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Adams is trying to reduce the number of negative posts.

It is all quite true to this day. Ryan McLeod is still young and is at least top 9 and can handle a top 6 role in certain situations. But the FACT is he was not top 6 on a Stanley Cup finals team in Edmonton. Zucker was top 6 in his prime years at Minnesota but was not in the recent years before coming to Buffalo. Look at his career stats. Both are good hockey players that benefitted from more ice time, power play time, and playing higher in the lineup than they did on past teams. They can probably be top 6 on a wild card playoff team, but I specifically referenced contenders like Florida, Avs, Vegas - the top tier teams.

How can you be so successful as a business man without knowing basic leadership? This guy sucks and I’m wondering if actual intelligent people made the business moves for him.

It’s da Bills fault. TBD specifically.

Title is the whole subject. I’m using an iphone, Safari browser. Damn, but pages have been slow to load the last couple of days. Anyone else?

I still don’t view him as a center. He’s a sniper. He’s a lot more like Victor Olofsson than people want to admit. He has a little more grit but not a ton.

They just aren't and haven't been a "team" since the tank. I don't have an issue with Dahlin as a captain, the guy cares, and you can tell after 3 games that he is not a happy dude getting frustrated watching it all unfold. They're just a bunch of players, some good, some with traits, but nothing cohesive.

The first two sentences are a friggin genius interpretation. I want to bear your children.

This just isn't true. Last season, Zucker (and McLeod) would be 4th on Florida and Vegas and 3rd in Colorado for forwards points. He/They is basically borderline 1st line player (by raw numbers). I say this because there is often a perception that a first line palyer is 100 points, a second line player is 70 points and a third liner is 50+ and that just isn't true. Tuch, Tage, Zucker, Norris, McLeod is genuinely 5 top 6 forwards. Our issue is depth - Quinn, Benson, Kulich, Doan, Krebs need to step up and the whole forward group needs to player better defensively. The Sabres have actually played pretty well for big chunks of the last 3 games. The issue is that they didn't break through, and then would often give up a goal or major chance on the counter attack and it would sap their will and momentum

... is the incredible depth of lowness the reason why the Sabres had to sign that castaway/cast-off goalie (Georgiev (sp?)) to an NHL contract rather than a PTO? the agent said: "Buffalo?! Pffff. Okay. But not a PTO. An actual contract." Because what other team would have signed a guy under those circumstances to anything other than a PTO?

The city is broke, the county doesn’t want anything to do with the arena, and the state just gave Pegula a boatload of money for the Bills stadium. It will either be a scaled back Pegula funded renovation, or get comfy in the arena as it stands today.

Here is the issue and I believe I mentioned this before. Anyone wondering if McD or BB should be let go, can forget it. IMO Pegula has made such a mess of the Sabres that even if he thinks he should fire one or the other, paralysis would set in, and he will do nothing. Reality…Josh Allen is saving McD & BB year after year, and on occasion when he is not superman, all of a sudden McD & BB don’t look as good.

Some enterprising Sabres fan needs to make a version of this Bears shirt

Adams getting an extension positioned as “one more kick at the can, this time (this, this, THIS time) for realz, is at least as likely as him getting canned

Yup, that's it. Pegula has to step away fully and give it to someone. He won't, but he has to. This is why I assume it'll be Jarmo. He's already here. You can argue that he didn't get it done in Columbus, but at least he's an experienced GM and hopefully learned from the mistakes he made there. But if they don't fix the culture nothing will change. The lack of effort and the lazy plays resulting in giveaways show you that the culture is totally broken. There is no excuse for that and those people need to go. The standard has to change and the bar of acceptability has to be raised. Not having a competitive camp started this. Merit didn't earn you a job on this team. All jobs were predetermined. That sends a bad message. Now you see Ruff will bench Kulich because he's not performed to last year's level. Oh my, what a shock, a young kid given too much too soon having a drop off. That never happens. So sure, Kulich should be down the line up but he's a kid. Admit you put him in a bad spot. It's your fault not his. Meanwhile Quinn, who has performed even worse still plays and he's older and has had more time to figure it out. So what does that say to them? It's all broken.

And without any action from him to the contrary there’s nothing left

Hoping your owner wants to win at sportsball is not a strategy.

