Archie Lee

I agree and think he would be a great pairing with Luukkonen, particularly in a solid defensive system like exists in Vegas and Winnipeg (and maybe now in Buffalo). The Sabres certainly will have the cap space to sign a goalie like Brossoit. The problem, as a Sabre fan, with any roster building exercise, is that there are certain players on the team who have not shown they are ready for the NHL roles they have been given but who the GM/organization appears wholly committed to. Signing a UFA goalie like Brossoit, and assuming UPL is back, means that the organization would be committing to Levi being in Rochester next year. I can imagine a scenario unfolding where Levi's performance drives him to Rochester, but I can't imagine a scenario where Adams makes an off-season move that makes it a certainty.

I read the bolded and thought, man am I getting old. Then I was comforted a bit when I realized you are off by a decade.

It was reported that McLellan was interviewed before the Krueger hire (along with Dave Tippett) and it was written that he told Pegula that Pegula's reputation around the league was as a man who lacked patience. Somewhat interestingly, today the fan base largely thinks Pegula is being too patient.

Not defending Pegula, Adams or Granato with this post, but in the 8 year period from Feb 2013 to March 2021 the Sabres fired 3 general managers and 6 head coaches, averaging more than 1 major firing per season.

Not quite ready to give-up on Kulich at 19?

Over the stretch of our 7-4 run, Detroit and Tampa have produced even better records. That is why we haven’t made up space. Obviously we won’t make it if the teams in playoff positions keep playing better and racking up more points than us. I’m not holding out a lot of hope. We are too far back with too little season left to play. But, the right approach is to focus on getting to real or DeLuca .500. We are 5 games below now. It does not guarantee a playoff spot by any means, but if we get to real .500 we will separate ourselves from the bottom of the conference, we will pass 2-3 teams ahead of us and we will, most-likely enter the playoff conversation.

The only coach on staff who has ever coached in the NHL playoffs is goalie coach Mike Bales. It is not a criticism is the individual coaches to state that none of them have ever helped to successfully implement a system that took a team to the NHL playoffs. This off-season, if they are serious about being a playoff team, experience needs to be added in key areas.

I’m ok with this take so long as there is an acknowledgment that playing sound defensive hockey doesn’t mean that you play slow or passive or without energy or aggression. We aren’t playing slower because we are trying to be better defensively. Either our players are not ready yet, from an experience standpoint, to play good defence or our coaches are not able to teach it. I said this earlier. We gave up 300 goals last year. You have to go back to 1993 to find a team that gave up 300 goals and made the playoffs. We absolutely needed to get better defensively.

On the coaching front, I was looking back at some other NHL coaches and their backgrounds and who they had on staff early in their careers. Jon Cooper’s first full season as head coach of the Lightning was 2013-14. Rick Bowness was added to his staff as an assistant that year. Bowness served as an assistant under Cooper for 5 seasons. At that point of his career, Bowness had 25 years of NHL coaching experience including 6 as a head coach. I will credit Adams in that he has surrounded himself in the front office with some people who have been considered for NHL GM jobs (Karmanos, Ventura). If Granato is back next year, he needs to be willing to add someone to his staff who could replace him.

There was absolutely a disconnect between a group of players who felt they were ready to take the next step and a GM who, while not actively trying to sabotage progress, was not quite ready to commit to “taking the next step” as the sort of goal for which falling short is considered failure. I think the decision by Adams to not address the shortcomings on the coaching staff, in net and on forward actually had two separate negative impacts. The first is obvious. 1.) Physically we are just not good enough. Too young, too inexperienced, too lacking in natural grit. We physically don’t have all of the needed elements to consistently thrive over an 82 game season. 2.) Psychologically we are fragile. This ties back to number one (youth, inexperience, lack of a physical presence), but was exacerbated by the decision to not address obvious needs and to instead roll into the season with an 18 year old at forward and to start the year giving 4 straight starts to a young goalie who didn’t even have a good preseason. The message was clear, while we aren’t trying to lose we are also not doing everything that we can to win.

For clarity, are you now of the view that Benson should have gone back to junior? No worries either way, but just curious if your position has changed?

I'm not sure this is wholly accurate. Adams recommended the firing of Krueger and assistant coach Steve Smith. I'm sure Adams won't be keen to go to Pegula and recommend firing a coach who he is close with and who was recently given an extension. I think though that Pegula understands how it works. A year ago, things were going well and Granato was going into the last year of his contract; typically in that situation you give the coach an extension. Now things have gone south and Pegula's much larger investments in Dahlin, Cozens, Thompson, Power and Samuelsson are in danger of not getting the required return. If Adams gets to the point where he thinks Granato needs to go and he presents Pegula with a viable alternative, I would be surprised if Pegula did not give the green light for a change. The bigger problem to me is that Adams did not address enough of the team's short-comings in the off-season to know for certain what the root cause of this year's regression is. Of course, it is likely a combination of things. He didn't address the coaching, which was likely a big factor last year in poor special team's play and poor d-structure. We didn't address goaltending, and, somewhat frighteningly, if we had brought in a veteran, the odd man out may well have been Luukkonen. He didn't address the lack of depth up front when it was known Quinn was out, Tuch was battling something and Granato had wholly lost faith in Olofsson. Instead he opted to "not block" our youngsters and left a spot open for the prospect who showed best in camp. He then allowed himself to be fooled by the kid with the most confidence, and now Benson is getting 8-10 minutes on his way to an 8 goal season when his value as an asset could be soaring while he scores 50 goals and 130 points in junior (not Benson's fault as he just showed up and played hockey). The team had cap space and the necessary draft and prospect capital to trade for a Tyler Toffoli and sign an Alex Kerfoot. I fully acknowledge that this is in the category of hindsight is 20/20, but swap Appert and Peca with Elis and Christie (Ellis and Christie to Rochester), sign Cam Talbot to replace Anderson and partner with Luukkonen, send Levi to Rochester, trade Oloffson at 50% and a 2nd for Toffoli and give Kerfoot more AAV or an extra year of term to what he got from Arizona and I think we could be in a much different place right now. There are a hundred variations of this that could have been done. The good news may actually be Adams's inexperience. His inexperience might mean that he is not bad at what he does so much as he is learning. He has done some good things and there is no denying that the team improved sharply in the first two full seasons post-Krueger. I do think that sometimes when an inexperienced person has early success they can trick themselves into thinking it is because they are smart and did smart things and forget that they still need to observe and absorb what works elsewhere and for others. Here is hoping that Adams actually understands that he made off-season mistakes and learned from them and now starts to fix them.

Tage went on a 5 week heater from Oct 31 - Dec 7 last season. 18 goals and 36 points in 18 games. Outside of that stretch he had 29 goals and 60 points in 60 games. He is probably a 30-35 goal and 60-70 point guy, which is what he produced in his breakout season. I think I have seen enough good things from Tage this season to think he is going to give us several years of that at least. Also, a quick internet search of the top 10 scorers in the NHL over the last 30 years or so shows that there are lots of guys who had pretty substantial drop-offs in production within a year or two of having career years. I'm not saying Tage will never duplicate last year's performance (though I don't think he will), but I don't think the drop-off is as unusual as some are making it out to be.

I’ll confess that I was not expressing a lot of concern over the goaltending situation, forward depth, special teams play, and the more intangible things like toughness and experience, in the off-season. These were concerns, but after last season I just thought we were closer than we are. In hindsight I was wrong. The Sabres had multiple areas they needed to improve. They opted to address one of those areas and improve their depth and experience on defence. In the other areas, including with their inexperienced coaching staff, they opted for internal growth and development. While they can still jump back in it if they have a stretch like they did to end last season, it is looking increasingly unlikely that they will. They now look a little foolish for squandering developmental years for Levi and Benson (a bit less so for Ryan Johnson) on a season where they are looking like a bottom 10 NHL team again. Levi should just stay in Rochester.

Saw a Harrington tweet from yesterday where he blamed the analytics department for pressing the coaches to focus on D, resulting in a style change that “broke the team”. Here are a couple of analytics: 1.). The Sabres allowed 300 goals last season. 2.). The last time a team made the NHL playoffs allowing 300 goals was 1993. We were 100% not making the playoffs without improved D. Either our coaches are unable to teach a defensive system that does not sacrifice offence or our players are not yet mature enough to grasp that playing a good D structure does not mean you can’t also be good offensively. I sense it is a bit of both.

I don't think it was wrong to focus more on defence than we had in the last two years. We didn't outscore our bad defensive play last year (though we came close). It is proper to have a goal of defending better than we did last year. I think there are several factors in why it hasn't worked: - As Bob Sauve28 has said, the PP has not held up it's end. If the PP was in the top-half of the league it would make a huge difference. As is, it is doubly detrimental in that not only is it not producing goals but it is directly leading to discouraged play on our part and inspired play by the opposition. If we were scoring more on the PP we would be in closer games, getting to overtime, not giving up empty net goals, etc. It all adds up. - We are too young. I'll write it again, the down the middle core of our team (Thompson, Mitts, Cozens, Krebs, Dahlin, Power, Sammy, Joker, UPL and Levi) had an average age of 22 to start the season. Collectively, that group is too young and inexperienced to have consistent success. Add in other young players like Peterka, Quinn, R. Johnson and Benson (the last thing this year's team needed was an 18 year old who can hold his own while on his way to an 8 goal / 28 point season) and I don't think we have the experience and discretion needed to understand how playing consistently good D structure does not require sacrificing offence or creativity. They can go together. We have too many young players who are learning this lesson at the same time without the necessary veterans surrounding them to help. - Granato and his assistants are perhaps just not good enough. This doesn't mean they are individually bad coaches. But if it was easy to coach an NHL team to the point where you are squeezing as much out of your line-up as you can then there would be more coaches who do it. There is a reason for why the same coaches get recycled and end up having new successes with new teams; it's because they are good at what they do. There is no doubt in my mind that we would be a better team today if in the offseason we had somehow flipped Granato and Power for Bruce Cassidy and Brayden McNabb (not suggesting for a second we make such a swap). Coaching matters. The good news is that we still have all of the assets that we had at the start of last off-season and that could have been used to make necessary roster adjustments. Also, there are and will be experienced coaches with winning track records available. The bad news is that we do not seem to be motivated to make the needed changes.

Factoring in everything (performance, contract status, cap hit, future value to team), I would say Girgs and Eric Johnson are the most likely to be moved assets. If we eat 50% and are willing, if needed, to take a contract back, then I think there are contending teams that might see them as valuable depth additions. I don’t think we trade Okposo unless he asks for it. I don’t think there are contending teams looking to add RFAs like Joker and Krebs. I think Olofsson’s contract, even at 50% retention, makes him hard to move and we have gone out of our way to make him nearly impossible to move with how he has been used. Unless Adams changes strategy and makes a big acquisition, it will be a quiet deadline. Maybe a couple of vets out (Girgs and Johnson) for 5th rounders.

The path to playoff / wildcard contention is to get to real or DeLuca .500. The teams that are ahead of us in the wildcard race are, respectively: - 3 games above real .500 (New Jersey) - 1 game above (Tampa, Detroit, Washington) - Even (Pittsburgh) - 7 games below (NYI and MTL) We are currently 5 games below real .500. With a win today we can get to 4 games below and accomplish step 1, which is getting back to NHL .500. Note that before our 9-2-1 finish last year, we were 33-31-6, or 4 games below real .500. That is where we will be if we win today. There is still enough runway if the team starts playing consistently good hockey.

I don’t know what to think about the retribution stuff. On the one hand, it’s just what teams do and it’s what’s expected in today’s NHL. On the other hand it’s just kinda silly. Kurashev got 5 and we scored the goal that iced the game during the penalty. I’m not sure why that isn’t retribution enough. I can’t say I know much about Kurashev, but his PM totals suggest he isn’t doing this sort of thing too often. It looked to me like he was trying to pinch EJ off and EJ turned at the last second. Lots of people will say that a vet like EJ should know better than to put himself in that position. The mood and tone of the game combined with how the play unfolded didn’t really make it feel like the sort of thing that required a major response. In short, I get that some teams might have gone after Kurashev. It just seems kind of ridiculous though.

