Robviously

Islanders lose again tonight. How high does this 1st round pick have to be for them to defer to next season?

That shop sailed a long time ago. Colorado is still a good fit for Miller though.

Meh. I'm not sure how much historic stuff like that really matters. It really only matters what we do relative to the other sucky teams and I think we'll grind out significantly more points than them the rest of the way. In 2011-2012, Montreal got the 3rd overall pick with 78 points. The 8th overall pick went to Carolina...with 82 points. The difference between 3rd and 8th was 4 points. In 2009-2010, Toronto had the 2nd worst record (Bruins got their pick) with 74 points. The 6th and 7th worst were Tampa Bay and Carolina...with 80 points each. It could easily shake out this way again. The Sabres could suck all year long (just like last year) but still string together just enough wins to push themselves out of the top 5. Also, in 2010-2011, the Sabres had the worst record in hockey on January 1st. We were literally dead last in the league three months into the season. That would have put us in position to draft Gabriel Landeskog, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jonathan Huberdeau, Adam Larsson, or Ryan Strome had we stayed in the top 5. In June 2011 we drafted 16th. Note to Sabres fans: Stop daydreaming about Reinhart or Draisaitl or Dal Colle or Ekblad or Nylander. There's still plenty of time for a glorious run to 9th place.

I've pretty much stopped reading up on the top prospects for this draft for now. The Sabres are doomed to draft in the top ten but probably after all the guys I really like are gone.

I'll take issue with both parts in bold. 1. It's easy to say when events unfold to support your theory but seemingly everyone was saying Pegula needed to clean house long before the first 20 games of this season. That was practically the headline for this message board from all of last season. 2. The franchise hit its low point with bankruptcy in the last 20 years but 1993 - 2013 also accounts for half of the banners in our rafters at this point, including our only Presidents Trophy. We came within 2 wins of winning the Cup in 1999 and were the best team in hockey in 2006. We also had the best coach we've ever had for most of that span. The 2002-2003 team was bad, but only bad enough that we drafted 5th overall in 2003. We were never the worst team in hockey, even during our "trip to hell." He didn't say that quote but the hypothetical was about Miller and he responded that, yes, he's willing to make trades if the right deal comes along even before the new GM is in place. I think that's pretty interesting. Sounds like he and Kevin Devine are unofficially acting as GM until we have one.

Graham does suck. And the Bills took him over Russell Wilson. Had we gotten that 3rd round pick right in 2012, are we a contender right now? In any event, nice to see EJ come back strong. 8-7 is doable with this schedule. I just wish we had one more win right now.

It sends a message that it's their team now. If they don't want to try, they can head back to the AHL until they're ready to try. (See: Luke Adam.) There's nothing toxic about struggling as a young player. I think it's a lot different than being surrounded by veterans who are just waiting to move on to their next team.

Nope. He can score 40 goals in the last 60 games and that'll just mean his value is at an all-time high. Trade him. This reminds me of how every time the Bills draft a guy, someone digs up his college highlight reel and he looks like the next Cornelius Bennett. But that's if you only watch 3 minutes of his absolute best college plays. Stafford will always be able to tantalize us with occasional flashes of brilliance. But those are only part of the story. He'll always be the guy who, at a moment's notice, can doze off for about a season or two. Stafford is not the answer and not the veteran we want around young players.

I want them to try. The environment was so toxic that I was worried about the long term effect it would have on guys like Grigorenko, Girgensons, Foligno, etc. The totally checked out, sleepwalking play we saw in the first 20 games is the opposite of a rebuild. But a lot of that was having so many veterans still on the team and just waiting to get traded. I want them to burn everything down and start fresh. All the UFAs should have been gone by the draft last summer. This team should belong to guys 24 and younger. That means they're going to lose and they're going to draft high, but that's part of the process. A team of young guys trying to carve out their place in the league shouldn't have motivation problems. But we accidentally cultivated a culture of half-assed effort by not (yet) going "all in" on the fire sale. I hope LaFontaine does this. He'll need to hurry up and find a GM first, and we'd better hope it's the right one. (These are more problems from the Sabres being the last to know what the problem is -- which is what is bothering me about this whole thing.)

But the refrain (from me and others) the last few years is that there really wasn't a plan, or enough of a plan. We've changed course so many times since Black Sunday. We've been rebuilding a little bit at a time for like 6 years. Remember when trading Campbell at the deadline was part of a rebuild? If you rewrite the plan every 2 weeks, it's not really a plan. So now we really, really, really, really do have a plan. Seriously. Or we will, once LaFontaine comes up with something. The Sabres are entering Bills territory when it comes to fresh starts. At some point they REALLY need to commit to a rebuild. I hope that is still the plan (as TBPhd says above). But, all that aside, it's also troublesome that the last people in Buffalo to realize Regier was the wrong guy to lead the charge for this rebuild were the guys who run the team. That's fairly amazing. Like I said: I like LaFontaine and Nolan, but the team looked incompetent even in bringing them in. I'm hoping PLF and TN actually let the Sabres demonstrate competence for once.

