Buffalo signed veteran defensemen Erik Johnson and Connor Clifton to make their blue line situation a lot more crowded
Of the things we knew about what the Buffalo Sabres would do this offseason, one of them was how they’d work to strengthen their defense corps. After five days of free agency, their blue line is busting at the seams.
The Sabres locked down veteran and 2022 Stanley Cup champion Erik Johnson, the No. 1 pick back in 2006, to a one-year contract worth $3.25 million. They also signed Connor Clifton, formerly of the Boston Bruins, to a three-year, $10 million contract and re-signed Kale Clague to a one-year, two-way deal worth $775,000 at the NHL level. Clague is earmarked to play in Rochester, much like last season, but as we witnessed, sometimes things change.
“We have nine NHL defensemen that we like, and I guess the way I look at it is, we need depth,” Sabres GM Kevyn Adams said. “It’s a long season. Hopefully, we are a team that is going to make a deep run and you need good solid players that can play. And you never know. Look what’s already happened this summer in terms of one of our key players that goes down (Jack Quinn). Those things happen. So, you need help.”
Two things are true here:
The Sabres needed help on defense.
The Sabres have too many defensemen.
They’ve got 10 defensemen with NHL experience under contract and that’s, to say the least, unwieldy. So how do they go about handling this? Let’s poke around at what they’re rolling with at this moment with full knowledge they might not be rolling with this many guys for too long.
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The Sabres have never been shy about having veterans in the room that much has been made clear. Kyle Okposo and Zemgus Girgensons were instrumental in helping provide a guiding hand to all the young players in the room. They didn’t have a veteran defenseman, however, to play the role of the sage elder for the guys on the blue line.
Enter Erik Johnson.
Johnson was the No. 1 pick in 2006 and he’s been a fixture in the NHL since 2007. He’s been a steady as it gets defenseman since he left the University of Minnesota, and he was part of Colorado’s Stanley Cup championship team last season. He’s played 920 games in the NHL, and he’s seen it all and done it all in his career with St. Louis and Colorado. With 15 years in the league under his belt, he’s got enough experience to share with Rasmus Dahlin, Mattias Samuelsson, and Owen Power as well as everyone else under 25 on defense on the team (Read: Just about everyone). Getting that veteran defenseman to help give guidance to their very young group was necessary to Adams.
“You know I love young players, but I thought a lot last year at different times about your own experiences that you go through,” Adams said. “I was reflecting back to when I was a player in Carolina. We draft Eric Staal and he sits in the locker room between Rod Brind’Amour and Ron Francis as an 18-year-old. And then I thought about later in my career when I’m in Chicago and Patrick Kane’s drafted number one overall and I’m rooming with him on the road and just talking to him. I was an older player by that point, whatever I was.
“I was thinking a lot last year about, am I doing enough to help our young, young talent that we have? Am I insulating them enough with good hockey players and just the right kind of people? You know how strongly I feel about Zemgus and Kyle, but have we done enough? I felt strongly that we needed to do a little more there. Erik Johnson fit that perfectly. I just think it’s an important piece. Sometimes even, however long Erik is with us, it can go for so many more years after just because these young players won’t forget those lessons. That’s something that was really important.”
At 28 years old, Connor Clifton arrives in the prime of his career. He’s played in the NHL since 2018 but has been a fixture there for the past three seasons. He’s a quick skater that plays a hard game. He’s physical despite being 5’11” 190 pounds and was in the top-25 in the NHL in hits this past season. He had twice as many hits as Samuelsson, the Sabres team leader in the category. He’s going to win a lot of fans over. But his game is more than that, too.
The fancy stats don’t jump off the page as a “Holy crap this guy rules!” kind of thing, but the xG numbers are solid as are the xGF% numbers. Which, to be fair, on a team as good as Boston was they should. Still, Clifton played the majority of his 5-on-5 minutes with Derek Forbort last season and his shot attempt and expected goal numbers were all better when he wasn’t with Forbort. The same can’t necessarily be said for Forbort when he was away from Clifton.
“(Clifton)’s our kind of guy,” Adams said. “He’s competitive, he’s a great character person. He’s going to help our group. He’s a good skater, physical presence. He has a real familiarity with the way we want and need to play as a team obviously with his history with Donny. You’re not taking three or four months of burning time to get up to speed.”
Clifton played for Don Granato at the USNTDP and, admittedly, that’s something I neglected to notice when scouting out free agent defensemen who might be of interest to the Sabres before the signing window opened. My bad.
Whether Clifton winds up with Owen Power, Rasmus Dahlin, or in another rejiggered pairing, he’ll be a great fit for the Sabres. He plays a fast-tempo kind of game and was a little pigeonholed as the roughneck last season.
This brings us to how the hell they’re going to make things work.
Having 10 defensemen is a lot (obviously) and they’re most likely going to keep eight with the big club. After they kept three goalies for most of last season, I’m reluctant to say they wouldn’t keep eight defensemen especially since forwards competing for NHL spots are young with AHL and/or junior hockey options readily available. Finding ice time while keeping guys game-ready and on their toes to play is tough when you’ve got an overabundance at one position.
