What Bowen Byram Brings to the Sabres
Surprising news came out of Sabreland this Wednesday with Casey Mittelstadt being dealt to the Colorado Avalanche for defenseman Bowen Byram. Mittelstadt was set to become a restricted free agent this summer with two years of team control remaining.
So there was no real urgent reason to move Mittelstadt at the trade deadline, but where there is smoke there is fire. With no contract extension in place (or any real contract extension talks for that matter), the Sabres decided to hop on a 1-for-1 trade for Bowen Byram.
It was always clear that if the Sabres were to move on from Casey Mittelstadt, it would have to be for another NHL piece. He was not a player that was going to be moved for a bag of tricks with where Buffalo is at in their rebuild.
Players like Bowen Byram typically aren’t involved in trades like this. He was the 2019 4th overall pick, he’s a great skater with puck skills, was a key piece in the Avalanche’s Stanley Cup win in 2022. However, he has been having a down year (or two) in the NHL and has a somewhat brutal concussion history for a 22 year old.
But you’re simply not acquiring a young player with Byram’s skillset and pedigree unless they come with a few warts. It makes this trade inherently risky: trading a sure-thing NHL center who has been playing reliable hockey for a young gun defenseman who has played great NHL hockey but is looking to bounce back.
We’ve already seen some of that great upside with Byram in his Sabres debut, he ripped this goal just 5 minutes into his blue and gold career:
Bowen Byram then went on to complete this nice little give-and-go play with Owen Power to pick up a primary assist and his second point of the night:
In evaluating any NHL trades, I never liked the black and white approach of naming a winner and loser just 72 hours after a trade. There are too many future unknowns and the answer to this question will change by the day.
So let us zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture. Let us take a look at some of the potential upside and downside of the Mittelstadt-Byram trade:
The Upside
The Inverted Offense
The Buffalo Sabres love flexing their muscles when showing off their two 1st overall pick defensemen in the offensive zone. They like having their defenseman come down the flanks as options while the forwards cover for them:
This system works great for players like Rasmus Dahlin and Owen Power. Two players who have a natural offensive inclination to their game. Dahlin possessing strong finishing ability for a defenseman while Power’s shot continues to improve.
The rest of their defense corps, well, they really don’t have that offensive element to their game. Jacob Bryson, Connor Clifton, and Ryan Johnson are unafraid to step up in the offensive zone but lack that final step. Mattias Samuelsson and Henri Jokiharju can step up but play a more simple game.
Basically, the inverted offense works better when you have defenseman that can score/playmake and forwards who can defend.
Bowen Byram checks off a lot of boxes here: he steps up in the offensive zone, he can create, and he can finish:
Byram had 10 goals in 42 games for the Avalanche last season and has 9 goals in 56 games for the Avalanche/Sabres so far this season.
Byram is also putting up these goal numbers while not being much of volume shooter either. He has just been real good at capitalizing on his chances. So he’s a real nice fit in Buffalo if they continue to pursue this inverted offense.
Talent Bet
From a pure talent standpoint, Bowen Byram has a toolset that surpasses Casey Mittelstadt’s in a variety of ways.
While Casey Mittelstadt has certainly carved out an effective role for himself at the NHL level, he does so in a more cerebral way. His defensive game is more about dictating space rather than being overly aggressive on the forecheck.
His offensive game is relies more upon small area skill and playmaking for his teammates rather than an in-your-face, game-controlling style of play. He is great at taking over his game on his terms, but lacks the dynamic ability to be able to control the game at every stage.
Just loosely watching an NHL game with Bowen Byram playing in it and you will almost immediately notice the elite skating defenseman. I feel like Colorado Avalanche fans may be a bit jaded when watching elite skaters with their roster, but Byram has that electric skating ability.
#4 is just a fun player to watch out there and just looks comfortable on his feet:
It’s always funny talking about Bowen Byram too because he’s a young player who has already climbed hockey’s Mount Everest: winning a Stanley Cup. And as a 21-year-old defenseman he played a pretty sizable role in that Cup run as well.
Bowen Byram had the third most TOI of any Colorado skater during the Stanley Cup Finals against Tampa Bay and had an incredible 67.9 xGF% at 5v5 according to Evolving-Hockey. The Avalanche outscored the Lightning 5-2 at 5v5 when Byram was on the ice in that series.
It feels weird talking about what a 22-year-old player “once was” but if anything it shows what he can still become if he remains injury free. He is just 3 months older than Jack Quinn and a month older than Ryan Johnson. The guy still has a decent bit of runway left in his development.
Prospect Pool Coverage
Buffalo Sabres fans are probably used to moving on from a good hockey player, struggling for years trying replace that player, and then once they finally replace that player another part of the team goes into the gutter. It is a brutal and endless cycle.
After the Sabres moved on from Ryan O’Reilly in 2018, they had a tough time trying to fill in the 2C role. Just a bunch of prospects who were not quite ready, some horrific free agent signings, and you get the point.
The Sabres prospect pool at forward is deep right now. Almost too deep. So they have the luxury of moving on from paying a forward if they chose to do so.
The combination of quantity and quality of prospects means that somebody will eventually back-fill the open forward roles and they should be able to skate by with a little short-term offseason patchwork in the meantime.
