GASabresIUFAN

KA has done alot and nearly all of it terrible at the NHL level. Like Jbot, his drafting is his saving grace so far, but not one of his draftees has yet to suit up for the Sabres.

Actually RK only coached 50% of the last season. KA brought in Hall, Eakin, Staal and Rieder to help enhance the returning roster. Those decisions are on KA. He failed to improve the goaltending or the defense and that is also on KA. RK is the worst NHL coach I have ever seen and that includes Ron Rolston, but KA is the GM and the enhanced roster he created was awful. Sorry he doesn't get a pass just because RK was the coach. Also the Sabres weren't that much worse in the first 25 games last season at 6-15-4 despite being on a 0-7-2 losing streak at that time. The Sabres are 1-8-1 in their last 10 and are currently on a 5 game losing streak.

In 81 games as GM KA's Sabres are 23-48-10 for 56 pts.

Dylan Cozens? Bryson? UPL? Aren't they Jbot's players on the roster as well? Aren't key prospects R2, Portillo, Samuelsson, Johnson, and Laaksonen Jbot's as well? We can make the same conclusions about KA already. 39 players played for the Sabres in KA's first year. Of the 10 players he brought in, only 4 remain (Tokarki, Bjork, Caggiula and Eakin), two of which were late season acquisitions, and none will be here beyond this season. 17 returnees from last year's Sabres have skated for the team this season and 19 are out of the organization completely. Of these 17 returnees, KA will likely move on from many of them this year at the deadline or in the off-season. Of the 11 guys he brought in for this season, 2 are already gone and nearly all the rest will be gone by year's end. I doubt any of Butcher, Hagg, Hayden, Subban, Dell, Anderson, or Jankowski remain here beyond this season. I think only Hinostroza and Pysyk have a chance to remain and that is tenuous at best. So far not a single KA acquisition has made a lasting positive impact on the team. Many of them have contributed nothing and many more have been downright awful such as Staal, Hall, Hayden, Dell, Subban, Eakin, Bjork, and Butcher. Hopefully Tuch comes back healthy and makes a positive difference. You may not like it, but the core of this team going forward is going to be Jbot's prospects and young acquisitions. Thompson, Cozens, Samuelsson, Joki, Mitts, Johnson, Dahlin, and Bryson all look like core pieces and possibly Laaksonen, UPL and Portillo as well. I don't disagree that Jbot's roster building wasn't great, but his legacy on this team will be here for years to come.

No , that isn’t correct. KA could have extended Ullmark the season before (KA 1st off-season) and that is what Thorny and I were discussing. People seem to forget that this last off-season was KA’s second in charge. Both Ullmark and Reinhart were given 1 year deals that first off-season. Ullmark was coming off a very credible 2.69 w a .915 and KA decided that wasn’t worth a long-term deal. Had he given him a reasonable 3 or 4 year deal then, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now. Had he also signed Reinhart to a multi-year extension, he might have received an even better trade this past off-season or had his No.1 center. Again, penny wise and pound foolish.

We went from a max cap team to a minimum cap team in one off-season and now have the lowest payroll in the NHL. We traded away every high priced player that had any market value. We then failed to sign Ullmark (He signed at around 5pm with) and then at 5:30 pm that day he acquired Butcher for 2.8 and a 5th, signed Anderson (9:30 pm) and then Dell the following day the total of those contracts getting us to the floor. Even @LGR4GM agrees that Butcher was acquired just to get us to the cap floor. Of course, by the time Ullmark walked nearly every other goalie with decent talent had already been signed or acquired by trade. In fact, Comrie, Andersen, Halak, Elliott, Bernier, Holtby, Brossoit, Grubauer, Jones, and Rittich all signed FA deals while KA attempted to re-sign Ullmark. Also goaltenders like Hill (acquired for a prospect and a 2nd) , Kruemper, MAF (acquired for a prospect), Nedjelkovic (for a 3rd), Vanacek (for a 2nd), and Spenser Martin ( Future Considerations) all changed teams as well. Hill, Nedjelkovic and Vanecek went for very reasonable prices and wouldn't have hurt our rebuild at all. Jack was later traded and we acquired Boychuk's contract to get back to the floor. While Anderson may still have been signed, I'm pretty confident Butcher and Dell would not have been acquired had Ullmark stayed. Management knew this would be a losing season on the ice and at the box office and did almost everything possible to minimize cost this. Of course there is any internal cap this season. The real question is will there be one next season as well.

He also could have re-signed Ullmark then as well and chose not to.

