2006 Buffalo Sabres / 2021 Canucks Forward Depth

[MS]

Canucks were 8th in 2019-20 in goals for. Wouldn’t say we’re far off from Buffalo’s offence at all. They aren’t that great of a team, we should aspire to be more than the Sabres.

We were 24th in 20-21.

Those 2005-07 Buffalo teams were absolutely elite and that team would probably have won the 2006 Cup if almost their entire blueline didn't get hurt in the Conference Finals against an inferior Carolina team.

 

[FOurteenS inCisOr]

We really just letting people make the threads for the dumbest things huh. Also Pettersson is a superstar they are very few players who impact the game when their on the ice as much as he does.

There have been countless threads more “dumb” than this.

Try this;

Don’t like the thread—don’t click or post. It’s very effective.

Welcome to the internet.

 

[Nucker101]

The 3rd line centered by Dickinson or Sutter is not going to create much offense, if they use Miller at C then sure

 

[Bojack Horvatman]

We were 24th in 20-21.

Those 2005-07 Buffalo teams were absolutely elite and that team would probably have won the 2006 Cup if almost their entire blueline didn't get hurt in the Conference Finals against an inferior Carolina team.

Exactly. The 2006 Sabres were like our 2010 team in that they were top 5 in the standings and gf and would go on to finish first in gf and win the presidents trophy the following season.

A really successful season for our forwards would to be around where we finished in gf in 2020. We probably have a better group on paper going into the season, but we got a lot of points from several players having career years. That is why I doubt we are a better offensive team than in 2020 unless we see Pettersson takes a big leap forward and able to stay healthy, or all our middle 6 guys all have 40+ points.

 

[Bankerguy]

Agreed... there are some similarities between the two teams... Buffalo had some depth for sure...and i do believe that the Canucks will totally run three scoring lines. They already hinted at it, plus they want guys at C who can win face-offs. If you move Dickie to the wing and Miller to C you have Horvat, Miller and Sutter at C who are all very good at face-offs. Petey isnt very good but 3 outa 4 centerman winning 55% of the draws is pretty good.

Podkolzin? Petey / Boeser
Pearson? Horvat / Garland
Dickie? Jt. Miller / Hoglander

maybe they switch up Hoglander and Garland if they feel that Hoglander has improved and he has more established chemistry with Horvat.
Either way, you're looking at three lines that will be pushing the puck up the ice. I'd prefer Hoglander to stick with Horvat as the idea of having 70 point Jt. Miller and Garland as the third scoring line coming over the boards is sexy. It will create legit matchup problems for the other team, regardless if we have home-ice advantage or not.

Motte and Sutter probably make for a servable fouth line that can handle 10 minutes a night. They'll be pinned in their own zone 65% of the time, but last year we had 2 lines that were hemmed in their own zone 80% of the time...

Now, I see your 2006 sabres and raise you a 2003 Colorado.

Tanguay Sakic Konowalchuk
Svatos Forsberg Hejduk
Kariya Nikolishin Selanne
Brigley Hinote Barnaby

Can we be more like this? instead of Buffalo? lol

 

[MS]

Exactly. The 2006 Sabres were like our 2010 team in that they were top 5 in the standings and gf and would go on to finish first in gf and win the presidents trophy the following season.

A really successful season for our forwards would to be around where we finished in gf in 2020. We probably have a better group on paper going into the season, but we got a lot of points from several players having career years. That is why I doubt we are a better offensive team than in 2020 unless we see Pettersson takes a big leap forward and able to stay healthy, or all our middle 6 guys all have 40+ points.

The 2005-07 Sabres were the #2 team in the NHL behind only near-dynasty Detroit over that two-year period, and unlucky to not reach a Finals or win a Cup. Like you say, they were very close to the 2010-12 Canucks.

It's absolutely nuts that people think adding Conor Garland to the 24th ranked offense puts us anywhere near a team like that.

I've said this before recently, but it's what you always see when people project that they're expecting all the faults with the previous team to be fixed by the new moves while all the things that went surprisingly well stay constant. "The 19-20 Canucks were the #8 offense and they've added Garland and Hoglander, so top-5 offensive team!!!!!'

And this completely ignores a whole bunch of stuff :

- Tanner Pearson and JT Miller scored at a 138 points/82 GP clip with crazy outlier career years. 100 points between them this year would be a good result.
- Virtanen, Gaudette, and Leivo/Toffoli filled 3 roster spots all at a 45-55 point pace. All of those players are gone. When you look at Hoglander replacing Virtanen and Garland replacing Leivo/Toffoli ... there might be a gain there but it's minimal.
- Alex Edler had a career year offensively at ES that nobody on this team will duplicate.
- that team was incredibly healthy until right before COVID, when a couple injuries caused them to crash. We are unlikely to be that lucky with injuries again.

