Fourth line grinder started off strong but soon fizzled out
Total Season Stats: 2G, 7A, 9pts in 40 games
Age: 28
Contract Status: UFA; two-year, $3.2 million contract ended this summer
A strong physical player, Eric Robinson made his name at the Columbus Blue Jackets as a solid bottom six forward who was a big contributor on the penalty kill. He came to the Sabres in a mid-season trade to replace Zemgus Girgensons who was injured for five weeks just as Buffalo were slumping badly midseason. Whatever the terms were on the conditional seventh-round pick General Manager Kevyn Adams gave up for the forward, it’s likely Columbus aren’t getting them.
Robinson ended up averaging a shade under 11 minutes a night in the games he dressed in, between two and three minutes lesser than what he had been averaging at the Blue Jackets as Don Granato and Matt Ellis chose to limit his penalty-killing minutes, effectively reducing him to a fourth-line bit-part player.
Look, no one really came here to read Eric Robinson’s season recap, so here, I’m going to boil it down to a couple of sentences. He was a marginal fourth-line player with slight offensive-upside that ended up on a team where his penalty-killing abilities weren’t really needed used. It was a bit of a stretch that GM Kevyn Adams brought him in to play in Granato’s system and expected Robinson to provide enough of a spark to light up a flagging playoff challenge, so the alternate theory that GMKA made the trade as one of those “I’m doing this so that my team’s fanbase don’t think I have slipped into a coma before the deadline” than anything else.
Don’t really think I have anything else to say about Robinson beyond that, his own inconsistency while displaying some grinding skills likely means he’ll pick up another bottom six role or two for the next few years.
Season Grade: D
