Should Sabres fans be concerned?
What the film shows went wrong in the Sabres opening night loss.
The crowd at the Sabres home opener on Thursday night was electric at the start of the night. The arena was shaking when Tage Thompson, Rasmus Dahlin, and others were introduced. There was a beautiful tribute to the late Rick Jeanneret. There was hope not just for the future, but for this season.
A goal by Alexis Lafreniere just under 4 minutes into the game gave all of the momentum to the opponent.
The Rangers sat back and suffocated the Sabres while capitalizing on their mistakes.
Many are calling it the worst season opener performance by a Buffalo team against a New York team since four weeks ago.
The final score: Rangers 5, Sabres 1.
The Sabres were outshot 24 to 18 at 5v5, but things look worse when looking at expected goals. According to Evolving-Hockey’s model, the Sabres only registered 0.96 xG at 5v5 relative to the Rangers’ 2.58 xG.
How about we zoom back out to all situations and take a look at this shot heat map from Thursday night. That is a lot of danger the Rangers generated in front of the Sabres net (3 goals came from in close!) and virtually no net front danger for the Sabres:
The game of hockey can be random, chaotic, and unpredictable. However, if you win the battle of high danger shots (getting a lot for your team and preventing them for the other team) then you have an extremely good chance to win a hockey game. The Rangers not only won that battle, they won it by a lot.
So let’s take a look at why the Sabres lost in this fashion and what it means, if anything, for the team moving forward.
Aggressive and Suffocating
The New York Rangers have a new boss behind the bench this season in Peter Laviolette. He deployed an aggressive and suffocating forecheck against the Sabres in game #1.
The Rangers were not afraid to sit back in a 1-3-1 formation (a.k.a. the neutral zone trap) when the Sabres attempted to move the puck up ice. Sending the first forward in to aggressively pressure the puck mover then keeping a line of three players across the middle of the ice, creating a moving wall. It makes for some boring hockey, but it is effective against teams that rely on rush offense.
Here’s a clip of the 1-3-1 at work late in the game, there are several others clips like this one. If no solutions can be found, the puck is punted back to the opponent:
Even the Rangers first goal was set up from some 1-3-1 type vibes. The defenseman steps up to kill the play, Krebs has to try to fit a pass in tight to Okposo but Panarin (#10) cuts off space in the middle of the ice knowing he has coverage out wide. The puck is turned over and the rest is history:
The Rangers’ in-zone defense even had a bunch of trap doors that let the Sabres find space just for it to be quickly taken away. Patience becomes poison:
The Sabres were a very rush heavy offense last season. In fact, they posted the second most shots off the rush last season (only behind the New Jersey Devils) according to Corey Sznajder’s tracking data:
They ranked 21st in shots off the cycle/forecheck. A big proportion of their offense was generated through causing chaos on the rush, operating in space. The necessary space to execute a rush heavy offense is eaten up quickly in an aggressive 1-3-1, so a lot of teams will lean on their forecheck when faced with a neutral zone trap.
The issue is that the Sabres don’t really have a strong forechecking game. The forecheck shots they do get typically come off sustained offensive zone sequences that are kick-started by a clean zone entry. But that “dump in, win the puck, and have a plan” type of deal is something they struggle with.
Zach Benson: An NHLer
I don’t think it’s fair to place the blame on any one Sabres for Thursday’s loss. They largely played awful hockey as a five-man unit and only 4 of their 18 skaters posted an xGF% greater than 40%. So may as well highlight one of the players who played well and that player is 18-year-old Zach Benson.
Benson became the 2nd youngest Buffalo Sabre to ever lace them up; only behind Hockey Hall of Famer Pierre Turgeon. When people saw the Sabres draft a 5’10” and 170 lb forward with the 13th overall pick this summer, most probably thought that he is simply an outstanding offensive player with his 98 points in 60 WHL games.
Well Benson is a great offensive player, but he is unique in how he generates his offense. It’s not just through speed or puckhandling or shooting. It’s through his defense and positioning. That is just a wild thing to say about an 18-year-old prospect, especially one standing at under six feet tall.
Just check out this shift from #9 here. He plays with great patience and is always moving to open lanes to provide puck support. He takes a clever route on the weakside which could have been his first NHL goal, but Dahlin was being hounded by three Rangers and could not move the puck to him:
That was one of the few sustained offensive zone possessions of the game and it was largely created by the rookie’s hockey IQ.
I’m going to highlight a puck battle as well because I just love how Benson battles out there. Here he is going against Artemi Panarin, one of the NHL’s top forwards, as he just uses his leverage to force the play out of his team’s zone:
The 3rd period provided Benson with his real “welcome to the NHL” moment when the puck slid through his feet to Chris Kreider’s stick for a goal. Some real unluckiness mixed into that one:
Overall, the positives certainly outweighed the very few negatives for Benson this game. There’s a reason why he led the Sabres with a 64.4 xGF% at 5v5 this game. His work rate, puck routes, and overall off-the-puck game looks sharp at the pro level. I think he has a very good chance to stick in the NHL this season.
Long-Term Outlook
Does this game have any bearing on the future outlook of this team? Not really, it’s just 1/82nd of the regular season. Does this raise some red flags for the remainder of the season? Yeah, probably a little bit.
There were some key areas the Sabres needed to improve in to make a New Jersey Devils-like jump this season: add a forechecking element to complement their rush element, kill more zone entries, and limit breakdowns in the defensive zone.
Do any of these things seem improved from last season? No. In fact, some of these areas worsened. The Sabres got exploited by the Rangers “playoff” style neutral zone trap and aggressive forechecking. Plain and simple.
Here is what Don Granato had to say about the 1-3-1: “It’s not that we haven’t seen 1-3-1s. We see 1-3-1s all the time. It’s just we haven’t seen one in months and you’re getting back in the swing of things. They did a nice job clogging it up. I thought that was not our biggest challenge. Our biggest challenge was not pulling the trigger.”
“Any chances we had, there was a shot prior and it creates a random situation we can jump on. That pulls a team that wants to be in that defensive structure out of it. We didn’t do that enough tonight. That was probably the biggest contributor to our demise, I would say.”
The Sabres know how to play chaotic, structureless hockey but that typically comes when they possess the puck. They have to learn how to play that brand of hockey without the puck on their stick at all times.
There’s still many pages to be written in this team’s story. However, as a fringe playoff team, adjustments must be made quickly. The growing pains are still very much real, but how long will they last?