So yeah, if they finish 8th-10th in the NHL offensively this year, that would be a huge result.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

just want to point out that the 2005-06 buffalo sabres had a forward group of

briere, hecht, dumont, drury, kotalik, grier, vanek, connolly, roy, pominville, afinogenov, gaustad, pyatt. that's thirteen forwards and zero of them were fourth line-calibre players.

i have zero doubt that they would have won the cup that year if their d didn't go from

tallinder lydman
numminen kalinin
campbell mckee

during normal times to

campbell lydman
paetsch fitzpatrick
janik jillson

in game seven of the eastern conference finals.

then they followed it up by winning the presidents trophy in 2007.

 

[vancityluongo]

this is a suspiciously random comparison lol. is it just a coincidence that benning was scouting director in buffalo from 1998-2004 and would have been a driving force in accumulating that depth?

if we're just going to pull out random comparisons, i think we should be pretty thrilled if this year's canucks are close in performance to the 2010 phoenix coyotes. before anyone gets mad, that team had 107 points and finished ahead of the 2010 Canucks. they were 15th in goals for (these canucks should be better), but trapped their way to 3rd in GA, backstopped by a .920 from Ilya Bryzgalov and this defense:

Yandle - Aucoin
Jovanovski - Michalek
Vandermeer - Lepisto

the canucks don't have anyone as good as zybenek michalek was that year defensively, but a 22 yr old keith yandle = hughes is pretty close, and hopefully so is jovo = oel. is a 31 year old travis hamonic as good as a 36 year old adrian aucoin? maybe? can green pull a tippett? unlikely, but probably better odds than hoping our third line all score at 50 point paces haha

 

[Just A Bit Outside]

Pretty much sums up the current situation when you wish you were the Buffalo Sabres…

 

[logan5]

I've said this before recently, but it's what you always see when people project that they're expecting all the faults with the previous team to be fixed by the new moves while all the things that went surprisingly well stay constant. "The 19-20 Canucks were the #8 offense and they've added Garland and Hoglander, so top-5 offensive team!!!!!'

And this completely ignores a whole bunch of stuff :

- Tanner Pearson and JT Miller scored at a 138 points/82 GP clip with crazy outlier career years. 100 points between them this year would be a good result.
- Virtanen, Gaudette, and Leivo/Toffoli filled 3 roster spots all at a 45-55 point pace. All of those players are gone. When you look at Hoglander replacing Virtanen and Garland replacing Leivo/Toffoli ... there might be a gain there but it's minimal.
- Alex Edler had a career year offensively at ES that nobody on this team will duplicate.
- that team was incredibly healthy until right before COVID, when a couple injuries caused them to crash. We are unlikely to be that lucky with injuries again.

So yeah, if they finish 8th-10th in the NHL offensively this year, that would be a huge result.

OK, let's go through each player...

JT Miller got 46 points in 53 games last season, with Pettersson injured. That's a fairly consistent number factoring in EP's injury. You are getting 19/20 JT this year.

We are highly unlikely getting 19/20 Tanner Pearson.

Hoglander got very little PP time, and ended up with 26 even strength points in 56 games. Virtanen got power play time, which pumped up his numbers, but at even strength, Virtanen had 27 points in 69 games. And Hoglander does so many other things that create offensive chances for his linemates. He is a big upgrade on Virtanen. I'm not sure how you can say that there is only a minimal gain here.

Toffoli was here for only 10 regular season games, so not long enough to have made a difference through that season, so we are left with Leivo vs Garland, and that's no contest. Garland also played on a team last year that scored .6 less goals per game than the 19/20 Canucks, and he was there best point producer per game. Huge upgrade.

Last year Ekman Larsson scored at very close to the same rate as 19/20 Edler, though the Coyotes were a lower scoring team than 19/20 Canucks. Significantly lower by .6 goals per game.

Rathbone is a big offensive upgrade on the bottom 6.

And you have to factor in the teams maturity is 2 years greater, especially for someone like Pettersson.

It's not a stretch at all to see the Canucks improving by at least 3 spots over the 19/20 team.

 

[Bojack Horvatman]

OK, let's go through each player...

JT Miller got 46 points in 53 games last season, with Pettersson injured. That's a fairly consistent number factoring in EP's injury. You are getting 19/20 JT this year.

We are highly unlikely getting 19/20 Tanner Pearson.

