NHL.com’s fantasy staff continues to cover the latest trends and storylines in the League through the lens of NHL EDGE puck and player tracker stats. Today, we take a look at the underlying metrics of the Buffalo Sabres this season.<\/p>\n
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The Buffalo Sabres, who fired general manager Kevyn Adams on Monday and replaced him with Jarmo Kek\u00e4l\u00e4inen<\/a>, have underlying metrics that suggest they could improve in the coming months of the season.<\/p>\n The Sabres, who have the longest active Stanley Cup Playoff drought in the NHL (14 seasons, last appearance: 2011), are in the midst of their first three-game winning streak of the season. That said, Buffalo has spent the second-most time trailing this season (791:43) ahead of only the Nashville Predators (812:49).<\/p>\n The Sabres, with longtime coach Lindy Ruff rejoining the franchise in his second tenure, led the NHL in first-period goals (92) and were tied for the best 5-on-5 shooting percentage (10.6) last season but still missed the postseason. This season, Buffalo has remained an inconsistent team but is only six points behind the Eastern Conference wild-card spots at the time of the GM change.<\/p>\n Buffalo, which had the No. 1 pick in the NHL Draft in both 2018 (selected Rasmus Dahlin<\/a>) and 2021 (selected Owen Power<\/a>), has made significant trades in recent seasons involving big-name players like Jack Eichel<\/a> (to Vegas Golden Knights), Sam Reinhart<\/a> and Brandon Montour<\/a> (to Florida Panthers in separate deals) and JJ Peterka<\/a> (to Utah Mammoth). While some current Sabres players involved in those trades have had productive tenures (e.g. Alex Tuch<\/a>, Josh Doan<\/a>), Eichel, Reinhart and Montour have each won the Stanley Cup with their new teams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NHL.com’s fantasy staff continues to cover the latest trends and storylines in the League through the lens of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-349499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}