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Buffalo Sabres’ Cody Hodgson Had Season of Disappointment

By Melissa Kania

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Left winger Cody Hodgson is one of the highest-paid players on the Buffalo Sabres. He’s also been looked at as one of the top players on the team, meant to be producing in decent numbers and contributing significantly on the ice.

This season just didn’t do it for Hodgson.

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He had just 13 points on the season, in 78 games played. He had points in just 12 games throughout the season, registered one only multi-point game, and could never quite get a point streak going.

In fact, he often went lengthy periods – once, up to 17 games – without registering even a point.

Hodgson’s ice time was limited at times. He played less than 10 minutes in 13 games, and less than eight minutes of ice time in seven games. That being said, he wasn’t playing up to par, so why would he get more ice time? You can also look at it the opposite way – if you don’t get a decent amount of ice time, it’s hard to produce.

But Hodgson had 51 games this season where he played over 12 minutes. In 23 of those games, he played over 15 minutes of ice time, including eight games in the very beginning of the season. This tapered off during the rest of the year.

Here’s a handy little graph that will (hopefully!) help you visualize Cody Hodgson’s production — or lack thereof — throughout the course of the 2014-2015 NHL season.

He never had points in consecutive games, and had two considerably lengthy stretches throughout the season where he went 17 and 11 games without registering on the scoresheet at all.

Cody Hodgson came out of 30 games this season with a minus-rating, including two games where he registered a minus-3. He had just 10 games where he registered as a plus-1 (never better).

For comparison’s sake, here’s a chart of Hodgson’s production from last season.

Obviously part of this drastic drop in points production for Hodgson is a reflection on the team as a whole. The Sabres this season were generally not as good, so naturally, the players aren’t going to have the same points.

But the fact is that he had 44 points in 72 games in the 2013-14 season, and only 13 points in 78 games this past season. The numbers don’t lie — that’s just a disappointment. He had more multi-point games, a couple point streaks, and rarely had pointless streaks. The same cannot be said of this most recent season.

The kicker about this is that Cody Hodgson isn’t going anywhere — so he’s going to have to shape up.

He’s signed under contract with the Buffalo Sabres through the 2018-19 season and made $3.5 million this season. He’ll make $4 million next season, unless the Sabres manage to trade him or buy him out this summer.

Will Hodgson be able to step up and produce next season, alongside guys like Sam Reinhart, Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel, Mikhail Grigorenko, etc.? Will he even be suiting up in the blue & gold when October rolls around? What are you hoping for?

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