Let me see if I can explain the Butcher thing. 1) He is a terrible player. Good offensive skills, but a complete train wreck in his own zone and should have never been acquired. With Hagg, Dahlin and Bryson already here and Samuelsson waiting he was a completely unnecessary acquisition at LHD. If KA wanted additional depth at LHD to keep Samuelsson in Rochester, cheaper and better defensive players were and are available. 2) The team has an internal cap of 60-65 mill this season. That means that ever $ under the cap needs to be allocated smartly. Placing 5% of that cap in who amounts to your 4th LHD again makes no sense. 3) With Ullmark bolting, this money should have been allocated to a goalie instead of a worthless D. It's a similar decision to signing Hall last year. Yes he was a splash signing, but a position of strength last year (LW). His huge cap hit left no money to upgrade the goaltending. In both season getting help in goal was a higher priority then adding another LW or another LHD this season. Yes it got us to the cap, but as we saw with the Boychuk move, that was easily possible another way. It's no surprise that KA's best decisions have all come since Karmanos joined the organization, but ultimately KA still has the general manager title and his handling of the goaltending that last two seasons is mindbogglingly horrible. This current losing streak is not on DG or the players. It solely rest on KA and his decision in goal.

@brawndo. What a bunch of excuses for incompetence. Of course a rebuilding team can pay a 2nd for a 2 year goalie. That acquired goalie is also an asset and can be traded later. Wash paid a 2nd for 25 year old goalie in Vanacek. Det paid a 3rd for Nedjelkovic. Good deals were available and KA ignored them time and again to stick with Hutton and later his “plan”. Those two goalies could have stabilized the position and given us the goalie of the future and not just a 2 year bridge. Other trades were likely available. I’m sorry but paying 2.8 mill for flawed player to acquire a 5th round pick is just plain stupid, especially for a team on a budget and with a boat full of D prospects and greater needs like goaltending or D first defensemen. He was never going to get another pick for Butcher because he can’t play defense at all. He makes Miller look competent. Goaltending was this teams top priority the past two off-seasons and our incompetent GM couldn’t see past our injury riddled but good goalie in Ullmark. At best KA had to get a good backup for Ullmark’s inevitable injury. He also should have realized that Ullmark was going to explore other options especially when the Sabres were about to go through another rebuild. Every other veteran wanted off the sinking ship why would Ullmark want to stay if he had a choice? KA should have had a plan B and didn’t and that is the bottomline. He alone is responsible for the goaltending issues for the last two years. He honestly should be fired for that failure alone. No one thinks that Karmanos or the other hires weren’t good. The truth is they should be in charge, not KA. He literally needs to be removed from the NHL roster decision making for the good of the franchise.

So how do you solve the attendance problem? Winning or at the very least putting a product on the ice that has a chance of winning each night. We can do that right now with some real goaltending.

….. For love in all the wrong places.

Here is one of my biggest frustrations with the lack of goaltending. Hockey is hard and all players, especially young ones, make mistakes. Without decent goaltending those mistakes end up in your own net. This harms the development of the young players. They end up playings scared and that leads to more mistakes and ultimately a loss of confidence. We are seeing that right now across the lineup, especially on guys like Dahlin, who carries so much expectations. He is afraid to make a mistake instead of allowing his talent to show through.

Yes. He said as much when he discussed the signings of Anderson and Dell. If he truly believed it is a problem he’d have found better solutions then keeping Hutton, signing Dell and Anderson and acquiring Subban. Subban was only acquired to replace injured or ill players, not to upgrade the position.

It was a tank from the onset.

That's the problem. All this was foreseeable. I wrote about it in the off-season as did so many others. If we could see it as fans on a message board, then why couldn't Sabres management? If they did see it, why did they do it anyway unless it was to tank the franchise again. If the plan was to tank, then their stated goal to build a new culture was BS.

Doesn't have a choice. Anderson, Tokarski and Subban are sick or hurt and Dell is just awful. Why hasn't Dell been waived already?

Honestly, it's based on what happened in Carolina while trying to rebuild without adequate goaltending. He has seen that problem first hand and I hope wouldn't make the same mistake twice.

What has UPL done to make the above stated plan a reasonable one? Nothing. UPL was 36th in save % last season in the AHL and he's 40th this season. You say that plan was not to invest significantly in the position on the faint hope UPL proves ready sooner then later. The funny thing is that they are wasting decent money already on the position with nearly zero return. Subban, Anderson and Dell alone are costing 2.35 million. Add the foolish contract to Butcher (2.8) and we could have invested $5 mill in real goaltending and not spent a single $ more then we are currently spending with likely better results in goal and on defense. So you say now that the plan is to keep putting band-aids on the problem until UPL finally proves ready. In essence continue to waste more money on bad goaltending. How does this make any sense? So what do they do when UPL gets shelled again in his next callup?

