I was kind of critical of Jaroslav Spacek when he was here because while I appreciated his offensive talent, he wasn’t as steady in the Sabres zone as most fans thought he was. One thing he did well though, was play the point on the powerplay. How many times did we see Spacek get the puck to the net and then Vanek would score on the rebound with his swing and shoot move? The loss of Kotalik and Spacek has been felt on the powerplay which is ranked 19th in the league down from a unit ranked 7th by the end of last year.
That only magnifies the scoring struggles this team has had on even-strength. A lot of things have been said about the top-six forwards on this team. When I watch the forwards on the Sabres play, I’ve gotten into the pattern of evaluating them based on their ability to create opportunities for themselves and for others and their ability to finish those scoring opportunities. Obviously, that’s pretty subjective. I’m not going to break down specific players right now. We’ve heard it all before.
I found this website called Puck Prospectus the other day. Basically they take common and available statistics, plug them into fancy formulas, and use the results to compare the performance of players. I usually don’t put much stock into evaluating players based on complicated formulas but one in particular jumped out at me. Puck Prospectus contends that the quality of a top-six forward can be determined based on the number of points he scores on even-strength per 60-minutes of ice time played while at even-strength. They believe the threshold between forwards considered scorers and checkers is 1.7 points per 60 minutes played. Elite level scorers usually score at a rate of about 3 points per 60-minutes played while quality scorers usually score between 2 and 3. That seems reasonable enough to me.
Naturally I wanted to see how the Sabres stacked up in that system against league averages. I calculated every player on the team, including defensemen because I was curious, so long as they played more than 15 games. Here are the results (through 12/13), they’re not very surprising.
It would appear the Sabres have only three forwards that are statistically considered top-six scorers by league standards: Jason Pominville, Derek Roy, and Thomas Vanek. Then you have Jochen Hecht who gets more playing time on even-strength than any other forward besides Derek Roy but whose production suggests he should probably be on the 4th line. I’m willing to concede that he hasn’t looked as bad this year as he did last year, for the most. But he is clearly a very inefficient scorer taking up a lot of ice time on a team that struggles to score goals. Draw your own conclusions from that.
I was going to expand on this a little more but frankly I’m tired of talking about the scorers on this team. It is a big deal though because there are going to be games where the defensemen and checkers don’t find the back of the net and we need the scorers to be a more reliable group. They’re not getting it done on the powerplay or on even-strength. Now we have some clear data to confirm our suspicion that some players on this team really do in fact severely under-produce.