The year is 2017 and Will Butcher is fresh off winning the Hobey Baker as the NCAA’s top ice hockey player. The 2013 5th round pick decided to test free agency rather than sign with the team that had drafted him, the Colorado Avalanche. Like the year before with fellow-Hobey-winner Jimmy Vesey, the Sabres were rumored to be interested in Butcher after he made his way to the market. ESPN.com (no author given) summed up the situation thusly:
According to multiple reports, the Vegas Golden Knights, New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres are among the teams Butcher may visit. Other reports have the Stanley Cup-winning Pittsburgh Penguins showing interest.
Butcher led the University of Denver to the national championship this past season. He scored 9 goals, added 23 assists and was a plus-19 in 39 games.
The Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, native became just the seventh defenseman to win college hockey's top honor. Overall, he had 28 goals and 75 assists for 103 points in 158 games with the Pioneers.
The Sabres would eventually land Jimmy Vesey on the second attempt and now they’ve also gotten their hands on Butcher. Neither of these unrestricted free agent NCAA players ended up living up to the hype but they’ve both put together respectable careers, although Vesey is still looking for an NHL gig following a season that saw him net 10 points in 50 games between Toronto and Vancouver.
Butcher, meanwhile, has spent his entire 4-year-career in New Jersey after signing during the 2017 offseason. The Sun Prairie, Wisconsin native started his career off with a bang by totaling 44 points in 81 games that season, although to this point, that has been the highwater mark of his career. His games played-per-season as well as his point totals have declined every year since which led to the New Jersey Devils trading him to the Sabres this offseason.
The Devils actually ended up paying more to trade Butcher than they did to acquire him in the first place as they sent a 5th round pick in 2022 along with Butcher (minus $910,569.00 in retained money by New Jersey) in exchange for future considerations. That’s pretty wild.
So what are the Sabres getting in Will Butcher? That’s the $2,822,764 question that could perhaps be answered in part by looking at his underlying statistics. His best season – both in terms of traditional statistics and analytics – came when he was playing sheltered third-pairing minutes for the Devils in 2017-2018, according to hockeyreference.com. I also headed over to dobber frozen tools to see some of his defense partners for that season and according to that website, the most common partner was stay-at-home defenseman Ben Lovejoy, and his next most common partner was Damon Severson.
His worst season (last season) came while playing most of his minutes with PK Subban, who is really nothing like those two. What we can infer from this data is that fewer minutes with more a more defensively responsible partner will likely generate more positive results for Butcher and the team as a whole rather than playing him for more minutes with offensively inclined partners. Sometimes analytics can be portrayed as a sort of nebulous, ethereal concept with the Wizard of Oz pulling levers behind a curtain, but this is really what it’s about: look at the data and use it to project how to maximize assets in a real-world way.
After taking all of that information into account, I think it may be wise to shake up the projected defense pairings and put Will Butcher with Mark Pysyk who is more akin to those two than Colin Miller. Pysyk is not – strictly speaking – a stay at home defenseman, although he leans more toward that side of the spectrum than Colin Miller does and that could be the kind of move that maximizes the value of Butcher. This move would create somewhat of a problem on the second pair because there is no real viable candidate to play second-pairing minutes with Colin Miller following the departure of Jake McCabe to Chicago. Robert Hagg, Jacob Bryson and Mattias Samuelsson are not players that can be counted on to contribute in that kind of role.
All of this means that Butcher will need to play more minutes than he really should, and if my interpretation of the data is correct, he should be playing those minutes with Mark Pysyk who can be relied on in a defensive role, which means playing Pysyk on the second pair. Look at that! Mark Pysyk went from fourth line forward to second pairing defenseman in two years.
This is certainly not an ideal solution on the back-end, but the Sabres have to use the pieces at their disposal to create the most advantageous outcome even if the pieces aren’t exactly what they might want. In a perfect world, the Sabres would play Butcher on the third pair with Pysyk, but perhaps by splitting the difference between first pair with PK Subban (bad) and third pair with Mark Pysyk (good), they can make it work on the second pairing.
X – X – X
X – X – X
Arttu Ruotsalainen -
Rasmus Asplund -
Vinnie Hinostroza
Zemgus Girgensons -
John Hayden -
Kyle Okposo
Cody Eakin
X – X
Will Butcher –
Mark Pysyk
Mattias Samuelsson -
Colin Miller
X
Dustin Tokarski
*******************
The Sabres and Rick Jeanneret are heading to oooooooooooovertime.
RJ won’t be calling an entire season’s worth of games, with the Buffalo News reporting that he’ll do a total of 20 matches this year. After 51 seasons, Jeanneret will call it a career and hopefully enjoy a nice, long retirement. It’s a real shame that the 79-year-old spent the past decade calling games for some truly awful teams instead of providing some memorable moments in the playoffs.
Perhaps he can come back and join Dan Dunleavy in the booth occasionally in the future. I listened to the WGR550 afternoon show on Friday and Chris “Bulldog” Parker put forth the idea that Jeanneret should have a statue in alumni plaza next to the bronze casting of The French Connection which is a fantastic idea in my opinion. Jeanneret is perhaps the most beloved figure of hockey culture in Western New York and giving him a permanent home outside the arena is a fitting tribute to a Sabres icon. The Sabres should make that happen while Rick is still with us.
Speaking of Dan Dunleavy, I may be in the minority among Sabres fans, but I think he does some quality work. “The workhorse from Whitehorse” moniker bestowed on Dylan Cozens by Dunleavy is probably my favorite of his calls, although I will agree that “The Eichel Tower” was a bit of a miss. Just like following Alex Trebek on Jeopardy, Dunleavy has enormous shoes to fill with RJ calling it a career, but he’s a very solid play-by-play man. Best of luck to them both this coming season.
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