Ruff is the only lame duck coach in the league. I'd have to do some research, but I'm guessing there are very few other GMs who on the final year of their contract. It's substitute teacher season in Sabres University and the students are looking to summer already and there's no knowing what classes will be offered next year.

They do, and in this case you'd be bad, but it's the only way to reset the culture. You'd have a bunch of AHL vets and hacks to start but you could build the hard to play against lunch bucket type thing and then begin inserting young talent to that base, It would take years but how else are you getting out of it? EVERYTHING has to change. Bandaids and one guy here or there won't get it done. All the guys stuck in this and all the slackers have to go to make it different.

Exactly. Well said. I’ve mentioned it a million times - the Sabres’ players aren’t stupid. They can SEE the lack of accountability. They understand the franchise doesn’t want to measure itself by way of results the sabres aren’t unsalvageable “even if they fire Adams”, that’s backwards the sabres are *revealed to be* unsalvageable because they won’t fire him. They won’t express accountability there’s hope for the Pegula that does can Adams right now. But if Pegula canned Adams right now he wouldn’t be the Terry we know and love, at all I’ll keep hoping for the canning of the GM, for some element of competency to be revealed in him, because it’s all we have “well if we fire him it won’t make a difference” has always, always been a reflection of a defence mechanism to the idea one knows he won’t be Even the acknowledgement the GM hasn’t been good enough would be a chasm of improvement from what we have seen - we are that low. I ask anyone if the sabres are in a position to deny even one modicum of hope to the fans.

If even in the spring.

To the bold: a great point, and the answer is a resounding “no”, of course. Adams should be fired if you believe in accountability to results. As for the rest, the same stuff I (and for some of it, others too) was vehemently railing on to increasing apparent annoyance, as a warning, all offseason long: -“sabres had enough scoring” to what, finish bottom 10 again? -JJ Peterka loss was, as always, worked over time in a frenzy into “addition by subtraction”. Only his faults mattered once we dealt him -we could simply “choose” to play better D while retaining offence cause players would just “pick up the slack” up front. Shell game thinking need not apply - players weren’t “injury prone”, they were just, coincidentally, hurt all the time - oh the GM made a ton of changes! 25.414436 percent of the roster since the start of the LAST year we didn’t make the playoffs. Pay no attention to the fact every team does on the fringe adjustment every year as a function of the league itself. Danforth is our impact addition. - when you don’t acquire good players, you theorize maybe the players we did get will be “harder” to play against. Whatever that means - maybe the Adams set up of requiring 34 consecutive coin flips to go your way isn’t the *best* strategy even if it’s strictly possible!

There is a great line in the final episode of season 3 of Fargo. The season 3 villain says: "You see it all of the time in nature: the smaller animal goes limp in the jaws of the large predator. On some level, food knows that it is food." Maybe it's too deep. I think this is the Sabres though. The players know this is not going to work. They know they exist to be one of the 16 teams that doesn't make the playoffs. I mean, take a minute to go back in the modern history of the NHL or of any of the other major leagues, and think of a scenario where the league's least successful owner of any particular era, hires a guy with no relevant experience to be GM, sticks with that guy into a 6th year after missing the playoffs for 5, and together they hire the oldest coach in the league who is not high on any NHL player's "coach I would love to play for" list and who has not had consistent NHL success in well over a decade, and they go with a group of assistant coaches that has never coached in an NHL playoff game (save for the goalie coach), and the senior advisor they bring in to advise the GM missed the playoffs in his last 5 years in the role and recently thought hiring a wanker like Mike Babcock was a good idea. If you pitched this as a sitcom, you would be asked to scale back on the absurdity. The Sabres are not the least talented team in the NHL. I hope we don't get to the point as fans where we forget that we have seen these players play good hockey. If Pegula waits until the off-season, or until this season is effectively over, to make changes, then we will just be starting over. If he fires Adams and Ruff soon, he can send a message that this is not acceptable and that more is expected. Maybe it won't make a difference, but it is time to try a bold in-season move that at least has the potential to change the team's fortunes immediately.

I could not agree with you more, I have said it, as have you, over and over... just firing Adams and Ruff and plucking in Jarmo and Appert isnt gonna do it... you need to go out there and find exactly what you said and pay what you need to pay to get it... then turn it over to them... and allow them to assess, create vision, and execute as a cohesive unit...