?

Remember this is a player that has gone from the first line to playing career-low minutes at 5 on 5 this season (11:56 per game), on a line with two players that are not known to generate offense, and is at times deployed in defensive roles.

This brings me to my main question of what does Krueger want from Skinner? He talked about following “principles” back in training camp. One would assume he was referring to his defensive game. The twist of irony here is that he may be having the best defensive season of his career by the numbers.

In Evolving Hockey’s RAPM model, he ranks 10th in the league among forwards in shot quality against per 60 minutes.

Micah McCurdy backed this up in a tweet yesterday with data from his model.

Skinner is Krueger’s most-trusted forward for combined offensive-and-defensive leverage. This is real weird. pic.twitter.com/1xpEAHhDxs

— Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) February 21, 2021

Basically, this is saying while on one hand, Krueger says he doesn’t trust Skinner at both ends of the ice, he’s deploying him as he does. So again, what’s his role supposed to be?

Krueger is even getting good results out of Skinner’s line with Riley Sheahan and Curtis Lazar. They’ve been the most consistent line in the numbers behind Eichel’s line. They went into the games last night ranked 27th in the league shot quality share (minimum 75 minutes), 14th in shot quality against, and 14th in actual goals against.

He’s deploying them as a checking line that he wants to control both ends of the ice and those are the results he’s getting. Keeping that line together allows the Sabres to play three lines deep with the Eric Staal’s line is going.

It should be mentioned that any argument about playing on the top line with Eichel isn’t exactly a relevant topic in all of this. I’m not going into great detail, but he’s playing just fine away from Eichel.

It’s not so much the scoring for me that is confusing because it should turn around. It’s what the head coach truly expects because he’s getting the results he’s asking for based on deployment in terms of on-ice impact.

At the end of the day, for me, this comes down to a box score stats versus on-ice impact debate. The scoring isn’t there, but everything else is. Including his ability to draw penalties at 5 on 5. He’s the best on the team and 19th in the entire league in penalties drawn per 60 minutes. That’s important because the Sabres can really only score consistently on the power play.

Why would you take your best player out in creating those chances for you? Especially against the Islanders where scoring will be at a premium.

We’ll see what Krueger ends up doing tonight. Outside of him having no goals, nothing else adds up to Skinner sitting out a game. It’s not like he’s the only one on this team sitting with no goals or struggling to put the puck in the net.

Data via: Evolving Hockey, Moneypuck, and Hockeyviz.com

Photo Credit: Photo by Len Redkoles/NHLI via Getty Images