There's no doubt that the Rolston thing was another fiasco. But the time to clean house was right after last season. Again, Sabres leadership was wrong and seemingly all the fans were right about what was going on in this franchise. That's disturbing. This franchise is alarmingly amateur. And right now it's really all on LaFontaine to provide some semblance of competence to this team.

Alright, it's been a couple days and a win since this went down. Here's what's still bothering me about this whole thing: all the "Blueprint" stuff from the past few months was confirmed as total nonsense. The team didn't have a plan or, at least, not one that they could commit to. This was our year to bottom out. And that wasn't a bad idea with Vanek (now Moulson), Miller, and Ott all UFA after this season. But 20 games into this thing, Terry and Ted realized "bottoming out is hard" so they gave up and started an all new plan they cooked up over a couple days. Why is this plan going to be any more well thought out than their last one? And do we even have a plan beyond the obvious PR benefit of bringing back LaFontaine and Nolan? Plus, they did all this, what, two weeks after letting Regier trade their best asset (Vanek). They trusted him enough to do that but then decided "screw it, let's not have a GM for a while." The team still has all the same problems. We're still going to need to trade Miller, Ott, and Moulson by the deadline. Or are we back to trying to re-sign these guys? The Sabres have flip-flopped between rebuilding and reloading over and over since Black Sunday. We also need to find a good, experienced GM to make these trades by March 5th -- that's less than 4 months away. The best time to do this would have been right after last season. But that doesn't fit into the Sabres' patented keystone cops approach to running a team. I like LaFontaine as the new PHO and I think Nolan is a good choice to turn a bunch of young players into a team. But there's still a ton of work to do and Uncle Terry seems flakier than ever. They really beat the odds by finding a way to remove Regier that still makes the team look disorganized and amateur.

No. F*** NO! Stafford still has to go. The sooner the better. Are you really going to fall for him temporarily giving a crap again? We do not want this guy in our organization and influencing our young players.

Let's hope.

You will believe a man can fly.

I couldn't disagree more. Stafford doesn't care. We're lucky with a 50% effort out of him. I don't want him near any of the young players.

Agreed. Really douchey tweet from the team there. Plus, they haven't done anything yet. Hiring two fan favorites from the 90s doesn't automatically turn the team around.

I really struggled with the Hurley pick when it was made but he's an interesting player. He doesn't even start college for another year. I hope he makes me look idiotic for grumbling so much when we took him.

Nashville is a good team that can't score goals (they're 24th in the NHL in goals/game). We have Matt Moulson to trade. Plus Ennis. Plus Stafford (yes, I know we all hate Stafford but to a non-Buffalonian, his stats would actually look good). There's a trade to be made there.

I don't even think this is the argument Bunomatic is making. I'm not sure anyone is saying that the only metric you should use to judge an individual player is how many rings they have. But should you judge how well a team drafts based on how many championships they've won? For the NFL, I'd say yes but I'm less convinced for the NHL. You need to draft well, but trades and free agent signings are a big part of winning the Cup too. A team could draft really well, but never win a Cup because their GM can't identify and acquire their missing pieces (*cough cough* Regier *cough*). And I'd say it's almost impossible to build a complete team just through the draft. You're scouting 17 year olds to try to figure out what they'll be like in 10 years. Even if you're great at drafting, what are the chances you've got size, speed, leadership, team chemistry, brains, etc. all addressed without any additional trades/signings?

Actually, Baptiste just turned 18 in August. We drafted him the first year he was eligible. He's cooled down a bit in November but he's still looking like a pretty solid prospect.

The top league in Sweden is already past the AHL.

Nothing. I want some top prospects too. When the Capitals had Forsberg to trade last year (and sent him to Nashville), we should have been all over that.

With the upcoming Ott, Miller, Moulson trades, plus the potential trades of Stafford and maybe someone young like Ennis or Myers, I'm hoping we get at least one more 2015 1st round pick (and hopefully a few more 2015 picks). Like I said, we loaded up on picks last year (in a strong draft year) and it wouldn't hurt to skip a year before seriously loading up again. We don't want everyone on our team to be the exact same age and we can target the next strong draft.

Maybe, maybe not. If they really tank and end up with a top 5 pick, I think they'll keep it. It also depends how the draft shakes out (i.e. what happens in the WJC, and the junior seasons). Maybe there are 6 or 7 guys they really like. That said, if we end up with their 2015 1st round pick, I'm not horrified by that. It's supposed to be a stronger draft. Plus we took 6 guys in the first 3 rounds last year. I'm OK spacing out our big draft years a bit.