Zucker Out, and the Left Wing Depth Chart Gets Thinner

Jason Zucker had sports hernia surgery and will miss the start of the season. That's the update. It lands at a bad time: Danforth and Kulich are still on injured reserve, Tuch is gone to Washington, and the left wing depth Buffalo is counting on to develop around Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin is already running short before a game has been played.

Zucker isn't a star — he appeared in 31 games last season, posting 12 goals and 11 assists — but he's a veteran who could fill a shift without incident. That kind of quiet reliability matters more than usual when the players behind him are young and, at the moment, unavailable. Zach Benson is signed and presumably healthy, and Ostlund got his extension done Monday. But Benson is 20 and Ostlund had 27 points in 60 rookie games. Neither is ready to absorb extra minutes without cost.

The front office built this offseason around a bet on youth. That's defensible. What's harder to plan around is the injury pile accumulating before training camp opens. My read is that the next two or three weeks of camp health reports matter more than anything else on Buffalo's schedule right now — not because Zucker is irreplaceable, but because the margin for further attrition on the left side is essentially gone.