Who Will Represent the Sabres at the All-Star Game?

The NHL will be announcing the representative of the Buffalo Sabres at the All-Star game tomorrow, per Chris Johnston of The Athletic. Johnston reports that all 32 teams, in fact, will have a representative announced Thursday. The remaining 12 participants for All-Star Weekend will be left up to a fan vote.

The Sabres have four players on their roster with All-Star Game experience, including Rasmus Dahlin (2), Jeff Skinner (1), Kyle Okposo (1), and Zemgus Girgensons (1). Tage Thompson was named as last season’s All-Star Weekend representative, but he was replaced by Dahlin due to injury.

Who’s the Likely All-Star?

Box score stats are the simplest and most common way that NHL All-Stars are determined. If you lead your team in points, then it’s likely you’ll be a frontrunner for nomination. In Buffalo’s case, the overall points leader is Casey Mittelstadt. His 31 points is two ahead of second place Dahlin, and four ahead of the next forward (Jeff Skinner).

So there it is. Casey at the bat, right?

Well, not so fast. Usually having a defenseman so close to the team point lead will lead to heavy consideration. The fact that Dahlin leads all NHL defensemen in goals and is 9th among all blueliners in points would make him the odds-on favorite for the All-Star nod.

Who’s All-Star Worthy?

For the sake of being a little more informed, let’s dig a bit deeper than box score statistics. After all, on-ice defense is a thing too, isn’t it?

Thanks to the model I developed for PuckLuck.com, we’re able to put a number on a players’ predicted goals-for value (GFV) and goals-against value (GAV) when they’re on the ice. It’s goal-differential that wins games, not points. So by subtracting a player’s GAV from their GFV, we’re able to determine a predictive goal-differential value (GDV).

Let’s take a look at each player’s GDV percentage: