The Pale King
Go easy on those Mango Giapanes brother...
I dunno, he only played 37 games for them and he managed to outscore Sabres legend Taro Tsujimoto by two goals, so that's kind of impressive.
I jest; Taylor Hall's Buffalo stint is posterchild for this thread. Some fun stats from that miserable half-season: Hall scores a goal in his first game (a 6-4 loss to Washington). He'd score just one goal in the next 36 games before getting traded. He actually had a promising start in Buffalo, with 6 points in his first three games. That means he had just 11 in his next 34.
When he got traded to the Bruins mid-season, his first game as a Bruin was against the Sabres. That gave Hall the opportunity to match or pass his Buffalo goal total against them, in one game. That would have been an all-time hilarious stat but of course he ruins it and goes pointless instead. But Hall did play against the Sabres 4 more times, finishing the season with 5 points in 5 games (1 goal and 4 assists) against Buffalo. Roughly double his per-game production against the team that was paying him.
Speaking of paying him, Buffalo paid Hall $8 million dollars with a $1 million dollar signing bonus for him to shoot 2.3% for them. For reference, the lowest career shooting percentage in NHL history (I'm assuming with some sort of minimum games threshold) is Bert Marshall's* 1.5%. Hall's 2.3% would rank third lowest if he'd done that over his career. Hall's career SH% is 10.3. Hall's 2.3SH% was the lowest of any of the 26 Buffalo Sabres to score a goal that year.
Hall scored points in 5 Sabres wins over the course of his time there. He had zero goals in Buffalo wins.
Last bit of weirdness: Both of Hall's goals during his time in blue and gold were in road losses against goalies named Ilya (Sorokin and Samsonov). Basically, if you wanted to shut out Hall that year, start anyone not named Ilya and you were golden.
That's it for now. Far more effort than that absolute all-time trash tier half-season by Hall was worth but hopefully you got some amusement out of it.
*No shade on Bert Marshall, he stuck around for close to 1000 games and he wasn't there for his offence. He was a rugged stay-at-home type defenseman in the 60s and 70s.
Also not too sure what happened here. Not quite the Taylor Hall I remember...
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