This kind of summarizes it for me. The trade did not work out as intended at the time, but has worked our positively in the long run. I understand that some would argue that the trade can't possibly be deemed to have worked out positively because the team has failed to have any on-ice success (playoffs) since. To me though, this is like saying that none of our player acquisitions (draft picks/trades) have worked out for the past 12 years.

I don't think it takes more mental gymnastics to factor in what was or wasn't theoretically possible at the time of the trade, than it does to not factor in that we don't yet know what Thompson and R. Johnson will accomplish as Sabres. O'Reilly never wins a Conn Smythe with us. Tage might. As you said earlier, we likely just see it differently.

I would say that trading O'Reilly was part of a series of bad decisions made in the Botterill era. The 1st bad decision of that era was the actual hiring of Botterill. Then the hiring of Housley as head coach. Then, the complete dismantling of the team's toughness through the loss of Carrier in the expansion draft followed by the trading of Foligno, Deslauriers and eventually Kane (not critiquing any of those as individual moves, but collectively it was a a bad strategy). Next was the O'Reilly trade, but by that point it was too late. We were dead last in the NHL the season before the O'Reilly trade. Remember that Botterill is the guy who, when given a 2nd chance to hire a head coach, chose Ralph Krueger. It was a hopeless situation. In hindsight, we are fortunate that Botterill got lucky and Thompson turned out to be a legit goal scorer/point producer and R. Johnson looks like he will be a good long-term addition on the blue-line. In the context of how bad things were and, more importantly, how incredibly unlikely it was that a turnaround of any significance could have happened under Botterill, I struggle to say that the outcome of the trade was bad. We were not turning it around with O'Reilly unless we fired Botterill that off-season and that was never happening. I don't think it is close to the worst trade in team history. Andreychuk, Puppa and a 1st for Fuhr was terrible. Calle Johansson and a 2nd for Ledyard and Malarchuk turned out awful. We drafted 4 Hall of Fame players between 1982 and 1987, completely lost patience and traded them all for a sum that got us a 1st round win over the Bruins in 1993. Yuck.

I will be stunned if we get anything of value for Olofsson. If he was worth anything to other NHL teams he would have been traded months ago. He is a scoring winger who can't get in the line-up ahead of a sheltered 18 year-old on pace for 9 goals, on a team that struggles to generate offence that has a wretched power-play. And he makes 4.75 million per year. That said, if he were to be moved it would not be at all stunning if he scored at a 30 goal or better pace wherever he goes.

Reinhart is a lesson in patience. It's a generalization (there isn't necessarily a lot of crossover), but today we have fans lamenting our lack of patience with Reinhart while wanting to move-on from players on the youngest team in the NHL. In fairness, I think fans can be forgiven for wanting results and for not always being able to recognize the difference between a player who is not delivering due to their own shortcomings v. a player who is being held back by his environment (losing culture, poor talent around him, bad coaching). Reinhart was good here, but in his best season as a Sabre he put up numbers that almost exactly match what Mittelstadt is putting up this year. Of course, the inflection point was probably when Botterill hired Housley. A more-experienced, veteran coach with a winning track record at that moment likely changes the trajectory of the franchise and of the careers of many players.

I'm glad Quinn is back and no question he makes the team better. We were 3-2-1 in the 6 games before he came back as well. We have played at a 92 point pace over the past 16 games. The team was trending up and playing a bit better already after a 1-5 stretch from Nov 25 and to Dec 5. We have a chance over the next 6-7 games to move our trend line heading into the post all-star stretch. I think it is fair to criticize Adams. Quinn was out, Tuch was banged up (per Ray's hot-mic moment) and the organization had lost faith in Olofsson. There were players available (Toffoli, Zucker, Kerfoot) who could not only have bridged the gap but have been upgrades. Instead we opted to give the opportunity to the prospect who most rose to the challenge in camp. I love Benson, but we needed more from that position this year than a 10 goal pace from an 18 year old who needs occasional sheltering (as Quinn and Peterka needed at times last year).