Hoglander got very little PP time, and ended up with 26 even strength points in 56 games. Virtanen got power play time, which pumped up his numbers, but at even strength, Virtanen had 27 points in 69 games. And Hoglander does so many other things that create offensive chances for his linemates. He is a big upgrade on Virtanen. I'm not sure how you can say that there is only a minimal gain here.

Toffoli was here for only 10 regular season games, so not long enough to have made a difference through that season, so we are left with Leivo vs Garland, and that's no contest. Garland also played on a team last year that scored .6 less goals per game than the 19/20 Canucks, and he was there best point producer per game. Huge upgrade.

Last year Ekman Larsson scored at very close to the same rate as 19/20 Edler, though the Coyotes were a lower scoring team than 19/20 Canucks. Significantly lower by .6 goals per game.

Rathbone is a big offensive upgrade on the bottom 6.

And you have to factor in the teams maturity is 2 years greater, especially for someone like Pettersson.

It's not a stretch at all to see the Canucks improving by at least 3 spots over the 19/20 team.

Hoglander had more time on the the powerplay last year than Virtanen did in 2020.

Arizona scored more than we did last year. In 2020 we had almost the hole team score a lot more than they were expected at even strength and the power play by a large margin. Then this players produced pretty much as expected. This is why there were several players that had career years that they couldn't follow up on, and so many goals from our 2nd PK unit. This is what MS meant by taking everything that went right in 2020 and just adding Garland and Hoglander.

Something else to keep in mind is not everyone is going to get prime minutes. One of the big reasons in increase of production last year was increase of minutes. He may not get those minutes here, and if he does who does he take those minutes away from?

This is why I said finishing around the same gf rank, give or take would be a successful year for our forwards.

 

[RobertKron]

Canucks were 8th in 2019-20 in goals for. Wouldn’t say we’re far off from Buffalo’s offence at all. They aren’t that great of a team, we should aspire to be more than the Sabres.

Nevermind, I forgot that every team didn't even play the same number of games in that totally regular and representative of business-as-usual season.

 

[Peen]

OK, let's go through each player...

JT Miller got 46 points in 53 games last season, with Pettersson injured. That's a fairly consistent number factoring in EP's injury. You are getting 19/20 JT this year.

We are highly unlikely getting 19/20 Tanner Pearson.

Hoglander got very little PP time, and ended up with 26 even strength points in 56 games. Virtanen got power play time, which pumped up his numbers, but at even strength, Virtanen had 27 points in 69 games. And Hoglander does so many other things that create offensive chances for his linemates. He is a big upgrade on Virtanen. I'm not sure how you can say that there is only a minimal gain here.

Toffoli was here for only 10 regular season games, so not long enough to have made a difference through that season, so we are left with Leivo vs Garland, and that's no contest. Garland also played on a team last year that scored .6 less goals per game than the 19/20 Canucks, and he was there best point producer per game. Huge upgrade.

Last year Ekman Larsson scored at very close to the same rate as 19/20 Edler, though the Coyotes were a lower scoring team than 19/20 Canucks. Significantly lower by .6 goals per game.

Rathbone is a big offensive upgrade on the bottom 6.

And you have to factor in the teams maturity is 2 years greater, especially for someone like Pettersson.

It's not a stretch at all to see the Canucks improving by at least 3 spots over the 19/20 team.

Gaw damn we goin from 17th to 14th

Plan the parade

 

[MS]

OK, let's go through each player...

JT Miller got 46 points in 53 games last season, with Pettersson injured. That's a fairly consistent number factoring in EP's injury. You are getting 19/20 JT this year.

Acting like it's a guaranteed fact that a player will match his huge outlier career year is making my point perfectly.

We are highly unlikely getting 19/20 Tanner Pearson.

Correct.

Hoglander got very little PP time, and ended up with 26 even strength points in 56 games. Virtanen got power play time, which pumped up his numbers, but at even strength, Virtanen had 27 points in 69 games. And Hoglander does so many other things that create offensive chances for his linemates. He is a big upgrade on Virtanen. I'm not sure how you can say that there is only a minimal gain here.

19-20 Virtanen was very good. And hopefully we've seen enough sophomore jinxes here to not project exponential improvement.

It's an upgrade but nothing massive.

Toffoli was here for only 10 regular season games, so not long enough to have made a difference through that season, so we are left with Leivo vs Garland, and that's no contest. Garland also played on a team last year that scored .6 less goals per game than the 19/20 Canucks, and he was there best point producer per game. Huge upgrade.