If the free agent market isn’t working in the Sabres favor, they have the assets to make a move via trade. Basically, they have the flexibility to make an upside bet that doesn’t sink the future of the franchise.
If Bowen Byram doesn’t pan out, they still have two young 1st overall pick defensemen on the blueline. The forward group won’t be devastated by moving Casey Mittelstadt with Noah Östlund, Matthew Savoie, Jiri Kulich, and Isak Rosén not being that far out. They have a healthier balance of assets than the 2018 Sabres.
The Downside
Concussion History
Unfortunately, Bowen Byram has suffered from numerous concussions in his short NHL career thus far. Three concussions to be exact.
In this article from the Denver Gazette from February 2023, there is an excerpt where Byram talks about his struggles from his concussions:
“It was tough for me because I felt like that for so long that I didn’t know what it was like to feel normal, you know?” Byram said Tuesday from the Avalanche dressing room inside the team’s practice facility. “It’s hard to decipher through what you’re feeling. … You could miss four months like I did. Or you could miss three days.”
Definitely unfortunate when anyone has to go through something like that, but Byram has bounced back health-wise and is back to feeling normal. But the tricky thing with concussions is that they aren’t exactly manageable like a shoulder injury or knee injury. There is major gray area in terms of recovery and risk of re-injury.
So from a purely hockey perspective, there is definitely great risk in trading for a young player who has struggled with concussions as much as Byram has before his 23rd birthday.
Results Bet
I’ve already talked about how the Sabres may have the slight edge over the Avalanche in terms of the talent bet portion of this trade. Bowen Byram has a ceiling that very few defense prospects can touch.
If you are on Twitter/X around the NHL Trade Deadline, your feed is probably filled with those red and blue charts with percentages.
You have probably seen this JFresh/TopDownHockey chart for Casey Mittelstadt:
And then this chart for Bowen Byram:
Some may think, “What did the Sabres just do?!”
This is one area where the Avalanche got the advantage in this trade. They got the more sure thing in Casey Mittelstadt. He is a player who may be lacking in dynamic ability, pace, and physical attributes, but has found ways to make his game work.
Mittelstadt’s playmaking, awareness, and small area puck skills will translate to almost any team and system. You know the type of player you are getting with Mittelstadt and you know the ceiling that comes with it. He has that solid two-way impact.
Bowen Byram has the more electric skillset and has had a 2021/22 season where he was pretty impressive in both the regular season and playoffs. But the big picture impacts on both the offensive and defensive side of the puck have been poor the past two seasons.
In the 2022/23 season, Byram had bad overall impacts but still had solid tracked microstats in Corey Sznajder’s tracked data. So maybe he was a player whose impacts were poor because of things that were out of his control and easily reversible:
But then in 2023/24, his impacts were even worse and his tracked microstats also took a nosedive:
So it’s somewhat risky hoping for a Byram bounceback season. There are a bunch of theories of why his game has fallen off in Colorado: limited opportunity, playing on his off-hand side, concussion recovery, poor forward depth, etc.
We will see which one, if any, of these theories turn out to be true.
The 2024/25 Season
I think a lot of the risk with this trade falls in the very near short-term. More specifically, the 2024/25 NHL season.
Casey Mittelstadt played a sizable role for the Sabres this season. He was the Sabres leader in points at the time of his departure. He even led the Sabres forwards in ice time at points of this season, never being lower than 4th in TOI:
Casey Mittelstadt also had the second best defensive impacts on the Sabres by most metrics, only behind Zemgus Girgensons, so he was one of their more reliable two-way centers:
The Sabres gave all three of their top centers (Tage Thompson, Dylan Cozens, Casey Mittelstadt) pretty similar usage last season. They did not really have a center in their top nine that they used as a defensive matchup type of player.
Mittelstadt was the most capable of that role and provided so much versatility down the middle. He was great coverage when injuries in the top six came up. Without him, things are a bit barren. We saw the Sabres center situation last night with Tage Thompson out and it was ugly.
I don’t think any Sabres prospect comfortably projects to an NHL center role next season (certainly not a two-way matchup one), so a middle six two-way center will be a huge item added to Kevyn Adams summer shopping list. That’s not always an easy and cheap role to fill in just a few months.
Not to mention, they are probably also looking at another two to three depth forward roles that also need to be filled with some of the other looming departures.
So there’s a lot banking on proper depth forwards being available for GM Kevyn Adams this offseason and the Buffalo market is certainly not an easy sell right now.
There’s not much the Sabres can do in one offseason to comfortably project themselves into a playoff spot, but an inefficient offseason with heavy reliance on bounce-back seasons and prospects could very easily lead to some firings.
Conclusion
I think this is just a solid hockey trade. The Sabres give up more on the results side of things while the Avalanche give up more on the talent side of things.
I don’t think there is much long-term risk with this trade with the great quality and quantity of prospects the Sabres have coming up through the system. Most of the risk lies in the 2024/25 season, I think building for that season gets more difficult without Casey Mittelstadt.
This trade punches a hole through both the ceiling and floor for the Buffalo Sabres next season. I think the ceiling and floor will both gradually rise with time as the forward prospects eventually breakthrough this lineup.
Overall, I understand the move. Risky, but I don’t mind risky if it involves a talent like Bowen Byram. I guess only time will tell how this trade works out for both sides.