Much like the third left-defense spot which was the subject of the last blog, the backup goaltender position on the Buffalo Sabres figures to be a three-way camp battle. Our contestants in this case are the newly acquired Aaron Dell, incumbent Sabres/Rochester Americans goalie Dustin Tokarski and up-and-comer Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen (UPL). All three of these goalies will likely be given an opportunity in training camp to play behind (not-so-massive spoiler alert) 40-year-old Craig Anderson in what could be a very shaky goaltending tandem that looks to be the weakest position group on a pretty weak team.
Ultimately Tokarski may be in the driver’s seat to win the job for several reasons, some of which involve very dry analytical reasons that I will try to make as interesting as possible so that people don’t immediately close this article, go to sleep never and return to the blog, and some of the reasons are more sentimental. Rather than using analytic hockey acronyms from evolvinghockey.com that read like absolute gobbledygook, I’m going to post the graphs to give a visual look at the underlying numbers. I’ve also included a glossary of terms at the bottom of the article to try to clarify what all of it means. There will also be the trusted metrics of save percentage and goals against average too, so I promise this won’t read like a statistics textbook.
With all of that out of the way, let’s take a look at Aaron Dell and UPL before discussing Tokarski.
Dell was signed by the Sabres to a one-year, two-way contract worth $750k at the NHL level and $350k at the AHL level. Right off the bat, that should tell the fans that Dell is not automatically assumed to be on the NHL roster because the Sabres made sure to put an AHL salary in there as well should he not make the team. Dell has essentially gotten worse in every one of his NHL seasons, although he started out hot as a rookie going 11-6-1 with a .931 save percentage. Since then his numbers have backslid pretty brutally culminating in a 1-5-0 record this past year with a terrible save percentage of .857 in parts of seven games with five starts.
Analytically, Dell did not meet the minimum threshold of minutes played to have his activity tracked on a chart this year, but it would be pretty easy to assume that the results would be ugly if he were eligible (all charts via evolvinghockey.com. It's well worth subscribing to). Instead of that, let’s take a look at the 2019-2020 data from Dell:
Ok, not terrific. The year before is even worse. Honestly, it’s hard to come up with a compelling reason why Dell could win the job out of camp short of an absolutely out-of-nowhere performance in the preseason. Weirder things have happened, I guess.
With Dell out of the way, let’s talk about UPL for a little bit. Luukkonen is a 22-year-old goalie who was selected in the second round by the Buffalo Sabres in the 2017 NHL draft by former general manager Jason Botterill during his first draft as GM. The 6’4” Finn has the NHL measurables that scouts look for along with a U-18 World Championship gold medal and a U-20 World Championship gold medal. The kid absolutely has the pedigree to project as a stud at the next level but is still short on experience due to some unfortunate injury issues. A double hip surgery in 2019 severely limited his playing time to only 33 games between the ECHL Cincinnati Cyclones and the Rochester Americans in what should have been a full professional rookie campaign. To make matters worse, UPL played only 31 games in 2020-21 season between a loan to TPS in the Finnish Elite League, the Rochester Americans and the Buffalo Sabres due to a double whammy of the pandemic-shortened schedule and another injury when he finally showed up in the blue and gold.
For those keeping score at home, that’s 64 games played in two years during a time when UPL should be getting as many reps as possible in live-action games. That’s simply not enough hockey played over the past 24 months to reasonably rely on UPL for meaningful minutes in the NHL this year. And that brings us to another point: if UPL made the team as the Sabres’ backup goaltender, he would conceivably play 30ish games over the course of the season behind Craig Anderson which is, again, a very small workload compared to the amount of games he should be seeing to further his development. What UPL needs is to see as much vulcanized rubber as he can in the minors for the next year in order to get ready to assume the mantle of full-time starter for the Sabres during the 2022-23 season. It makes little sense to glue him to the Sabres bench when he could get some big minutes with coach Seth Appert in Rochester. It looks like a two-horse race between Dell and Tokarski for those reasons.