Leivo was absolutely outstanding and regularly our best ES forward before getting hurt. Those two players scored at about a 55-point pace combined. There was a gap in between when Leivo was hurt but Garland isn't likely to be significantly better than their healthy performance. And will be worse defensively.

Last year Ekman Larsson scored at very close to the same rate as 19/20 Edler, though the Coyotes were a lower scoring team than 19/20 Canucks. Significantly lower by .6 goals per game.

OEL scored at an 18 point ES pace in 20-21.
Edler scored at a 36 point ES pace in 19-20.

OEL will not match his offensive production getting a fraction of the PP minutes here.

Rathbone is a big offensive upgrade on the bottom 6.

Rathbone is unlikely to significantly outproduce Stecher at ES. And it's not even guaranteed he's on the team.

And you have to factor in the teams maturity is 2 years greater, especially for someone like Pettersson.

It's not a stretch at all to see the Canucks improving by at least 3 spots over the 19/20 team.

Ah, the projection of big improvements for young players. How has that gone the past couple years?

Again, if they can rebound from 24th offensively to 8th-10th that would be a huge win. But they're going to absolutely suck ass defensively and Demko will need to be Vezina-calibre to get this team in the top half of the league.

 

[bertuzzi2bure]

Those Buffalo teams essentially had 9 50-point players who were all at least above-average 2nd line players.

The top-9 you're hyping in Vancouver contains Tanner Pearson (28 point pace last year), Jason Dickinson (24 point pace last year) and a rookie in Podkolzin who is unlikely to score more than 20-25 points given his likely usage.

So no, not the same thing.

true but canucks top forwards are better than that teams top forwards.

i think its closer than ppl think. preference is up to each person

 

[Bojack Horvatman]

true but canucks top forwards are better than that teams top forwards.

i think its closer than ppl think. preference is up to each person

Buffalo is clearly superior. They were a top 5 team in the league and in scoring, and would be first in scoring and win the presidents trophy the next year. Briere at the time was the best player on any team. 58 points in 58 games that year and would be top 10 in scoring the next year. They also had Afinogenov who had 73 points in 77 games, Drury with 67 points in 81 games, Kotalik with 62 points, Connolly with 55 points in 63 points, and 3 others on pace for at least 50 points if they pulled a full season.

I like our forward group, but they need to earn being compared to an elite team at the time. If they come top 5 in scoring this year then we can start comparisons.

 

[Get North]

Boeser, Pettersson, and Miller are better than Vanek, Roy, Pominville. Vancouver fans saw 2/3 of them play and they were nothing great like Boeser or Petey. Nor do they play a physical game like Miller or take face-offs like our studs. Horvat could fill in Drury's role.

It's obviously hard to say if Pettersson is better than Briere in his prime! Petey definitely had a better start to his career though. Hoglander and Podkolzin are younger than everyone on the Sabres roster.

It would be more appropriate to compare these teams 2-3 years from now

 

[racerjoe]

Boeser, Pettersson, and Miller are better than Vanek, Roy, Pominville. Vancouver fans saw 2/3 of them play and they were nothing great like Boeser or Petey. Nor do they play a physical game like Miller or take face-offs like our studs. Horvat could fill in Drury's role.

It's obviously hard to say if Pettersson is better than Briere in his prime! Petey definitely had a better start to his career though. Hoglander and Podkolzin are younger than everyone on the Sabres roster.

It would be more appropriate to compare these teams 2-3 years from now

yes Roy and Vanek at the end of their careers is the same as prime boesse, Peterson and Miller…

 

[Get North]

yes Roy and Vanek at the end of their careers is the same as prime boesse, Peterson and Miller…

Roy is the same age as Miller when they both played with Vancouver. Will Miller be playing in Europe in 3 years? Doubt it.

Did you forget how bad and lazy Vanek was defensively? Do you see the difference in compete level between Vanek and Boeser? Roy had 5 good seasons. Vanek is good for racking up points in the regular season, Petey has 1/3 of his goals in the playoffs already.

Nobody touches Briere yet, but Petey is close. After that, you can take Buffalo's 1 dimensional players.

 

[racerjoe]

Roy is the same age as Miller when they both played with Vancouver. Will Miller be playing in Europe in 3 years? Doubt it.

Did you forget how bad and lazy Vanek was defensively? Do you see the difference in compete level between Vanek and Boeser? Roy had 5 good seasons. Vanek is good for racking up points in the regular season, Petey has 1/3 of his goals in the playoffs already.

Nobody touches Briere yet, but Petey is close. After that, you can take Buffalo's 1 dimensional players.

roy turned 30 the while playing for us in 2013, 2 years older…

the rest of your post is almost as honest bravo