On Monday it became official that Lawrence Pilut will be heading to the KHL next season. He signed a two-year deal with Traktor Chelyabinsk. He leaves the Buffalo Sabres after only playing 46 games in the NHL.

The point of this piece isn’t going to be to point the finger at who is to blame for this or dive into the nuance of why Pilut bolted from the KHL. Instead, I’m going to review the player that the club is losing and how it’ll impact them moving forward.

Video Review

We’ll start things off with the video portion of our journey. I went back and watched every shift Pilut had in four games. Those four games were against the St. Louis Blues, Vegas Golden Knights, Detroit Red Wings, and Dallas Stars. The 24-year-old played 13 games this season, so in an ideal situation you’d like to look at more than 30% of his games, but these were the only games I had full access to.

One of the areas of the game that often went unnoticed was his aggressiveness to hold the blue line in the offensive zone. He would often pinch and put pressure on the opposing winger on the wall when the puck arrived. In most cases, this forced a turnover and the Sabres to maintain offensive possession. You’ll see an example of this against the Blues in the video below.

In this play his pinch along the wall allows the Sabres to keep the puck in the zone and directly leads to a high-quality scoring opportunity for Sam Reinhart. Below is another instance of this type of play against the Blues again where he comes flying in to hold the zone at the bottom of the screen. The Sabres maintained possession in the zone for 25 seconds after this.

One of the big knocks on Pilut is that he’s easily removed from the puck and weak along the walls because of his size. The play below is a perfect example of this type of situation that does happen from time to time during games.

He struggled with players of size more often during his first season with the Sabres, but it looked like something that he improved upon in year two. He was better at distributing the puck under pressure and handled himself better on the walls. You’ll see him win a 50/50 puck battle against Ryan Reaves below.

Here’s another example of winning a battle with Max Pacioretty that resulted in the puck clearing the zone.

Pilut wasn’t afraid to go into the corners and battled hard against forwards in front of the net. He didn’t always win those puck battles but this knock is something that is overplayed because of his size and wasn’t a problem in year two.

The Swedish defender excelled at moving the puck. He had good vision and was a solid player at exiting the zone with possession by carrying puck out or exit assists.

Numbers

Speaking of his transition ability, this is when we’ll start to move into the numbers portion of this breakdown. Corey Sznajder’s tracking data didn’t have anything on this season for Pilut at this point, but we do have some data from the 2018-19 season to validate what we’re watching.

As you can see above in CJ Turtoro’s three-zone tool using Corey’s data, he graded out very well in zone exits. You also can see that his shot assists were impactful on the offensive side of the game when he was on the ice.

In his first season, Pilut scored at a 15 points per 82 games pace in 33 games, and in year two he didn’t register a point in 13 games. He was never going to be that productive of a player offensively in the NHL, but there are some reasons that we didn’t see any offense this past season.

The first reason is that his on-ice shooting percentage at 5 on 5 (4.69%) was the lowest of any defenseman to play for the Sabres this season. Overall he ended the season with a .963 PDO, which indicates he had some poor luck this year.

He also saw a change in his usage under Ralph Krueger. Under Phil Housely, he was still deployed in more defensive zone situations with a 44% offensive-zone starts (oZs), but Krueger kicked that up a notch. This year he was placed in far more defensive zone situations with only a 32.69% oZs, according to Natural Stat Trick. That was the heaviest defensive zone deployment for any defenseman on the roster to play at least 100 minutes for the Sabres.

In fact, in only three of his 13 games, Pilut had over 37% offensive zone starts this year. In six of his games, he had zero offensive zone starts in the entire game. That doesn’t put a player in a good position to provide much offensively.

It appears as though that Krueger wanted to use Pilut as a defensive defenseman, which makes sense with his ability to exit the zone with such success. His defensive ability was the strong part of his game as you’ll see below in Micah McCurdy’s isolated impact chart.

The interesting thing to note is that he graded out average in impact on scoring, which is good considering how Micah’s model favors forwards over defensemen in offensive impact.

They asked him to play the role of a shot suppression defender this season and he did just what they asked. According to Evolving Hockey, he was the best defenseman on the team in on-ice shot quality against (xGA/60) with a 1.80 rating at 5 on 5. That was good enough for the fifth-best xGA/60 among all defenseman in the NHL to play at least 150 minutes.

If you want to widen the sample size, over the last two years he was 17th among all defenders to play at least 300 minutes in xGA/60 and 37th in shot attempts against (CA/60). Essentially making him one of the better shot suppression defenders in the league during his time in the NHL.

It also should be noted that Pilut had the best numbers on the penalty kill this past season. He led all defensemen in unblocked shot attempts against (FF/60) and shot quality against, according to Evolving Hockey.

Conclusion

The sample size for all of this data is relatively small and it could change if he played more games consistently. At the end of the day, the Sabres are not losing a top-pair defenseman in Pilut. His ceiling was a second-pair defenseman that was strong in his end of the ice.

Having said that, it’s never good to have a 24-year-old cost-controlled asset get away for nothing. They can maintain his rights for the next three years, but his trade value is gone at this point.

They lose a strong defensive defender that was good at moving the puck and could provide some offensive impacts at times beyond just points.

To end on a good note, the Sabres do have a similar player on the left side that can come in and possibly fill the spot that was Pilut was going play in Jacob Bryson. He’s another undersized defenseman that moves the puck well and can provide some offense. Although he may not be as good as Pilut defensively, he is an overall promising prospect.

Data via Hockeyviz.com, Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, and Corey Sznajder