For the 14th straight season, the
Buffalo Sabres do not look like a playoff team.
The Sabres are 5-7-1 to start the season, look middling at five-on-five and disastrous on special teams with the league’s 31st-best power play and 24th-best penalty kill. Just a month into the season, their chances of ending a lengthy playoff drought already look dim at just 14 percent.
Is there any hope for Buffalo to turn things around?
Maybe — but it all hinges on the team’s second line figuring it out, and that’s been an extreme uphill battle so far.
The selling point for the Sabres going into the year was pretty simple.
Tage Thompson and
Dylan Cozens would bounce back to anchor a decent top six with a healthy
Jack Quinn, while the acquisition of
Ryan McLeod and
Jason Zucker would form the basis of a strong shutdown line, soaking up tough minutes. Buffalo has seen strong results on two of those fronts — and an absolute disaster on the other. Cozens and Quinn have looked downright unplayable to start, and that’s been enough to sink the Sabres early. (Unused cap space on the opposite wing hasn’t helped either, by the way).
Together the duo has been on the ice for just 39 percent of expected goals and have been outscored 5-3. Considering Cozens’ zone time ratio is right around 50 percent (that’s actually up from last year), there’s a massive lack of efficiency with the puck, mostly on offense where both players’ ability to generate chances is
way down. The duo is not producing at all and it’s because they haven’t been able to control the game to any meaningful degree. Just the opposite: Without either on the ice, the Sabres are up 24-17 on the year with 52 percent of expected goals. That’s a massive difference.
Any hope for Cozens and Quinn stems from the prior knowledge that this is a duo that’s worked well in the past. Over the past two seasons, the pair has earned 54 percent of expected goals and both Cozens and Quinn have flashed strong offensive ability. In 2022-23 Cozens scored 2.46 points per 60 at five-on-five while Quinn was at 2.93 last season. That kind of production shouldn’t just evaporate, especially not at the age of 23. That’s the age when both players — both of whom were top-10 picks — should start dominating. While both have offered glimpses of that promise in the past, this season has been anything but.
Right now, the duo is not working. When two guys aren’t going, having them together only exacerbates the issue. The solution should be obvious: split them up.
The challenge there is risking disruption on the two lines that are working, but at a certain point it’s time for a change and it feels like Buffalo has reached that point. The Sabres need to get Cozens and Quinn going and the best bet for that might be pairing them with two players that are already going:
JJ Peterka and Thompson.
Those are Buffalo’s two top drivers right now — not Quinn and Cozens — and the team’s best bet is probably having each player lead their own line. In a
very small sample, Cozens has looked a lot better with Peterka this year, while Quinn has looked great with Thompson. That flip could be the answer.
After a 5-7-1 start, the odds aren’t on Buffalo’s side. But the answers are on the team’s roster and in the room — it’s on the Sabres to figure out how to get the most of what they have.
16 stats
1. Brand new Tage
At the very least for Buffalo, Thompson looks not just like himself again, but an even stronger version. Through the team’s first 13 games he’s scoring like he did in his breakthrough 2022-23 season with eight goals and 15 points — that’s a 50-goal, 94-point pace. But perhaps more important is that he’s not cheating without the puck to make it happen.
One of the major criticisms of Thompson’s game coming off his breakout season was that he was giving a lot back defensively. In 2022-23 the Sabres allowed 3.3 expected goals against per 60 with Thompson on the ice, 0.32 more than his teammates. And it showed up on the scoresheet too. Thompson made some big under-the-radar strides to clean that up last season, but it came at a great expense to his offense.
The question this year was whether Thompson could put it all together and so far, so good. He’s been the best of both worlds. The Sabres are absolutely dominating their minutes at five-on-five with Thompson on the ice to the tune of 59 percent of expected goals and a 13-6 goal margin. Relative to teammates he’s even better offensively than he was in 2022-23 and that’s in part because of how much stronger he looks without the puck. This year the Sabres are giving up just 2.38 expected goals against per 60 with Thompson on the ice, 0.21 less than his teammates. By Defensive Rating, Thompson has been the team’s best defensive forward.
Thompson is turning into a complete player playing at a franchise level. The Sabres can’t waste that effort.
