Rasmus Ristolainen has been an unprecedented offensive presence for the Buffalo Sabres since joining the NHL in 2013. If you need proof, just watch his goal from November 27, against the San Jose Sharks. Ristolainen has very impressive skating abilities and hands, despite standing at 6’4″ and weighing 215 pounds (193 cm, 97 kg). Throughout his career, he’s scored a combined 168 points in 375 games.
With all of his offensive positives, Ristolainen’s statistics reflect those of a winger, not a top-line defenseman. He has consistently been among the worst in the league in a variety of defensive stats through his six-year career. In a sport where each position and player tends to be fairly consistent statistically, Ristolainen might be the truest boom-or-bust package that the NHL has to offer.
Rasmus Ristolainen is a Boom-Or-Bust Defenseman
Offence
There’s no denying his offensive prowess. In each of the last three seasons, Rasmus Ristolainen has scored over 40 points and he’s on pace to do it again. Almost all of these points have come from assists, as he hasn’t had a single year of double-digit goals yet. Still, his passing abilities and love of being involved in the offensive-rush have made him one of the league’s top-tier offensive-defensemen.
Yet, he can’t be called a pure offensive-defenseman simply because of his size and how he uses it. Ristolainen is strong and he loves playing a physical brand of hockey. He totalled a career-high 206 hits last season, which ranked him ninth in the league. This year, he currently leads the league with 91 hits through 29 games. This puts him on pace to total roughly 257 hits this year if he keeps the average of 3 hits a game. 257 hits would’ve been good enough for second in the league last season, just a few behind similarly-sized Nikita Zadorov.
Rasmus Ristolainen also uses his body to compliment his offence perfectly. In the aforementioned dazzling goal, Rhe uses a between-the-legs deke to get the puck on his backhand. This put it on his left side, with San Jose’s Brent Burns on his right. The strong Ristolainen had no issue driving the net at this point. Using your body to protect the puck is a very common tactic when in the offensive zone, but Ristolainen’s ability to do it so well, combined with his large stature, make him lethal when he is in tight spaces. This coincides with a very strong passing ability to make Ristolainen a true, elite playmaker.
Defence
With all of this said, there’s a huge hole in Ristolainen’s play. After all, only one other Sabres defenseman has a lower goal differential during even-strength play. Looking at the same stat, Ristolainen has been terribly ineffective on the penalty-kill as well. Overall, he averages 0.3 goals-against-above-replacement, despite being on the team that ranks ninth in the league in goals-for. This means that despite ranking sixth on the Sabres in points, Ristolainen is one of the worst defenders the team has.
His possession metrics are also fairly disappointing. Like with the goals-above-replacement stats, only Marco Scandella ranks worse than Ristolainen when you look at the team’s defence. Overall, the Sabres have only had the puck in their possession 45.5 percent of the time that Ristolainen is on the ice. While he’s been on the ice, the Sabres goalies have faced 440 shots, roughly 15 each game. To put that into perspective, the Sabres face an average of 32 shots a game.
Last Year’s Stats
This means Ristolainen is on the ice for just under half of the team’s shots-against. It is slightly skewed, however, considering Ristolainen leads the team in average ice time. He averages 25 minutes a game, five minutes more than Zach Bogosian, who ranks second.
The difference in Ristolianen and Bogosian’s stats still tells a disappointing story for Ristolainen, though. Bogosian has faced over 100 fewer shots than Ristolainen and averages five fewer shots-against each game. So even though his increased minutes might inflate the stats, there’s still a very obvious issue with Ristolainen playing in his own zone.
So, when Ristolainen is on the ice, the opposing team has the puck more and gets more shots as a result. A mix of great goaltending and the best offence in the league has masked Ristolainen’s defensive woes this year. If either of these starts to weaken in any sort of way, Ristolainen quickly becomes a liability to the team.
This was made apparent last season when the Sabres offence scored the fewest goals in the entire league. This snowballed and left a struggling Buffalo defence to their own devices. The team ended up allowing over 2659 shots and ranked 29 in the league in goals-allowed, with 280. Ristolainen was on the ice for the most even-strength goals-against of any Sabres defenseman last year. This was despite only averaging one more minute of even-strength ice time than Scandella, who ranked second.
This Year and Moving Forward
Despite the massive improvement of the Sabres team, who won 10 games straight at the end of November, Ristolainen is still struggling in his own end. It hasn’t been bad enough that the team is calling for his resignation, but it seems like they’re ignoring a major issue.
Ultimately, the decision to keep allowing Ristolainen over 25 minutes of ice time a game show that the Sabres clearly think his upsides outweigh his downsides. This is made evident by the fact that, since 2015, Ristolainen averages the fourth most shifts per game of any NHL defenseman. In that same time period, he ranks 17 amongst defensemen in assists; 21 in total points.
So clearly, the Sabres are thinking right in playing Ristolainen. Still, his downside is very obvious and makes a clear case for calling him one of the worst defenders in the league. His great scoring stats, juxtaposed with his poor defensive stats, make Rasmus Ristolainen one of the biggest risk-reward packages that the NHL has.
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