Archie Lee

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.

Over the last two NHL seasons there have been twelve mid-season head coaching changes. Three of those changes were done by teams in the midst of lost seasons where there was no goal of making the playoffs at the time of the change: - in 23-24 NJ fired Ruff for Green Travis late in the year - in 24-25 Chicago fired Richardson after only 26 games, but there were no illusions of them making a playoff run - also in 24-25, the Flyers fired Tortorella with only 9 games left The other nine mid-season head coaching changes in the last two seasons, were done by teams that had plans to make the playoffs and at an early enough point in the season where the change was intended to be impactful. The only one that did not result in an improved winning/points % was Boston replacing Montgomery with Sacco early last year. The other eight changes all resulted in improved performance, ranging from the modest in Ottawa going from a .423% under DJ Smith to a .500% under Jacques Martin, to the dramatic in Edmonton where the Oilers went from playing .269 hockey under Woodcroft to .702 under Knoblach. The others were: in 2023-24: - NYI went from .544 under Lambert to .608 under Roy and made the playoffs - LA went from .583 under McLellan to .632 under Hiller and made the playoffs - STL went from .482 under Berube to .601 under Drew Bannister and missed - Minn went from .368 under Evason to .587 under Hynes and missed in 2024-25: - Det went from .441 under Lalonde to .583 under McLellan and missed - STL went from .431 under Bannister to .641 under Montgomery and made the playoffs In the 14 year drought, the Sabres have not made a mid-season coaching change at a point in the season where the change could have a positive impact on that year's standings. They are crazy not to at least try.

DeBoer will be back in the NHL when he wants to be.

Well, of course. If Karmanos is picked just to be the next guy who won’t rock the boat, then he wouldn’t be successful. Here’s the thing: the owner isn’t getting fired. If it is truly the case that there is no hope under Pegula, then there isn’t much point of us being here, short of habit or masochism. My opinion is that there are GM candidates out there who would simply be better at the job than Adams. Karmanos might be one such person (and might not be). It’s the known vs unknown factor. One way or the other, we are left hoping that some positive confluence of circumstances leads Pegula to hiring the right candidate next time.

Granato was an assistant under Krueger. Granato's role as an assistant was to help Krueger install his system and vision for how the team would play. You can’t be more opposite than Granato from Krueger when it comes to a philosophy on how to play hockey. I have no idea if Jason Karmanos would be a good GM. But I also have no reason to think he would simply continue on with the same plan/ideas/vision as Adams. I would prefer Rob Blake, of the experienced people available, but I would take Karmanos over Adams in a second.

A small ray of hope: three seasons ago the Devils started the year with back to back 5-2 losses and Devil fans were chanting “Fire Lindy”. Five weeks later they had won 16 of their next 17 and the fans were chanting “Sorry Lindy”. I guess there’s a chance?

After the fiasco that was Adams’s first year as GM (the Covid year), the Sabres had back to back seasons where they exceeded expectations. The Sabres went from being a disastrous 55 point team to a 75 point team to a 91 point team. Adams read this to mean that he knew what he was doing and he failed to recognize the streak of good fortune that the team had during that stretch. Then in 23-24, Granato’s last year, they regressed to the mean and were a 84 point team; while that team disappointed fans after the 91 point season prior, they played to exactly where most models were projecting. Sadly, the wrong man paid the price for the setback. Say what people will about Granato, but in his 3 full years as head coach of the Sabres, the team met or exceeded objective expectations for wins and losses - based on the roster - every year. Adams learned all the wrong lessons and rather than making real and meaningful and needed roster adjustments, he replaced Granato with Ruff - likely to extend his own window as GM - which has been a disaster. I think we are watching a group of players who subconsciously (and probably consciously) know what time it is. There is a next to zero chance that a Kevyn Adams and Lindy Ruff combo, lead them to long-term success. Adams has never done it. Ruff has made the playoff in 3 of his last 11 seasons as a head coach, and has not led a team to the playoffs in back to back years since 2011. These are not the men you task with ending the longest non-playoff streak in NHL history. On one level or another, the players know this.

I agree that Adams should be fired. He should have been fired when it was clear the Sabres would not be a playoff team a year ago. I have zero enthusiasm for a Kekalainen takeover. He was at best a mediocre GM with a preference for old-school coaches whose era is over (Torts, Babcock). We have such a coach now, and it isn't going well. I would take Karmanos over Kekalainen, not because I have any degree of certainty that Karmanos would be good, but because I'm near certain that Kekalainen is not a long-term solution.

