Sabres announce qualifying offers

[Weave]

12 minutes ago, PromoTheRobot said:

McLeod signed fairly quickly. Is there any reason to be concerned that Levi hasn't signed yet? Or are they working on something longer term for him?

Wouldn’t that be delicious in an awful kind of way if the key piece in the Reinhart trade doesn’t want to be here?

[Dr. Who]

1 minute ago, Weave said:

Wouldn’t that be delicious in an awful kind of way if the key piece in the Reinhart trade doesn’t want to be here?

That one would surprise me, with an obvious opening at goalie. There's enough terrible to dwell upon.

[Weave]

Just now, Dr. Who said:

That one would surprise me, with an obvious opening at goalie. There's enough terrible to dwell upon.

I’m not expecting it.  But at this point nothing would surprise me.

[dudacek]

6 hours ago, Taro T said:

No urgency at all for signing Levi.  He can't be offer sheeted and he isn't arbitration eligible.  They'll have the rest of their ducks in a row and then get the deal done with him.

Yes, things seem to be going rather well on the contract front.

The Sabres had potentially one of the bumpiest contract situations in the league and I’m starting to see Adams has actually done a pretty good job of negotiating it so far.

Better cap minds than me did a good job of showing last year during the Skinner buyout talks how the Sabres would actually be in a rather precarious position under the cap this year given all their pending RFAs.

Priority one was getting a framework in place with Byram, Peterka, Quinn, and McLeod in order to get the starting point needed to chart his course of action, which clearly he was able to do.

Then he needed some certainty before July 1 with at least one of his 2 difficult negotiations, which he got with the Peterka trade.

He then neatly knocked off Quinn and McLeod early, and to reasonable deals to avoid distractions while shuffling the fringes of the roster to free up the cap space to ensure he kept his leverage with Byram. He added the big right-handed shutdown D, 3rd goalie option and forechecking badgers he wanted, and dumped a couple of role-playing too-pricey roster failures.

Now he can deal with Tuch and Levi at his leisure while still being able to complete any further tweaking after the Byram situation settles.

On some level it’s actually been a solid bit of business. He may have actually had a plan and has mostly executed it.

Too bad on the hockey level it doesn’t appear to have included any appreciable roster improvement.

Edited yesterday at 04:14 AM by dudacek

[Taro T]

8 hours ago, dudacek said:

Yes, things seem to be going rather well on the contract front.

The Sabres had potentially one of the bumpiest contract situations in the league and I’m starting to see Adams has actually done a pretty good job of negotiating it so far.

Better cap minds than me did a good job of showing last year during the Skinner buyout talks how the Sabres would actually be in a rather precarious position under the cap this year given all their pending RFAs.

Priority one was getting a framework in place with Byram, Peterka, Quinn, and McLeod in order to get the starting point needed to chart his course of action, which clearly he was able to do.

Then he needed some certainty before July 1 with at least one of his 2 difficult negotiations, which he got with the Peterka trade.

He then neatly knocked off Quinn and McLeod early, and to reasonable deals to avoid distractions while shuffling the fringes of the roster to free up the cap space to ensure he kept his leverage with Byram. He added the big right-handed shutdown D, 3rd goalie option and forechecking badgers he wanted, and dumped a couple of role-playing too-pricey roster failures.

Now he can deal with Tuch and Levi at his leisure while still being able to complete any further tweaking after the Byram situation settles.

On some level it’s actually been a solid bit of business. He may have actually had a plan and has mostly executed it.

Too bad on the hockey level it doesn’t appear to have included any appreciable roster improvement.

Yes.  It could've been a disaster.  Instead, he managed to keep the team essentially what it was heading into this off-season; if not in actual make up, in expectations.

Which, for what we expected, is kind of a home run.  But it in no way IS an ACTUAL home run (on paper, at an absolute minimum).  We still need to see how this chapter of the Byram saga ends, but it's likely the value he provides will roughly be maintained one way or another.

BUT it didn't have to be this way.  Rather than just keep status quo leaving us to hope another year getting "taught" 😄 Ruff's system and the youth being 1 year closer to their primes will be enough for the adjustments towards grit to be enough to sneak into the playoffs; he could've made bold moves to show some definite improvement on the big club at the expense of some of the precious prospect pool.

And yes, trading Peterka (for less than he's worth IMHO) could be considered to be a bold move.  But Adams himself said their preference was to keep him.  His agent's refusal to negotiate forced his hand on that one.  So, other than possibly trading Byram, the plan entering this season was to replace the backup goalie with another backup goalie, and to replace the 4 & 5 D with different 4-6 D, and to swap out a large chunk of the 4th line once again.  Oh, and replace the S&C coach too.  If this team were coming off a 106 point season, the plan as devised makes a ton of sense.  Coming off 79, it's a bold move, Cotton.  And it COULD work.  But they need a whole lot of items to all break their way for it to do so.

[LTS]

22 hours ago, Weave said:

If I remember correctly, there is a small limit to the number of times you can walk away from an Arbitration result.

Noted.

22 hours ago, Trettioåtta said:

If the arbitration is below a certain value (about $4.8 million) the team can't walk away. So if he's given $1.5 million, you're stuck paying that for an 8th defender.

If this guy was basically a thrown in for the Norris trade, it makes sense they never saw him as more than that.

He also signed for basically league minimum - he clearly isn't well regarded. 

Also saw this posted elsewhere.. it does make sense then.  So I retract my criticism... a bit.  It's still all crap.

[Taro T]

22 hours ago, Weave said:

If I remember correctly, there is a small limit to the number of times you can walk away from an Arbitration result.

For every 2 arbitration awards in any given year, you can walk away from 1 of them.  So, if you have 1 or 2 players electing arbitration, you can walk away from 1, 3 or 4 and you can walk away from 2.  And so on and so forth.  And that's only the case when the award is above a threshold (was $3.5MM when the last CBA was signed, not sure what it is now due to inflation) and Bernard-Docker's award had exactly 0.0% chance of exceeding that threshold to allow the Sabres to elect to walk away from it.

And you can't walk away from club elected arbitiration.  (Though that doesn't apply in this situation at all.)

[shrader]

1 hour ago, Taro T said:

For every 2 arbitration awards in any given year, you can walk away from 1 of them.  So, if you have 1 or 2 players electing arbitration, you can walk away from 1, 3 or 4 and you can walk away from 2.  And so on and so forth.  And that's only the case when the award is above a threshold (was $3.5MM when the last CBA was signed, not sure what it is now due to inflation) and Bernard-Docker's award had exactly 0.0% chance of exceeding that threshold to allow the Sabres to elect to walk away from it.

And you can't walk away from club elected arbitiration.  (Though that doesn't apply in this situation at all.)

This makes me wonder how many teams actually see 2 hearings in any given year.

[Taro T]

12 minutes ago, shrader said:

This makes me wonder how many teams actually see 2 hearings in any given year.

Nowadays, not many.  Back in '06 there were a LOT of arbitrations.  But both teams and players seem to be better about working a deal out on their own without a 3rd party mediating (arbitrating, whatevs) the discussions.