Unlike most of the Sabres’ other young, high-end talent, Henri Jokiharju came to the Sabres organization via trade as opposed to being drafted by the team. The 22-year-old was brought in the summer of 2019 as Jason Botterill attempted to overhaul his defense group under new head coach Ralph Krueger. Jokiharju was instantly popular among Sabres fans in part because the man they traded away to get Jokiharju, Alex Nylander, was decidedly not a popular prospect among Sabres fans. Nylander had been selected 8th overall in the 2016 NHL draft by Botterill’s predecessor, Tim Murray, in the last draft before Murray would be dismissed and Botterill was brought in.
The Sabres decided to take what they saw as the quickest path possible with Nylander (a theme that would repeat itself often with the Sabres under the stewardship of Murray) and put Nylander in the AHL despite being only 18 years old. Typically players aren’t allowed to enter the AHL so young but Nylander had an exemption that allowed him to do so, as Jared Clinton of The Hockey News explains:
Nylander, 18, could be set to head to the Sabres’ farm club as soon as the 2016-17 campaign, which would means the young winger is making use of a loophole that would allow him to go from major junior to North America’s top minor league before the normal age of eligibility.
Typically, a player drafted out of major junior has to wait until their age 20 season to become a full-time AHLer. But Nylander is the rare case of a player who had spent the entirety of the past season on a loan. So, in that sense, he’s not a major junior player, but a European player that is eligible for the AHL whenever the Sabres see fit. And it appears they could see fit this season.
Whether this severely hampered his development is impossible to say, although he never truly excelled in the AHL. His last year in the organization, 2018-2019, saw Nylander bottom out with 26 points in 65 games for the Rochester Americans before being shipped west that summer.
Jokiharju was also quickly jettisoned from the organization that drafted him; it was a mere two years from his draft to a trade for Jokiharju and the reasons weren’t necessarily performance based. Jokiharju was drafted out of the WHL after putting up 48 points in 71 games and would return to the Portland Winterhawks the next season where he scored 71 points in 63 games. The report on Jokiharju going into the draft in 2017 was that he’s a smooth skating defenseman with top-four potential. From Ben Kerr (lastwordonsports):
Jokiharju has the potential to be a top four defenceman in the NHL. If he continues to develop, he can play on the power play and the penalty kill. He needs to add some muscle to his frame though, and could stand to really work on his slap shot and wrister going forward. That may limit him to being more of a second unit, than first unit power play defenceman.
Most of that ended up being accurate and former Blackhawks head coach and future Hall of Fame member Joel Quenneville seemed to take a shine to him quickly during the 2018-2019 season as he skipped the AHL and went straight to the show. Jokiharju saw quality minutes for Coach Q but the Blawhawks were entering a transitional phase as the core that carried the Hawks to multiple cups started to show signs of age and wear-and-tear from the many successful playoff runs. The Blackhawks decided to move on from Quenneville and hired Jeremy Colliton to replace him. Colliton didn’t seem to have the same affinity for Jokiharju as his predecessor and as a result, Jokiharju was demoted to the AHL for the latter part of the 2018-2019 season before ultimately being traded.
Anecdotally, that didn’t seem to be a popular move among Blackhawks fans. The general feeling at the time was that Jokiharju was a solid commodity with a likely path to the NHL and a long career ahead of him, while Nylander was more of a gamble in the hopes of finding lightning in a bottle and unleashing dormant offensive ability.
Jokiharju, meanwhile, was coming to a Sabres team that suddenly flush with right side defensemen which meant he had to battle for ice time right off the bat. It seemed at the time like the Sabres believed that he would likely go to Rochester for a season before making his debut in Buffalo but he ended up making the team, furthering the defensive log jam. The 6’0” defenseman was pretty much as advertised in his rookie campaign: smooth skating, good outlet pass and defensively responsible. Jokiharju struggled at times on the penalty kill so perhaps it’s best to leave those duties to the players below him on the depth chart and focus on feeding Jokiharju even-strength minutes with only sporadic shorthanded usage as needed should injuries pop up.
The Finnish-born defenseman is a transitional defenseman rather than an offensive one; that is, his game is to make a simple play in the defensive zone and then use his skating and vision to make the proper read to get the puck up the ice. He’s not likely to put up enormous offensive point totals, and as Ben Kerr pointed out in his prospect report, Jokiharju’s shot isn’t anything to write home about. “Joker” seemed to regress a bit in his sophomore campaign prior to Krueger’s dismissal as he had 2 points in 18 games, with a -7 rating to start the season. Things improved under the tutelage of Dan Girardi who served as an assistant coach with Don Granato, as Jokiharju had 6 points in 28 games, -4 rating while playing around 20 minutes a night over the last month + of the season.
Say what you will about the value of +/- rating, but the fact that he was a -4 while playing huge minutes in front of goalies that largely had no business being in the NHL is pretty dang good.
Dan Girardi will not reprise his role as assistant coach this season due to personal commitments elsewhere so it looks like Marty Wilford will be teaching the Sabres young defensemen this year. The 44-year-old Wilford was a journeyman defenseman throughout his career who mostly played in the AHL and the German elite league before getting into coaching. He most recently spent three years as an assistant coach with the Anaheim Ducks.
How the coaching change will affect Jokiharju remains to be seen, but it’s a fair to hazard a guess and say he’ll likely be playing 20+ minutes a night again this season, after which it’ll be more clear if Jokiharju tops out as a good second pairing defenseman or whether he can truly be called a top-pairing guy. Only time will tell.
Here’s the roster to this point:
Jeff Skinner – X –
Victor Olofsson
Anders Bjork – X –
Tage Thompson
Arttu Ruotsalainen -
Rasmus Asplund -
Vinnie Hinostroza
Zemgus Girgensons -
John Hayden -
Kyle Okposo
Cody Eakin
X – Henri Jokiharju
Will Butcher –
Mark Pysyk
Mattias Samuelsson -
Colin Miller
Craig Anderson
Dustin Tokarski 
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