Ellis is basically at the point in his career where Levi will be a year from now. He spent a couple of years in the ECHL, in part, because the Blues had Lindgren and Hofer in the AHL. He has not been considered at Levi's level as a prospect, but I still prefer giving him a chance to going with Georgiev. Also, at the risk of dumping on Adams for everything, just looking at all of the goalies who have hit waivers in the last 48 hours (Ellis, DiPietro, Sogaard, Primeau), it seems like Georgiev was a panic move.

This is just a hypothesis. The discrepancy can be chalked up to this: The analytics community uses data that produces a likely outcome and relies on the general assumption of all other things being equal, while hockey fans and media recognize that all other things are, indeed, far from equal. I think it can be fairly stated that no team in NHL history has started a season under greater risk of circumstances quickly eroding into here we go again territory, than the 25-26 Sabres. I think the analytics community, while utilizing history to generate projections, does not account for the weight of history and expectation, whether that be the pressure that comes with expectations for success, or the apathy that can be generated by expectations for failure. Of course, some of that here we go again burden, could have been lifted had the owner brought in a new GM and HC combo. Which leads to a second factor: No team in NHL history has started a season with a more demonstrably proven to be bad at their jobs, combination of owner, GM, and HC than the 25-26 Sabres. I won't get into how unprecedented it would be for a trio in their positions of leadership with their collective records, to work together to produce a winning product that lasts beyond a season, but, let's just say, it has never happened before. After all that, I'm actually finding myself in the odd position of being cautiously hopeful about the team making the playoffs this year while also having zero long-term optimism. The Sabres have some really good players. A couple who are elite. Teams with less talent, even in the modern 32-team NHL, make the playoffs all the time. So, I am excited about the start of the year and am eager to see how this goes. But, I have no enthusiasm for the future of the franchise. This is because I know from history that people who are this bad at what they do, don't suddenly get it all figured out. The only longer-term hope for the franchise is that the owner has some luck and finds a hockey version of McDermott and Beane; sadly, a playoff run in 25-26 is likely just to delay the possibility of that happening anytime soon.

The current Levi situation is an example of how the organization has painted itself into corners under Adams. Levi was given an NHL job to start each of the last two seasons. I feel comfortable saying that these were bad decisions for two reasons: 1.) Levi was not ready, and 2.) The lack of a sound defensive structure made being in Buffalo a poor environment for goalie development. Now we are heading into Levi’s third full year as a pro, the Sabres are staring at 15 years out of the playoffs, the starting goalie is injured, Levi may well be their objectively best option in net, and the organization is, seemingly, committed to letting him cook in the AHL. Bad decisions have a way of compounding. I’m not saying it is a bad decision to let Levi cook this year, but Adams has put himself in a spot where he has no wiggle-room for making further mistakes with Levi. Hopefully Luukkonen was just pulled from the last game out of an abundance of caution.

What is frustrating, I think, is that a skilled GM is, generally if not always, a step ahead in evaluating his own players. An organization should be able to sort out its own players and identify the traits that will hold them back. Such players should be moved when their value is still high and before long-term commitments are locked into. I’m not implying this is easy or that any GM gets every evaluation correct. Going back to the end of the 91 point season though, it is largely where Adams has failed and what set the team back.

I think that we are generally talking about what Samuelsson was projected to be when he was a prospect. In Rochester, Seth Appert described Samuelsson as “miserable to play against”. There was no mistaking what Appert was inferring: Samuelsson was big, tough, and mean and he made opposing forwards pay a price for going to the hard places on the ice. Whether something changed in Samuelsson or Appert and others were just wrong in their evaluation, I don’t know. As an NHL player, he has shown only glimpses of being a player who is miserable to play against.

There was pretty much consensus among Sabre fans that getting a partner for Power was a critically important off-season objective. That partner appears to be Kesselring, who is 25 years old, has played 156 NHL games, was 6th in average ice time among d-men in Utah last year, and received almost no PK time (25 seconds per game, 9th among Utah d-men). Yes, there is context that should be considered when looking at his limited average ice-time over the course of the larger season. But, until he shows he can be an effective defender for 19-21 minutes a game in a Lindy Ruff system, it’s not unreasonable to have some skepticism.

