Buffalo Sabers 2024 Player Report Card: Eric Robinson

The fourth line crusher started strong but quickly fell apart

Total season stats: 2G, 7A, 9pts in 40 games

Age: 28

Contract status: UFA; two-year contract worth $3.2 million completed this summer

A solid physical player, Eric Robinson made a name for himself with the Columbus Blue Jackets as a solid bottom-six forward who contributed greatly on the penalty kill. He came to the Sabers in a mid-season trade to replace Zemgus Girgensons who was injured for five weeks as Buffalo fell apart badly in mid-season. Whatever the terms of the conditional seventh-round pick that general manager Kevyn Adams gave up for the forward, it’s likely that Columbus won’t get them.

Robinson ended up averaging less than 11 minutes per night in the games he suited up, between two and three minutes less than he averaged on the Blue Jackets as Don Granato and Matt Ellis chose to limit his shorthanded minutes, effectively reducing him to a fourth-line player.

Listen, nobody Really I came here to read Eric Robinson’s season recap, so here I’ll summarize it in a few sentences. He was a fringe fourth-line player with slight offensive potential who found himself on a team where his shorthanded skills weren’t really necessary used. It was a bit of a stretch that general manager Kevyn Adams brought him in to play in Granato’s system and expected Robinson to provide enough of a spark to light up a playoff challenge, thus the alternate theory that GMKA made the exchange one of those “I’m doing this so my team’s fans don’t think I fell into a coma before the deadline” than anything else.

I don’t really think I have anything else to say about Robinson beyond that, his own inconsistency while showing some work skills probably means he’ll fill one or two more bottom six roles over the course of the next few years.

Season level: D

(After the backlash from Comrie’s review and rating, I recalibrated what my fellow writers hand out for ratings.)