Abandon all hopium, ye who enter here: 1,001 reasons why the Sabres won't be better this year — or probably ever

[dudacek]

The place to talk about Terry Pegula, Kevyn Adams, droughts, ***** announcers, ***** players, ***** coaches, ***** prospects and how ***** the Sabres are in general.

1 hour ago, GASabresIUFAN said:

Sadly, they can, as they have proven the last two seasons.  This is the pts trend under Adams leadership - 91, 84, 79.  
 

10 reasons they could continue to regress

1.  The Atlantic division is deeper than ever.  Det, Mon, and Ott are actually improving while the Sabres have regressed

2. Adams traded away another young developing scorer, who has improved each of his 3 NHL season, for two depth players who may or may not have upside.

3.  McLeod is almost certain to regress.  He is a career 11.9% shooter who had a career year last year when shooting 20.9%. 

4.  The goaltending is woefully inadequate.  The save % of our 4 goalies last season were as follows - UPL .887, Levi .872, Georgiev .875, and Lyon.896.  League average last season was .893 in all situations.

5. Norris unlikely to play enough games to adequately replace Cozens.  Norris has never played more than 66 games in a season and has averaged only 47 games a season during his time in the NHL.  Remember he was shutdown after only 3 games last season following the trade from Ottawa.

6. The entire failed coaching staff returns including special teams failure Appert and defensive failure Wilford.  

7.  The team again refuses to spend to the cap and with the cap rising quickly, the Sabres are likely to fall further behind. Remember that teams that don’t spend to the cap rarely make the playoffs.

8.  The defense remains defensively suspect.  Byram, Power, Samuelsson and Bryson are still inept defensively. Kesselring and Timmins maybe upgrades defensively over Joki or Clifton, but neither has ever been a full time top 4 defenseman.  Timmins has averaged less than 16 minutes a night for his career and last season was his first in 6 years as a full time NHLer.  Kesselring played under 18 a night last season and while he did fill in the top 4, as soon as Utah got healthy he was relegated to the 3rd pair.  He did have a solid all around season, but it’s fair to wonder if he is ready to pair with a player as defensively inept as Power for 22 minutes a night.  It’s also fair to question whether the addition of two 3rd pairing D is enough to elevate a group as terrible as the Sabres have been defensively for years. 

9.  I am a big fan of both Benson and Kulich, but Sabres are betting on their continued improvement, plus rebounds from injury prone guys like Quinn and Norris, plus continued success from Zucker and McLeod, to keep the offense working. Also don’t forget we don’t even know who the 9th top 9 forward will be; will it be the injury prone and scoring challenged Greenway or a bet on another young player with 62 games of NHL experience in Josh Doan. That’s a great deal to ask and comes with a high risk of failure.  If the offense regresses, it raises the odds of another regression by the team significantly. 

10.  Kevyn Adams is still the GM.

I understand that the fans here want to have some hope that the 15 years of wandering in the hockey desert as punishment for the “tank” might end this coming season, but honestly we need to temper our expectations for a team put together by GMKA (aka Howdy Doody).

 

[GASabresIUFAN]

I forgot the high taxes, lack of palm trees, an owner not committed to winning, the crumbling stadium, and terrible fan experience. 

Edited 10 hours ago by GASabresIUFAN

[In The Buff]

pretty thorough list. I guess i'd add that the length of time the Sabres have been bad, some 15 years now & counting? Its another reason in & of itself for why we wont be better this year... its our momentum or trajectory we've been on for 15 years.... with the losing now ingrained into our culture. 

However i do deep down think we could be a couple points better on the season this year, 'could' being the key word. But thats not a lot to hang you're hat on & a couple points isnt the meaningful improvement we all yearn for. But after 3 consecutive seasons at falling deeper in the standings, we at least need to stop going backwards for a start.

[LGR4GM]

I don't worry much about Benson or Kesselring. 

[7+6=13]

Many of the Sabres players really like soup.

[Thorny]

They won’t be bad forever 

Even the Lions turned it around 

[GASabresIUFAN]

2 minutes ago, Thorny said:

They won’t be bad forever 

Even the Lions turned it around 

The Jets haven’t.  

[Thorny]

3 minutes ago, GASabresIUFAN said:

The Jets haven’t.  

Well they are in the exact same spot we are except it’s harder to make the playoffs in the nfl. They will also turn it around eventually 

[Indabuff]

[GASabresIUFAN]

12 minutes ago, Thorny said:

Well they are in the exact same spot we are except it’s harder to make the playoffs in the nfl. They will also turn it around eventually 

But easier, much easier to build a team.

[Mr Peabody]

They’ve finally addressed strength conditioning.

They now seem to understand you need 200’ players.

i expect Tage’s 200’ game to improve considerably and lead by example.

Goalie’s will improve with a better team D.

 Not claiming playoffs but turning a corner to look like a balanced team.  That’s my hopium.