In fairness, they did draft Benson.

Respectfully and honestly, can you provide some examples from Bruin camps in the last 5-6 years of multiple players who were competing for a job or two? Because, the idea of camp competition seems mostly a myth to me. I think most years, most NHL teams go to camp knowing who will be in their line-up on opening day, barring injury. Some years there are openings in spots 19-23 for the kid or AHL vet who shows the best in camp, or a team is up against the cap and they have a spot or two open for the player on an ELC or a league minimum deal to prove they belong in the NHL. But these aren’t the players or roles that typically make or break a season. Top 6 centre talent, youth and inexperience, coaching deficiencies, inconsistent to bad goaltending, ineffectual management. These are the Sabres’s issues, I think. I just don’t see camp competition or bottom of the line-up depth, as being big factors.

This is currently where I'm at. Though, depending on how camp goes, I could move Greenway to LW4 with Krebs and put Danforth or Doan at RW3 with Kulich and Zucker. I like Greenway, and actually think there is an argument for him at LW2. Greenway/McLeod/Tuch could be an elite shutdown line with a unique combination of size (all 3), speed (McLeod/Tuch), toughness (Greenway/Tuch), and a little nastiness (Greenway), in a threesome who are all adept at defensive play.

According to Puckpedia, Rosen and Ryan Johnson are both still waivers exempt.

I’m not sure. Could be real. Montreal has taken similar steps to what the Sabres did in Adams’s 1st two full seasons post-Krueger (I acknowledge that the Habs made the playoffs last year, while the Sabres missed by a point in 22-23). I think Montreal has another step or two to take before it can be said that their GM is all that.

I also want to add, in all my decades following major league sports in North America, I can’t recall another example where a coach who got more wins out of a team than his successor, was blamed for the failures of his successor. It is, frankly, a bizarro theory.

New Jersey was worse that the Sabres in 23-24, had a new coach last year and had the same short camp and travel issues.

To the bolded. It might be true, to a degree. But I largely reject the notion. I mean, is anybody seriously arguing that Benson would have dominated junior hockey as an 18 year old more than McDavid dominated the NHL as a 24-25 year old? And, is anybody seriously arguing that McDavid stopped learning once he started dominating the NHL? The list of players who dominated lesser competition for a year or two in junior, post-draft, and who then went on to have great NHL careers is very long. Very long. Benson, in my view, is the sort of player who would have found many things in his game to improve on whether he was in junior, college, the AHL, or the NHL. He's not the sort of kid who would have pouted, or got lazy, or forgot about the defensive side of the game.

Some GMs don’t spend much time worrying about how happy a player is.

As a qualifier, every player gets one path to the NHL (some more winding than others, but a single path nonetheless). The reality is that if a player fails to reach their potential, there is no way to know with certainty whether that failure relates to a poor development process or to the player simply not being good enough. So, I really don't think it is possible to say that Benson's offensive game has been, will be, or won't be stunted by being in the NHL; that is, unless he develops into an offensive star, in which case it can be said that being in the NHL from day-one, didn't hurt his offensive game. Benson never went back to junior and we will never know how going back to junior might have impacted his game. That said, I don't think there is any way to say that Benson being in the NHL for D1 and D2 means there is a better chance, let alone a "far better chance", of a breakout this year. There is, relatively speaking, a long list of forwards drafted between 11th and 15th overall (Benson was 13th), who did not fully make it to the NHL until D3, and who had rookie seasons that would qualify as a "breakout year" for Benson. Respectfully to my fellow Benson admirers, there is a tendency to see Benson as a different sort of Cat who was/is uniquely able to adapt to the pro-game as an 18 year old right out of junior, while also thinking that he somehow doesn't have traits that would have allowed him to develop in junior ("He's too good for junior and going back would have stunted his development"). Benson is a unique Cat. He would have developed fine either way and would, in my view, be a legit rookie of the year candidate if he was coming into the NHL this season.

I think it remains that the Sabres are collectively (not individually) too young and inexperienced. Their three best players, are not though. Dahlin, Thompson, and Tuch, are keys. I don't think they all need to have career years, but they need to be the elite players that they are. I think it is possible those three are talented enough to drag a team into the playoffs.