Jack Eichel Keep Streaking, While The Buffalo Sabres Keep Fading Away

The Buffalo Sabres are sliding backwards in the standings and the playoff race, but there’s at least one reason to look forward to 2017-18!

If there are any Buffalo Sabres fans out there who were holding out hope that the team might start reeling off a few wins in a last-gasp effort to make the playoffs, Tuesday night’s game against Philadelphia should have been enough to crush those dreams.

Buffalo’s 6-3 loss to the Flyers keeps the team locked in at 66 points, which is now 7 points behind the New York Islanders, who are holding onto the second and final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference.  Compounding this fact is that Buffalo is now 3 points behind both Florida and Tampa Bay, 4 points behind Philly, and 6 points behind Toronto.

With only 15 games left in the 2016-17 season, that’s a lot of points to make up and teams to leap over, with no time left to do so.

That’s the bad news (unless you are looking for the Sabres to land a top-five pick in the draft, that is).

The good news?  Jack Eichel is a stud, and is already proving he can take it to another level.

With two goals and an assist on Evander Kane’s goal, Eichel had a hand in every goal the Buffalo Sabres scored in their disappointing yet unsurprising 6-3 loss to the visiting Flyers.  That’s pretty damn impressive in and of itself. . . and then you realize that Eichel has been impressive for well over a month now:

An eleven-game points streak.  45 points in 46 games played.  The second-longest points streak of the season.  101 points in just 127 career games played.

And he plays for the Buffalo Sabres, people, the team with a bottom-10 offense.  This team only has one 20-goal scorer on its roster right now, people!  Eichel isn’t getting much help, and yet he is averaging .98 points per game this season.

Wanna know just how good Jack Eichel has been this season?  He has been absolutely lethal on Buffalo’s power play, scoring 8 goals and notching 11 assists when the Sabres have the man advantage.  As a result, the Buffalo Sabres – currently sitting 23rd in the overall league standings – lead the NHL in power play success, scoring an absurd 23.4% of the time.

That’s unheard of people: a team this bad should not own the league’s best power play . . . yet here we are.  No, it’s not just Eichel getting work done on the power play, but his 19 power play points are 4th-best on the team, and he has earned them at a faster pace than anyone else on the Sabres.  (Rasmus Ristolainen leads the team with 23 PPP in 67 games played, followed by Kyle Okposo with 22 in 63 and Ryan O’Reilly with 22 in 57).   Eichel is currently 26th in PPP in the league, and if you need to know, there is not one player ahead of him that has played less than 57 games this season.

Eichel has been so good this season that the script has flipped: whereas last season Connor McDavid got far more love in the Calder Trophy voting despite Eichel have more points, Eichel’s play this year actually prompted ESPN to pose the question, “Is Jack Eichel having a better season than Connor McDavid?”  I think it is a silly question, personally – McDavid leads the league in points and assists, is fourth in points per game, and has led the Edmonton Oilers to a high playoff spot in the Western Conference – but the fact that people are even asking the question shows you just how transcendent Eichel has been since he returned from injury on November 29.

Next: Jack Eichel's Milestone Night

I’m sure a lot of Buffalo Sabres fans are tired of “the silver lining in the cloud” approach – Buffalo is on pace to finish the season with pretty much the same points total it had in 2015-16, and fans want to see progress being made, not a flat-lining team.  You cannot deny Jack Eichel his greatness, however: in an otherwise disappointing season, he has taken his game to another level.