Here are some way too premature pairings/depth chart:
Rasmus Dahlin — Mattias Samuelsson
Owen Power — Connor Clifton
Henri Jokiharju — Erik Johnson
Jacob Bryson — Ilya Lyubushkin
Riley Stillman — Kale Clague
First thing’s first, We know who the no-brainers are for the defense corps: Dahlin, Samuelsson, Power, Clifton, Johnson, and Jokiharju. We’ll get into Jokiharju in a little bit, but as of now, those are the absolutes on the roster no matter how much Adams and Granato talk about competition. Common sense can’t be ruled out by anything.
Clague will compete in camp for a place on the NHL roster and given the experience he got in the system last season he can’t be discounted to earning one. That said, if there’s one defenseman going to Rochester, it’ll be him.
I can already hear everyone screaming that they should cut Bryson and trade Jokiharju for a goalie. I’ll just stop you right there, I hear you, I’ve heard it before, I am not ignoring you saying it. It’s just that those ideas aren’t likely at this point. That is, unless Kevyn Adams’ poker face is really good.
Let’s start with Bryson because he’s the fan base’s bane of the moment.
Jacob Bryson
Bryson is coming off a down season in 2022-23. He showed a lot of promise and potential in 2021-2022 as a smart player that can get his team out of a tough spot by making good decisions with the puck and knowing how to read the situation. This year, he may have been the unluckiest player on the Sabres roster.
At 5-on-5, Bryson had a 46.7 percent expected goals for rate. Of players with 600 or more minutes at 5-on-5, Bryson had the fourth worst rating, beating out Lyubushkin, Peyton Krebs, and Victor Olofsson. Not great, but with limited minutes you can live with it.
Bryson had a .940 PDO (1.000 is baseline) at 5-on-5, worst on the team, meaning no one scored when he was out there, and no one stopped anything either. That’s making it look pretty. The regular numbers are raw and nasty.
When you look the number of goals for and goals against, he was on-ice for the second fewest goals for (25). Only Zemgus Girgensons (21) was on ice for fewer. He was also on ice for 50 goals against. A 2:1 ratio in the wrong direction is brutal, but he’s also the only player with such a wide disparity in goals for and against. It’s truly incredible because there’s no feasible way Bryson is responsible for all of that on his own without throwing it into his own net…right?
When Bryson was on the ice, goalies had an .880 save percentage at 5-on-5, the lowest mark on the team for any singular player. Olofsson was right behind him at .882. I already know what you’re thinking so I did the work for you. In their time shared on the ice at 5-on-5 (nearly 190 minutes), they were on the ice for three goals for and 14 against (17.7 GF%). Bryson had only worse ratios with Rasmus Asplund (1-6) and Jordan Greenway (0-1) and in far fewer minutes in both cases.
Bryson spent the majority of his minutes paired with Lyubushkin this season, but goalies had a .918 save percentage when Lyubushkin was on the ice at 5-on-5. When those two were together, the collective save percentage was .899. These dots seem to be connecting in all the bad ways for Bryson and it’s very strange. It’s a 180-degree difference between how Bryson performed in 2021-22 and 2022-2023.
Question is whether it’s a one-season hiccup or a foreboding sign of things to come. The pressure will be sky-high for him in training camp to lock down a spot on the team.
Ilya Lyubushkin
Lyubushkin’s case is an interesting one because he was used so heavily in standard defensive situations and on the penalty kill. He was physical, he took no crap from opponents, and also had the penchant for taking one very predictable penalty every other game.
Lyubushkin had three guys he paired up with the most: Bryson, Power, and Stillman. He and Bryson paired up mostly in the first half of the season and struggled more often than not, but late in the year he and Stillman became a solid third pairing.
His time spent with Power, I’ll be honest, I’m struggling to remember anything of note and given very few goals were scored or scored against them when they were together (5-4 in 172+ minutes at 5-on-5) that checks out. Their 42 percent expected goals for also shows why it’s hard to recall a lot of what they did (or didn’t do).
Still, Lyubushkin was a player Granato and Adams alike both lauded for his effort in playing the kind of hockey they believe a team loaded with skill players needs: lunchpail hockey.
I’d argue Mattias Samuelsson also plays a style like that, but he’s a fair bit more capable with the puck and makes better passes than Lyubushkin. That’s enough to set Samuelsson apart (and above) with ease. Where Lyubushkin had the most success was with Stillman.
When paired with Bryson or Power, Lyubushkin’s xGF% with each of them was around 42 percent. With Stillman it was 50.8 percent in 118 minutes of 5-on-5 play. It’s not a huge sample compared to what Lyubushkin had with Bryson (295) and Power (172) but it’s enough of a difference to believe those two should get a longer look if possible or necessary.
Lyubushkin was also one of the main defensemen on the penalty kill along with Samuelsson. Those two had the most minutes played on the kill among all skaters and whether it was on them or not (I’d lean more towards the PK system than the players), the PK struggled terribly. Clifton comes in with very strong numbers as a penalty killer in Boston, but that’s perhaps skewed by them being the best team in the regular season that also had the NHL’s best penalty kill. Still, it stands to reason that Clifton will get a lot of action on the PK and, ideally, the Sabres PK improves because of that.
