E111. "Starting Off Wounded"

Yeah, so let's get the bat out of the way quickly.

And first, Owen Zellweger is...

In concussive protocol, seems like he's doing actually okay, but took a pretty meaningless hit.

It was clean.

Should have had his head up.

But I just...

What did that really accomplish there, Carson Soucy? Did that really skyrocket you up the depth chart over there in Columbus? And then Matthias Samuelsson took a shot off the foot, and he is weak to weak, and that is...

You just really don't want to hear...

Let's go over Zellweger first because Olin Zellweger has been kind of the talk of camps, especially after the scrimmage that we were at.

He looked pretty good at.

What are your thoughts on, I mean, I guess maybe just like the incident, if you want to talk about that, but just who would be the obvious replacement for someone that you're kind of penciling in for Owen Powers' partner and immediately having to change after two preseason

games? Yeah, I think Zellweger's been a pretty exciting player so far.

Like, you can see flashes of... what makes him an exciting player.

You also see like flashes of like why a lot of the older coaches in the NHL don't really trust him that much and kind of want to revise his game down a little bit.

I think that Susie hit was an example because you could probably get away with being in that spot of the ice at that size and like the AHL or in junior hockey.

Yeah.

But in the NHL, you're probably going to get lit up if you go in that area of the ice without being fully aware.

So yeah, I think it's just parts like that with his game where it's like he does so much cool stuff, like those spin moves we see, like he's an elite skater, can make great passes, loves shooting the puck too.

I think it's kind of just dialing his game into being a more almost like conservative type of game which I think will help him earn the trust of his coaches, in this case, Lindy Ruff, a little bit more.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for him to recover.

It looked like a pretty brutal hit, and he was on the ice for a little bit, but he did post something on his Instagram story saying he's going to be back, so we'll see if he even misses any regular season games.

I think that's one of the reasons why the Sabres haven't really been pushing for a defense addition because I do think if you get Zellweger back, you could slide someone like Dennis Gilbert into that seventh defenseman role and just put Mets on your top six and probably survive like that for a few weeks.

And if another injury happens, Gilbert has some NHL games under his belt and he could slide in there too.

And yeah, You can also look at guys like Ryan Johnson and Mirko, too.

It looked like they had them practicing with the NHL team today, so it will be interesting to see if those guys, they'll get a chance to push this preseason for potentially that seventh defenseman spot.