There hasn’t been a lot of excitement outside of day one of the NHL Draft for the Buffalo Sabres. Overall the roster doesn’t look spectacular. It’s no secret that the Sabres are rebuilding once again and will likely find themselves at the bottom of the standings this upcoming season.

If there is one area that you can point to on this roster that Kevyn Adams did improve, it was their defense group. By no means did they move into the top tier of NHL defenders, but they should get better on-ice performance that position group this upcoming season.

Comparison

Let’s start by recapping the moves that Adams made on his blue line this offseason. I’ll focus on the NHL-level changes so we don’t get too into the weeds here.

Departures

• Rasmus Ristolainen
• Jake McCabe
• Matt Irwin
• Brandon Montour (trade deadline)

Additions

• Mark Pysyk
• Will Butcher
• Robert Hagg

I know Brandon Montour was moved at the deadline, but he should still be included in this discussion. Montour played in 38 of their 56 games last season.

I used Evolving Hockey’s expected goals above replacement model to go through this analysis and look at different angles of this comparison. The twins’ xGAR model is better at predicting the future performance of a player.

Let’s start by taking the top seven defensemen from last season and comparing them to the projected top seven for this upcoming season.

As you can see above, the projected 2021-22 defense group comes out with a higher xSPAR (Standing Points Above Replacement) than last year. Now, there are some things that we need to account for in the numbers for the new projected blue line that we’ll get to later.

Next, I wanted to see if the difference was in defensive or offensive impact. Is the new group looking better because they have the ability to create offense or are they better defending? I looked at two aspects that make up the xGAR model in even-strength offense (xEVO) and even-strength defense (xEVD).

The red bars in the chart above reflect the defensive rating (xEVD) and the gray bar represents the offensive rating (xEVO) for these players. Defensively, the new crew comes out on top again with a combined 3.32 rating and last year’s group was a combined -2.38. Offensively, it’s a little closer, but 2021-22 projected top seven once again comes out higher. They had a combined xEVO rating of 12.9 versus an 8.7 from last season.

Contributing Factors

Now that the numbers are out on the table, we need to dive into a few contributing factors to bring this all together. The obvious thing you’ll notice is that the Sabres blue line simply improves with the subtractions and Rasmus Ristolainen and Brandon Montour. The departure of Jake McCabe should hurt the Sabres, but the other two were so bad that it puts the Sabres in the plus column still.

In reality, I could have just written down that the Sabres are better because Montour and Ristolainen are gone. That would have been sufficient enough. However, I decided to add a little more analysis than that.

On the flip side, we need to discuss Mark Pysyk’s numbers quickly. If you weren’t aware, he actually played a good amount of time at forward over the last few years. He’ll go back to playing his natural position of defense with the Sabres this season.

The reason I bring this up is that it could be inflating some of his numbers. In particular, his xEVO numbers. Forwards obviously get better scoring opportunities and have the ability to make a larger impact on offense than defensemen do (in most cases).

Due to this, I would say that in terms of the offensive impact that it’s a push between the two groups. I would still give the defensive aspect of this analysis to the 2021-22 defense.

Translating on the Ice

We’ve established that by the numbers, the Sabres improved their blue line over last year. It’ll be interesting to see if that translates on the ice. One of the main things that have caught my curiosity is that none of these players have had success or played a considerable amount of minutes against top-line opponents. I’m not looking to start another quality of competition debate on its importance but at the very least it should be accounted for in the small window of one season.

It’s presumed that Rasmus Dahlin will be used as the top defenseman on this team under Don Granato like he was at the end of last season. The Swedish defender saw an improvement in his on-ice shot quality for and against at 5 on 5. Improving from a 44% expected goal rate under Kreuger to 49% under Granato. The improvement under Granato is even more impressive when you consider the quality of teammate he put up these numbers with during the final stretch of the season. We’ll see if he can handle that deployment over a full season.

The player that may be the most interesting to watch is Will Butcher. He has had some good results in his past playing second-pair minutes, but things went off the rails last season. Anthony recently touched on how Butcher, along with Pysyk, were good moves for the Sabres.

I did some digging on Butcher and found some interesting results that we can attempt to make some assumptions on. He saw a drastic improvement in his quality of teammate last season with the New Jersey Devils compared to what he played with in 2019-20, according to Micah McCurdy’s model.

In most cases, this usually results in better performance for the player. That wasn’t the case for Butcher. His numbers were poor relative to his teammates and had a lot of struggles. Particularly on the offensive side of the ice in Micah’s model.

You can see above that his offensive game went in the tank and that his defense stayed in a similar spot compared to the 2019-20 season. This may be a one-season outlier with Butcher playing in a new system under Lindy Ruff. He found himself in Ruff’s doghouse early in the season and we know how that goes.

Perhaps a system that is friendly to generating offense under Granato will allow Butcher to improve his offensive game this season. At the end of the day, Butcher is probably a replacement-level defenseman like we saw in 2019-20. I understand that isn’t going to get you excited, but replacement level is better than the results the Sabres were getting on their second pair last season.

It’ll be fun to see how the Sabres blue line performs next season. There’s an exciting combination of youth and veterans that are looking to re-establish themselves in the league. In my opinion, it’s safe to say that the blue line is improved. It won’t be long until we find out how drastic of an improvement it’ll be.

Data via: Evolving Hockey and Hockeyviz.com

Photo Credit: Mike Stobe/NHLI via Getty Images