Sabres reporter gets roasted for mocking Alexis Lafreniere before his OT winner for the Rangers
A Buffalo reporter made a confounding observation last night. In a tweet, Mike Harrington wrote; “it’s another nothing performance from Alexis Lafreniere. One shot on goal in 9:11 of ice time. Still no points in seven games for the No. 1 overall pick. You don’t even notice him.”
Now, I’m not sure what games Mr. Harrington has been watching, or if he was paying close enough attention to Lafreniere who probably should’ve had a hat trick last night.
Alexis Lafreniere has been generating offense
I know what I saw last night, but apparently when someone states he isn’t noticing a player, I try and dig in. So I headed on over to Natural Stat Trick and compared Lafreniere to Jack Eichel 5 on 5 for this season.
As fas as individual scoring chances for (iSCF) Eichel has 18 through 8 games. He also has 6 individual high danger chances for (iHDCF) and created 1 rebound. Pretty solid, wouldn’t you say?
Lafreniere in his 7 games and also 31 minutes less of ice time has 12 iSCF and 7 (iHDCF). That’s one more than Buffalo’s best player in over 30 minutes less ice time. He also has generated two rebounds. The only difference is the puck hasn’t gone in for him or his line mates.
Let me throw this at you as well.The Rangers best player, Artemi Panarin with 8 points in 7 games has only been credited with 12 iSCF and 3 iHDCF. He’s also played almost 20 minutes more than Alexis.
Lafreniere earned his goal and more points are coming
The 19 year-old is the first ever first overall pick to score his first NHL goal in OT per Sportsnet Stats. What’s most impressive about him is that he never, throughout the 7 games thus far stopped working. He never hung his head after glorious chances did not go in and get him down. He stuck with it and got rewarded.
“It’s pretty crazy. Overtime, game-winning goal, it was really special. I’ll never forget this moment, for sure,” Alexis Lafreniere said wearing the Broadway Hat, awarded to the player’s player of the game. “I had a lot of good chances and I was just keeping it going. It was going to go in, for sure. I kept going, kept grinding. Nice pass by [Blackwell] and I had the open net. It was a really good play by ‘Blacky.’”
Even in his euphoria, he credited Colin Blackwell for the great play and talked more about the team than himself. It’s no wonder why many within the Rangers organization feel that he will be the future captain of this team.
The bottom line is this, he’s gotten the proverbial monkey off his back and more goals and points are coming.
As far as Mr. Harrington, he certainly heard it last night from hockey and Rangers fans. He handled most of them very well too, and no one should be coming at anyone with vulgarity, especially over a hockey opinion.
“#NYR fans having a good time with the Lafreniere tweet — which was 100 percent correct at the time,” Harrington responded. “Good job by all reacting to something said in real time in the wake of something else that happened 20 minutes later.”
I will leave you all with my response. If you ask me, it was the most appropriate one possible.
NHL News and Scores for last night
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