Archie Lee

I totally agree. If DeBoer or Bednar became available and were interested in coming to Buffalo? Sure. Maybe Sullivan. I don't have any interest in Tortorella. I'm not a big Laviolette fan. At this point, Gallant seems to be out of the coaching picture. Knoblauch might be on the bubble in Edmonton. 40 year old Washington Assistant, Mitch Love, might be my first choice: Todd Nelson, from what I understand, has resisted offers to return to the NHL as an assistant, because he is committed to being a head coach. The man just wins at all the levels he has coached. He is 55.

Agreed totally. We need a new head coach. Ruff has had two seasons with a better than DeLuca .500 record in his last 11 as a head coach. He hasn’t coached a team to 3 straight years in the playoffs, for a quarter century. He is not the coach you hire to bring structure to a team. He is yesterday’s man. If an established head coach with a recent track record of sustained success is not available, and they likely won’t be, then Carle would be a good choice. Others: Washington assistant Mitch Love and Hershey coach Todd Nelson.

Yeah, Adams is not good at his job. According to Adams and/or his head coach, he has assembled a group of players who are over-confident, don't take accountability, and don't take off-season workouts seriously enough. At some point, maybe the players just recognized that accountability is a one-way street with the Sabres. A leadership change at the GM position, is the most needed move for the coming off-season.

I’m not opposed to trading a prospect or two. Since we are overflowing with forwards who are legitimately in the NHL now (14 by my count), I would prefer we package 2-3 of our current NHL players for that difference maker. And, no, I don’t mean we can package Lafferty and Malenstyn for a top 6 forward. If we are not prepared to move on from a Quinn, a Kulich, or a Benson, then we are really just running another young team back and again hoping for internal development to carry us there. If we are going to trade our way to being better next season, and not simply be passive and wait for internal growth, then we need to bring in talented players and be willing to move on from some young roster players. The beauty of this is that it still leaves us a strong prospect pool. A good GM can manage these waves. There would be nothing wrong with the Sabres having Östlund or Rosen or Novikov playing an important role at some point next year. Contending NHL teams have such players on their team all the time (see: Knies, Lundell, Samoskevich, Sanderson, Grieg, Jarvis, Jackson Blake, Nemec, just from Eastern playoff teams). What you can’t have and be successful is all 3 on the roster plus Kulich and Benson and Power and Levi…etc.. Layering these young players onto the roster and moving some out at the appropriate time for veterans is the answer. Adams’s big error, in my view, was not being willing to move out any of the kids from the first wave to make the NHL (Peterka, Quinn, Benson, Kulich). It might pay off long-term, but he needlessly squandered 2-3 years when they could have been in the playoffs.

I see this as the flaw in having so many young players and not being willing to block them, or trade them until you know what you have (acknowledging they moved on from Savoie). The thing is, it is possible that Quinn will stay hot and becomes what we wanted/hoped/needed. We just can't rely on it. And his value has likely shrunk.

My math has the Rangers coming in at about $10 million under the cap with K. Miller and Cuyle as RFA's. They would likely need to move out a contract to get Byram signed. Schneider and Cuyle for Byram and Quinn?

Again, I'm not eager to trade Power. But, doesn't your statement make the assumption that we don't get a comparable player in return? There is always risk in a trade, but aside from one or two posters who think we will be better if we just dump Power, nobody is suggesting we trade him for less than fair value.

Anybody paying attention to the last 13-14 years of Ruff’s career, knew there was no reason to think he would make a difference.

On track to be a top pairing, 22-25 minute a game, 50-60 point, d-man. What we drafted.

I agree he is on track. I’m not worried about Power. I’m not dumping him. Trading him would not be an addition by subtraction move. But, I’m not sure why it would be absurd to trade him for a player who helps us be a better team? Not for a rental, not for a prospect, not for picks, not for a 35 year old, but for a 24-27 year-old legit top 6 centre with 4-5 years of team control.

It certainly is not a game being played with playoff level intensity. Wilson probably would like to start something with a Sabre to spark the Caps, but when he looks at the Sabre bench he sees nobody he can go after and retain his credibility as a tough guy.

Not a lot of self-awareness on Ruff's part. His teams have now missed the playoffs in 7 of his last 10 seasons as a head coach and he has a .471 winning % in that stretch. He is the man who was brought in to ensure structure and accountability, yet in those years where his team missed the playoffs their average league position for goals against has been 26th. At this point, Ruff is disrespecting the game as much as any player.

To the bolded: that seems right, but I have a hard time identifying a 50-60 point centre that I think a team would trade for Byram.

