Buffalo Sabres Biggest Enemy This Season: Injuries, Or The Shootout?

In a season full of what-ifs, we debate whether it was the injuries, or the lack of scorers who excel in the shootout format, that ultimately killed the Buffalo Sabres’ playoff chances.

By now, every Buffalo Sabres fan knows (or should at least be starting to realize) that the Sabres will not qualify for the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Needing to make up 9 points in just 15 games gives the Sabres a 0.1% chance of making the playoffs according to Sports Club Stats, and the team would have to go 13-1-1 or better over the final month of the season just to raise its odds to above 50%.

So adios, playoffs! Maybe we’ll meet up with you next season.

The Sabres’ failure to make a concerted playoff push was not for lack of trying; as imperfect as this team is, I don’t doubt that most of the guys in the locker room wish things had turned out differently this year. Sure, this team still has not learned how to play 60 minutes, or defense, and it still needs to develop a killer nature – it’s an imperfect team, to be sure, and we’ve discussed this in length here at Sabre Noise already.

But imperfect as this team might be, you can easily make the argument that, had it not been for two major setbacks, we would be talking about playoff hockey in the 716 right now, instead of lamenting what might have been.

Those two setbacks, of course, are the number of injuries that the Buffalo Sabres have experienced this season, and their absolute ineptitude in overtime and the shootout. The question is, which of these two setbacks proved to be more influential in derailing the Sabres’ dreams of making the postseason?

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I imagine most Sabres fans will point to the injury bug that decided to play Whack-a-Mole with the Sabres’ roster this season. As of March 4, the Buffalo Sabres led the NHL in cumulative minutes lost to injury (CMIP) according to Man Games Lost, with over 4,600 minutes of ice time lost to injury and counting. Making matters worse, the Sabres also have “enjoyed” the greatest cumulative impact (IIT) of the players it has lost to other teams in the NHL this season – basically, the Sabres have not just lost players due to injury, they have lost IMPORTANT players due to injury, and have paid the price for it.

Based on that, it is easy to assume that injuries were the single-biggest reason that the Sabres currently sit 7 points behind the New York islanders for the second wild card spot in the Eastern Conference, and that the story would have been different had the team stayed moderately healthy. While that might be true – sounds obvious enough – if you take a close look at both CMIP and IIT figures over at Man Games Lost, you notice some interesting results. For starters, there are three teams who currently own playoff spots that rank among the league’s top ten in CMIP: the Edmonton Oilers, the Anaheim Ducks, and the New York Islanders. This is not too surprising – a team’s CMIP is simply the sum of ALL minutes lost to injury, whether the players lost were good, bad, whatever. Losing a lot of third- and fourth-line minutes to injury will inflate a team’s CMIP, but will it have it have much of an impact on the team’s success in a given season?

More telling is a team’s IIT, and if you look at that number, you will see something far more interesting, in my opinion: along with the Sabres, the Pittsburgh Penguins, Montreal Canadiens, Edmonton Oilers, and Boston Bruins all rank among the league’s top ten in IIT rankings. Granted, the Sabres have the worst IIT skater-metric by far, so that counts for something, and we are not saying that in juries had nothing to do with where the Sabres currently sit in the standings. We are simply pointing out that there are other playoff-bound teams who have been hit moderately hard by injuries, and somehow they have managed to stay the course.

Which brings us to the team’s outright terrible results in overtime. Even with the staggering amount of minutes the Sabres have lost to injury, this team has still managed to force overtime 19 times this season. Sadly, 12 of those 19 games have resulted in losses for these Sabres – the second highest total in the NHL. I didn’t sign up to do math, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this means that the Sabres have left 63% of the points available to them in those games decided by overtime on the table – and counting.

Adding to Buffalo’s OT woes is the fact that this team is not built for success in the shootout format, which is evidenced by Buffalo’s 1-6 record in the format, which amounts to a winning percentage of just 14.3% (statistic courtesy of Sporting Charts). Only the Maple Leafs have lost more games in the shootout than the Sabres, so I guess people in the 716 have that to hold over their neighbors to the north . . . except the Leafs still have a chance to make the playoffs, while this team does not. And watching Robin Lehner flop around on the ice like a fish out of water while he is supposed to being saves in the SO doesn’t exactly inspire the sort of confidence needed to talk trash to the enemy, now does it?

Can injuries be blamed for Buffalo’s terrible results in overtime? Well, the Sabres did play 5 games that went into overtime or the shootout before Jack Eichel returned on November 29, and wound up losing 4 of those, so the Sabres’ success in OT has improved slightly since Jack returned (the team is 6-8 in OT and the SO since Jack came back). Still, a 43% success rate if overtime even with Eichel in the lineup is nothing to write home to mom about. And if I look hard enough I will find games that went into OT and the SO without Ryan O’Reilly or (more recently) Kyle Okposo. Any way you slice it, the Sabres have left too many points on the table that were within their reach, and those points are currently making the difference between the Sabres being a have or a have not.

Next: Eichel Streaking But Sabres Still Fading

Obviously, the Buffalo Sabres have both been hurt, and have hurt themselves, this season. Injuries took a toll early on, and forced this team to play catch-up once its best player returned. But even as injured as they have been, the Sabres find themselves only 9 points out of the playoffs. How closer would the Sabres be today had they figured out how to win in OT, or the SO? Would we be talking about the playoffs if this team had remained fairly healthy? In a season filled with “What if?” questions, these are the two that will haunt Sabres fans until October.

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