No one said retain Ullmark at all costs. Keeping Ullmark was about keeping adequate goaltending as the kids developed. Others could have done that just as well and that is the point. It was the right move for KA to try to keep him and he was right to bolt. KA should have known that was a likely (even probable) outcome and had an adequate substitute when Ullmark bolted. He didn't and that is why we are here. Tanking is a very different plan then keeping Ullmark. Try to spin it any way you want, but as I illustrated above the difference between adequate goaltending for this team and not is night and day. It's not the defense, it's the goaltending and the stats clearly bare that out. Putting decent goalies in and this team wins, putting Tokarski, Dell, JJ, Hutton and Subban in and you are tanking the team's chances for success. Also relying on a 40 year old goalie to anchor the team was simply stupid as I also illustrated above. Only 3 have ever played 50% of a season and only one, the greatest goaltender of all time in Hasek, did it well.

Sabres goaltenders the last two years 2020-21 Ullmark - 9-6-3, 2.63 gaa .917 save % Hutton - 1-10-1, 3.47 gaa .886 save % Tokarski - 2-8-2, 3.54 gaa .904 save % Johansson - 0-5-1, 3.79 gaa . 884 save % Houser - 2-2-0, 3.46 gaa . 901 save % UPL - 1-3-0, 3.88 gaa .906 save % 2021-22 Tokarski - 4-5-3, 3.28 gaa, .903 save% Anderson - 4-2-0, 2.50 gaa, .921 save % Dell - 0-5-0, 4.52 gaa, .872 save % Subban - 0-1-0, 7.21 gaa, .760 save % By the way, only 3 goalies have played more then 40 games in a season in the past 5 decades at age 40 or older, and only 1 was truly good and his name of course was Dominic Hasek. They are Roloson - 50 gp - 23-18-1, 3.00 gaa and .907 save % Belfour - 49 gp - 22-22-0, 3.29 gaa and .892 save % Hasek - 43 gp - 28-10-5, 2.09 gaa and .925 save % It was pretty unreasonable for KA to rely on Anderson as the solution.

KA has never stuck to a plan since he arrived. Last season he loaded up on vets to try to get over the hump and then switched to rebuild when the first plan failed. This off-season was no different. He started with plan A which was re-signed UIllmark to properly support the youth movement. When that failed, instead of sticking to that plan by finding an adequate replacement he switched again to Tank 2.0. But a funny thing happened on the way to the tank. The kids started scoring and playing hard. As @dudacek pointed out, when this team gets just decent (not even good) goaltending they win and when they don't they lose. We are scoring at a playoff caliber level despite having so many JAGs at the forward and defense. If KA was willing to change plans so quickly in the off-season, it's reasonable to hope that he'd be willing to revert back to plan A when the team shows that it's worthy of that support. This team has and KA should do his job and give them the support they have earned. TO those that say that this season was never about winning, you are both right and wrong. Yes, it was about the growth and development of the young core, but it is also about changing the culture from one where losing is acceptable to one where it isn't. By going for Tank 2.0, KA is still signaling that losing is just fine. Not exactly the way to turn this ship in a better direction.

I have repeated said since Karmanos was hired and we should kick KA upstairs and let Karmanos run the show

Then we are wasting two seasons. How are they going to get the fans back if this is the level of hockey we are going to see for the remainder of this season and all of next year because KA can't find goaltending.

You can't blame KA for bringing in a 40 year old goalie? What were the odds of a 40 year old goalie lasting an entire season without injury? Nearly zero. I researched this issue when we signed him and in modern hockey only 2 or 3 goalies over 40 ever played over 40 games in a season. A competent GM should have known this. This means he needed to have a good backup for his 40 year old goalie. Instead he relied on a career AAAA goalie in Tokarski and a 30 something goalie with horribly declining stats for the prior 3 years. Essentially he went from plan A to plan Tank and created the situation you see before you today. He is completely responsible for the mess. The sad part of this mess is that it was completely avoidable. He is wasting 2.8 on Butcher and now another 2.35 in Subban, Anderson and Dell. That's 5 mill he could have and should have easily invested in a real starting goaltender with Tokarski already here. @inkman you say he punted because he had UPL, Portillo and Levi in the wings. He didn't. Levi had yet to be acquired and no reasonable talent evaluator after UPL was 36th in the AHL last season in save % would think he was going to be ready to start in the NHL anytime soon. At best he needed to have bridge goaltending for 2-3 years until a prospect was ready, but it was also just as possible that UPL is not an NHL goalie and that the college kid (Portillo) wasn't going to be ready for 4 or more years when he let Ullmark walk. Honestly his decision was penny wise and pound foolish.

I don't think anyone is looking for a quick fix. What I want and others want is reasonable efforts to support a bunch of hard working kids so that they have a chance for success even in this early stage of the rebuild 8.0. So far KA hasn't given them that chance.