This is all a long-winded way of saying Clifton (and Johnson as well) have helped make Lyubushkin a little redundant among Sabres defensemen. With one year left on his contract at a reasonable cap hit ($2.75 million) it puts him squarely in the sights for a potential trade down the road.
Riley Stillman
When Stillman was acquired, it caused some rancor in the Sabres fan base that he was the guy they went out and got around the trade deadline. He was in the middle of a rough season in Vancouver after having played decently in Florida and Chicago previously.
Everything the Canucks touched last season turned to misery and Stillman was having a rough season there. The change of scenery did him well and he found a role within the Sabres defense as not just a physical player who was happy to throw punches when the situation called for it, but as a guy who could also move the puck reasonably well and make smart decisions on the ice. Those traits along with being good with the puck helped earn him more time as the season went on.
He went from a sub-47 percent CorsiFor in Vancouver to more than 57 percent in 200-plus minutes at 5-on-5 with Buffalo to go with a 51.2 xGF% (compared to 44.2 in with Vancouver). That kind of play helped put him on the ice more often and Bryson in the press box later in the year. Competition is the name of the game and Stillman took the opportunity and ran.
A new season brings a clean slate when camp opens, but how Stillman performed leads me to believe that’s how Adams and company envisioned how he would play and their faith was rewarded for it. Considering all that, you’d have to think it gives him an edge heading into training camp to secure a place on the team and perhaps on the third pair.
Henri Jokiharju
Granato and Adams love Jokiharju, flat out. They love his versatility, his defensive game more often than not, and that he’s capable with the puck and can pinch in on the power play when asked. He’s a good player.
But…
Jokiharju is entering the final year of his contract before becoming a restricted free agent next summer. Dahlin and Power will have new extensions by then and with Tage Thompson and Dylan Cozens’ extensions kicking in this season, the Sabres are no longer scraping the salary minimum threshold and are closer to the ceiling than they’ve been in years.
Jokiharju could be looking at a bridge deal, but the question is what the cap hit would be for a player whose been in the top-four in minutes for multiple seasons. It’s not an insignificant number and it forces the Sabres to ask if they’re better off with Jokiharju moving ahead or not. By adding Clifton and Johnson this summer, both right-handed shots like Jokiharju and Lyubushkin, it makes you wonder how they’re going to divvy things up.
Jokiharju spent the majority of last season paired with Owen Power and what’s fascinating about their advanced numbers together is that they were both better off away from each other by sizable margins. Corsi, Fenwick, xGF… all of it. Any time they were away from each other they (and presumably the rest of the team) were better off for it. They played almost 700 minutes together at 5-on-5 and nearly 400 apart. I know the sampling makes a difference in measuring these things, but 395 minutes is not exactly a small sample size comparatively.
If Jokiharju wasn’t with Power, he was with Dahlin and after those two looked rough in previous seasons, in the 231 minutes they had at 5-on-5 last season they were outstanding. They rocked a 59.5 CF% and a 60.2 xGF% all while they were outscored 14-11. Hockey is a jerk that way and perhaps it’s that minus-3 that burned itself into our minds as to why they weren’t good together.
If the Sabres were going to entertain trading Jokiharju for an addition at another position, from a peak return perspective, now would be the time to do it. His current $2.5 million cap hit is easily manageable and passing off the next contract negotiations to another team could relieve some tension for the Buffalo bookkeepers. Then again, if he’s able to play this well, why would you want to give him up to another team? It’s a fun conundrum.
The question to be answered before anything is done is: Who do they foresee Jokiharju pairing up with? It shouldn’t be Power for both the eye-test and nerd-test evidence. Would a long look with Dahlin do them any good or is the Dahlin-Samuelsson pairing set in stone? Would Jokiharju provide a lift on a third pair with Clifton, Johnson, Lyubushkin, Bryson, or Stillman?
These are not simple decisions to make, and it needs in-game looks to decide. How much can they tinker in preseason given the packed seven-game schedule? How eager would they be to mess around with things during the season knowing full-well that any given loss can be the difference between making the playoffs and going back into the lottery one more time? This is why they’re paid the big bucks and I am not.
If the Sabres stand pat with their collection of 10 into training camp, the competition and the effect it has on the players and their collective psyches helps magnify why it was important for them to bring in Erik Johnson. A sage elder providing guidance in what should be an intense competition is a classic move. Of course, the sage elders aren’t usually also competing with those they’re supposed to mentor.
Last season, goaltending took the spotlight in camp for how the competition for No. 1 was going to go there. That battle is there again in September (at least right now it is) but it’s the contest between the blue liners that’s going to be worth overanalyzing. It’s great to have options, especially good young ones, but opening it up to 10 players to take a shot makes it into a sort of pro sports reality show. I’m unsure if that’s a good thing or not, but at least the drama would be confined on the ice and not off it.