So with all of that said, we finally come to the pick for Sabres backup goalie: Dustin Tokarski. The Canadian netminder has a grand total of 47 NHL games under his belt going back to the 2009-2010(!) season. He hadn’t even played in an NHL game between 2017 and 2020 until he re-emerged from his NHL slumber to play hockey for the Sabres following injuries that sidelined Linus Ullmark and Carter Hutton. Even more incredibly, he hadn’t won a game in the NHL since 2015 before finally breaking the streak under Don Granato. Bill Hoppe of buffalohockeybeat.com relayed that moment spectacularly in an article he wrote in April:
“It was pretty incredible, to be honest,” an emotional Tokarski said following Thursday’s 5-2 win over the Washington Capitals, his first NHL victory since Dec. 12, 2015. “I lost my dad a few years back, so that was my first NHL win since he’s passed.”
Tokarski, 31, started to become choked up talking about his late father, Mark, who passed away in 2017.
“So I was just pointing up to him for that special moment,” he said on a Zoom call. “And then all the guys were just awesome coming in, and there’s nothing better for a goalie celebrating with your teammates after a win.”
I know what you’re thinking: I’m letting sentimentality override logic. Like Sonny Corleone said about Michael in
The Godfather, “This is business and this man is taking it very, very personal.” Well, maybe there’s a touch of that going on as I’ve been known to love a good story, but there are still some solid reasons for choosing Tokarski over Dell. For one, Tokarski had a .904 save percentage last year compared to the .857 save percentage from Dell. On the analytic side, the charts for Tokarski looks a considerable bit better than Dell’s:
There seems to be a meaningful difference between Dell and Tokarski as the baseline stats and the analytics indicate that Tokarski was the better goaltender and should win the job this year. As any fan of hockey knows, though, puck luck plays a big factor in the game and Dell could end up looking like the better goaltender after the preseason. Whichever direction the Sabres go, they should not – under an circumstances – award UPL the job only to watch him sit on the bench for 55 games this season. Let him play the role of starter in Rochester.
Advanced stats definitions via the excellent breakdown of blueshirtsbreakaway.com:
FENWICK SAVE PERCENTAGE (FSV%)
The percentage of all unblocked shot attempts that are saved. By comparison, standard save percentage only counts shots on goal, so a goalie’s (or team’s) Fenwick save percentage is always higher than his (or its) standard save percentage. Because it strips out blocked shots, Fenwick save percentage is often the preferred calculation when discussing shot quality and individual save metrics by quality, such as low danger save percentage.
EXPECTED FENWICK SHOOTING PERCENTAGE (XFSH%)
The Fenwick shooting percentage (percentage of all unblocked shots that convert to goals) that a player or team would have shot if the opposing goalie performed at a league-average level, given the quality of scoring chances generated. The formula for the stat is: expected Fenwick shooting percentage = expected goals for/Fenwick for.
EXPECTED FENWICK SAVE PERCENTAGE (XFSV%)
The Fenwick save parentage that a goalie (or team) should have with a league average performance given the quality of chances faced. The formula for the stat is: expected Fenwick save percentage = 1 – expected goals against/Fenwick against.
ADJUSTED (DELTA) FENWICK SAVE PERCENTAGE (DFSV%)
The difference between a goalie’s (or team’s) actual Fenwick save percentage and his expected Fenwick save percentage. The formula is dFSv% = FSv% – xFSv%. All of the same context provided in the dSv% definition can be applied here, with the caveat that dFSv% considers all unblocked shot attempts, while dSv% considers only shots on goal.
GOALS SAVED ABOVE AVERAGE (GSAA)
This is a cumulative stat that represents the number of goals allowed by a goaltender compared to the number of goals that would have been allowed by a league average goalie. It is similar in nature to WAR in baseball that way, except it is specific to goals allowed by goaltenders.
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