Jeff Skinner misses Buffalo Sabres practice due to upper-body injury

Skinner, 31, apparently suffered the injury during Tuesday’s 5-2 loss to the Seattle Kraken, although he played through it for the remainder of the game. He had a goal and an assist in 15:42 of ice time in the loss.

Sabres head coach Don Granato seemed to believe that the injury isn’t a long-term one after Wednesday’s practice.

“We won’t know until we get the imaging and then the final doctors look at it and assess it, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be long,” Granato said to the media after practice. “That’s the hope and we can only stick to that right now.”

However, Skinner remains questionable for Thursday’s game against the Ottawa Senators.

Skinner has 17 goals and 16 assists for 33 points in 38 games, which is about on par with his recent production after a couple of rough seasons in Buffalo. It currently puts him on pace for 71 points in an 82-game season, which would be his second best season behind 2022-23, although he won’t hit that between this injury and the upper-body injury he dealt with earlier in the year that made him miss three games.

Since Skinner has rediscovered his game in 2021-22, he’s been one of the best offensive players in the league, with a 0.75 offensive goals above replacement per 60 that ranks 11th in the league in that span among forwards with at least 3000 minutes of ice time.

Skinner was originally the seventh-overall pick in the 2010 NHL Draft by the Carolina Hurricanes, and he spent eight seasons with Carolina before he was traded to the Sabres in the 2018 offseason for Cliff Pu and a second, third and sixth round pick. He’s since spent the past six years in Buffalo, playing out his eight-year contract with a $9 million cap hit, which is currently in it’s fifth year after he signed it in 2019 coming off a career-high 40-goal season.

The Sabres will look to bounce back from Tuesday’s loss when they host the Sens on Thursday at 7 p.m. EST. They currently sit in seventh in the Atlantic Division with a 17-20-4 record, and are seven points behind the Tampa Bay Lightning for the final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference with one game in hand.