Adam Proteau discusses the Buffalo Sabres' defensive lapses, Nolan Patrick not officially retiring from hockey and a reported Burlington youth hockey ice time disparity between the girls' and boys' teams.

This is Screen Shots, a regular THN.com feature in which your humble writer tackles a few different hockey topics and breaks them down into a handful of shorter paragraphs. And with that, we’ll move on to it.

In an already disappointing season, the Buffalo Sabres sunk to a low with this group in Tuesday’s 9-4 loss to the lowly Columbus Blue Jackets. 

This was about as disheartening a defeat as Buffalo has had in quite some time. There was a complete abandonment of defense, and they were a turnover machine to boot. The goaltending was the pits. For about 42:33 of ice time, they failed to produce a single goal on the defense-challenged Blue Jackets. It was a horrendous effort, to say the least, and it was another body blow to a Sabres team many observers expected much more from this year.

Stabilizing their goaltending has to be a priority for Sabres GM Kevyn Adams. Neither rookie Devon Levi nor tandem-mate Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen has a save percentage better than .893, and that’s not going to cut the mustard if Buffalo will bounce back in its final 49 regular-season games and push itself into a playoff position. 

As it stands, the Sabres are just seven standings points ahead of the Ottawa Senators for last place in the Atlantic Division – the Sens have six games in hand on Buffalo – and they’re six points behind fourth-place Tampa Bay. Not a good harbinger of what’s to come the rest of the way.

Unless there’s a drastic change in their results very soon, the Sabres are in real danger of missing the playoffs for the 13th consecutive season. And there’s no excuse for that.

There was confusion in the hockey world Tuesday when hockey coaching program The Power Play indicated NHLer Nolan Patrick retired from hockey at the very young age of 25. Patrick and his family confirmed to Global News and Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman that he is not, in fact, retiring. That said, he hasn't played in the NHL since March 2022 and looks to be keeping busy elsewhere.

Patrick – a No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 NHL draft – has been regularly sidelined by head injuries over his four years in the NHL, three of which were with Philadelphia. Patrick’s last season to this point was with the Vegas Golden Knights, but he’d been out of action since March 24, 2022, against the Nashville Predators, when he only took three shifts before leaving the game. He missed close to a month before that when, on Feb. 17, 2022, Colorado Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon hit Patrick up high and sent him to the dressing room.

It’s great that Patrick is still involved in the game – he’s listed as a “skills specialist” at The Power Play hockey school – but you always hate to see medical issues affect the careers of players nowhere near their competitive prime. Patrick's played in 222 career regular-season NHL games so far, generating 32 goals and 77 points. That feels like not nearly enough for him, but he has gotten to play more NHL games than 99.9 percent of the rest of us, so he should be proud of the time he has had in hockey’s top league up to this point.

The last thing we’d want for Patrick or any player is the type of sustained head trauma that can affect their off-ice lives and their days post-playing career, so we’d rather have hockey’s gatekeepers err on the side of caution and prevent repeated head trauma from happening than ask players to “fight through it” and have their medical status worsen over the long haul. We know better than that by now, and we don’t get any entertainment value in seeing players suffer. 

Patrick will be able to do good things, hockey-wise or otherwise – and we’ll breathe a bit easier that he’s taking time away from the NHL to take care of himself.

The gender battle in sports continued in Burlington, Ont. this month when a girls' youth hockey club called out the city over not getting equal ice time. 

The head of the Burlington Girls Hockey Club criticized the dissimilar amount of ice time girl players get compared to boys in the Burlington area’s 11 city-operated ice rinks. Will Short, the president of the BGHC, said his organization represents 850 girls, while the Burlington Eagles youth hockey organization represents 650 boys – yet Short said the Eagles get 800 additional hours each year than the BGHC does. That’s definitely not the equality we should be striving for.

The City of Burlington's senior manager of recreation, Denise Beard, said the city is aware of the disparity and is committed to gender equity when ice time is redistributed for the 2024 and 2025 winter season. Still, it seems like the city is kicking the can down the road to next season to address the problem. It should've been rectified well before this.