Victor Olofsson has the opportunity to make up for an oddly disappointing season and earn his next good deal.

To get ready for the upcoming Buffalo Sabres season, I’ll be previewing most of those involved in the eventual successes and failures by going through the alphabet using a different word each time – a revolutionary theme if there ever was one.

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Amend

It feels weird to say that a guy who scored 28 goals has a lot to make up for, but this is the position Victor Olofsson is in as we head into the 2023-2024 season.

Olofsson had a career-high in goals last season, perhaps an overdue correction from shortened seasons of the past, notably 2019-2020 when he scored at the same pace then (0.37 goals per game) as he did in 2022-2023. It was Olofsson’s third 20-goal campaign in four full NHL seasons, although it was his third-lowest point total (40).

For a guy whose specialty is lighting it up on the power play and making opposing teams pay dearly for committing illegal offenses with his shot that’s easily one of the 10-best in the league, never before did a nearly 30-goal season feel so disappointing.

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As a weapon on the power play, Olofsson is outstanding. But while the Sabres were fighting to make the playoffs during the final 10 games of the season, he was a healthy scratch for five straight games until they were officially eliminated from playoff contention in a 6-2 loss on the road in New Jersey in Game 80. Although he finished his season on a high personal note scoring in each of the final two games, those games also had zero stakes involved.

Every game will be high stakes for Buffalo this season after finishing one point behind Florida and two points out of the playoffs. The Sabres have never been closer to ending their postseason drought and hopes are sky-high.

Before the summer began all signs pointed to Olofsson not being part of the equation with trade speculation running rampant. After Jack Quinn ruptured his Achilles’ tendon in late-June, however, the opportunity for Olofsson to reclaim a role in the top-six forward group and be an offensive force on the power play. It’s going to take a change of mindset and a new focus for that to happen.

Something coach Don Granato said after the season in referring to what Olofsson needed to do to get back to the kind of game they needed from him stuck out:

“Our challenge is for him to look at ways to get inside; inside battle areas more for reasons of plus-minus, for reasons of keeping pucks alive in the offensive zone instead of backchecking,” Granato said. “So, there’s some things that I think he’s worked on to improve.”

“Getting inside” was something that was said a couple times in the second half of the season. Granato mentioned it was something Olofsson did well two seasons ago when his goal scoring wasn’t there (much in part to him playing through a wrist injury that sapped the power and accuracy of his shot).

I looked at Olofsson’s performance last season when he was on the ice with or away each of his Sabres teammates. Natural Stat Trick provides this information and it’s really fascinating to compare it.

The majority of Sabres players had better 5-on-5 numbers away from Olofsson than with him when it came to percent of shots attempted for and expected goals for. One notable exception was Casey Mittelstadt whom Olofsson spent most of his ice time with last season. Mittelstadt’s shot attempts-for and expected goals-for percentages were each better with Olofsson than away from him, albeit by slim margins. The shot attempts-for were 2.36 percent better with Olofsson whereas the expected goal difference was 1.39 percent better.

While some differences weren’t terribly vast, others very much were and that’s troubling because it points to Olofsson being a drag on their performance when it comes to generating shot attempts and quality scoring opportunities. To say that’s a problem when Olofsson’s main job is to create those instances is downplaying it significantly.

For as difficult as those with/away stats are from last year, there is a reason for optimism because he’s been much better at it in previous years. Two seasons ago with the bad wrist, the one where Granato made sure to point out the way they wanted him to play more like last season, the discrepancies between the stats with and away from Olofsson were vastly reduced. These are little things that can change, and the percentages can fluctuate wildly with a very bad or a very good game.

Getting back to doing these things can get Olofsson back in the lineup and to be more trusted by Granato and even his teammates. But heading into camp, his margin of error will be slim.

He’ll have an advantage because he’s a veteran and he’s put in the time and, yeah, he scored 28 goals last season. But the competition, even without Quinn, will be severe from a set of young players in Lukas Rousek, Matthew Savoie, Isak Rosén, and particularly Jiri Kulich.

What Kulich brings to the ice is the kind of player that has a lot of eerie similarities to Olofsson when it comes to his outstanding shot and ability to score on the power play. The big exception is he’s 19 years old and just completed an impressive first season in the AHL at 18 in which he scored 24 goals with 22 assists and then had seven more goals with four assists in 12 playoff games with the Americans.

A lot of the early critiques of Kulich echo those of Olofsson when he came over which makes the resemblance stand out all the more. Doesn’t help he had similar goal scoring success either, but the toolset is quite similar for now and Kulich has a lot of growth yet to make. Olofsson, meanwhile, needs to reestablish himself and make amends for a statistically successful season that was nearly his undoing in Buffalo.

With it being a contract year for him, the Sabres hope Olofsson can make Granato’s choices very difficult by being the best version of himself he’s ever been. But, if what we saw from him last season is what he is and will always be the rest of his career, and some of those bad habits became traits, the competition on wing will turn into a rookie showcase.