Trading Byram or Power is seeming like a real possibility. I think it is now most likely that Byram is traded. Less likely, I think, is that Power is traded or that both are back. This week on an episode of the Athletic Hockey Show, their prospect crew were discussing which teams among the league's bottom dwellers are most likely to win a Stanley Cup in the next decade. The criteria to be considered was being a bottom 10 team last season, so the Sabres were excluded as an option. The Sabres did come up though, mostly as a cautionary tale of how you can't solely rely on your prospects to get you there. Each of the 4 commentators listed their top 3 teams from last year's bottom 10. The two teams that did not make any list were Seattle and Calgary. For Calgary, they thought that the Flames are just pushing back the inevitable and that they will eventually need to start trading some of their vets and get earnest about a rebuild. With Seattle, their view was that the Kraken have focused on the centre position at the top of the draft (Beniers, Wright, Catton) and are missing the long-term #1 D. Their views on Calgary and Seattle made me think of a few players: MacKenzie Weegar, Rasmus Andersson, Beniers, and Shane Wright. Would Beniers for Power be crazy (give or take pieces to balance the trade one way or the other)? Or what about Shane Wright. Neither are veterans though. So we aren't getting more experienced. Would Byram get us Andersson? Is that even a good trade? What would Calgary need to consider moving Weegar? Anyway, there is a lot of discussion about revamping our D. What would be an acceptable return for Byram or Power?

I think he’s a crucial piece in the sense that if we trade him we need to be getting a crucial piece back.

I agree a playmaking centre would help. I don’t understand why we don’t try two D on the PP and put Dahlin on the right flank with Byram or Power on the point. Dahlin is our best passer/playmaker and putting him on the flank gets him closer to the bumper and to the net. Also, the cross ice pass to Thompson for the one-timer is more difficult for the goalie to get to than the point pass; I just think Dahlin has the skills to make the PP run from there.

Columbus currently in WC2, on pace for 86 points. A 3-4 point improvement on last year’s 84 point season, might have put us in the playoffs. $6-7 million in unused cap. 10 picks in the coming draft. One of the deeper prospect pools in hockey. Adams makes not one move from the start of the season, with the intent of improving the team now. And all signs are he will get another shot at it.

I'm not intending to put you on the spot (it's the GM's job to make trades), but who do you think is most likely to be moved? From a shake-up stand point, my view is that the Sabres have only 3 forwards who I think it could be said that them being traded could represent a shake-up: Thompson, Tuch, and Peterka. Norris could be traded, but that would not be a shake-up. Ditto for Zucker and McLeod, this early in their time with the Sabres. I suppose they could trade Greenway, but that seems highly unlikely after just extending him. Benson and Kulich seem like they are in the long-term plans. Thompson has the most team-friendly deal in the league; he's not going anywhere. Quinn could be dealt, but at this point his value is so low that I'm not sure we could get any player for him that would shake-up the lineup. Sabre fans won't fall for a 4th line shake-up again. That leaves Tuch and Peterka. How good of a player or players would we need to get to trade either of them? Of course, players could be packaged for the sort of players that would definitely shake-up the lineup as acquisitions.

I'm of the opinion that Reimer playing 3 in a row has been about giving UPL a break as much as it has been about Reimer playing well. Certainly Reimer has earned the starts, but I think for UPL this is a longer-term equivalent of pulling a guy when he has allowed 6 goals through 30 minutes. At some point, it's not helping to stay in the net.

Through November, UPL was 8-5-1 with a .904 save % and a GAA in the 2.60 range. Then came the 1st Colorado loss and the meat of the 13 game losing streak. His game slowly unravelled from there to the point of complete collapse by February/March. Of course, a large part of this is on him. I think though, that the Sabres will be making an enormous mistake if they don’t recognize the negative impact that the Lindy Ruff system/structure has on goalies.

That line-up comes in around $50k under the cap. And, while he is probably $1 million high on Bernard-Docker’s deal, he might be a combined $5-6 million low on Peterka and Byram. From the angle of: “Could this line-up make the playoffs…once?” Well, Montreal might make the playoffs this year. I don’t think their line-up is better. So, yeah, it could. But not likely with Ruff as HC. And, obviously, UPL would need a big bounce back year.

I’m not sure of the differences in scouting staffs, but under Yzerman, Tampa drafted much better than Detroit has. Also, Yzerman inherited Hedman and Stamkos in Tampa. Dylan Larkin is a good player, but not in the same category as a building block as Stamkos or Hedman.

The irony, of course, is that the culture in the room that Ruff was referring to, was created by Adams, the man heading the meeting in the room they were in. Like last off-season, we are back to Adams blaming the players rather than taking responsibility for his own role in creating the mess. Last year the narrative was accountability, this year it appears we are headed towards off-season training as the area of focus. Also, Ruff has now finished out of the playoffs in 7 of his last 10 years as a head coach. He is the oldest coach in the NHL. This is the man we hired with the goal of long-term success. You can’t make this stuff up.

Yzerman has never won a Cup as a GM. He was gone from Tampa by the time they won their back to back cups. Certainly he played a role in building those teams, but he was gone by then. He made it to one cup final, a decade ago in 2015.

That line-up would come in very close to the 95.5 cap ceiling.