Skibum

Agreed. The Pegulas more or less hit the lottery with McBeane on the Bills' side of things, but their Sabres moves have not worked out, and they don't have the bandwidth to do anything about it. I know Terry wants better for the franchise and is willing to spend the money, but nothing has worked so far. Time to give someone else a shot.

The Sabres have no choice but to be sellers at the deadline. If they choose not to sell, they probably don't make any trades at all. But if they do choose to sell, maybe we see a fire sale.

Ehlers dodged a bullet for sure.

I just don't think the players are good enough, and I think that's been it for most of the way. You could have a whole separate poll on a list of reasons why they aren't good enough, and all of those reasons would be true. It's just crazy that it has gone on so consistently for so long. Even the sun shines on a dog's bum once in a while.

Id' like to see a trade, but I don't want Adams to be the guy who does it.

Giving Dahlin the C kind of reminds me of when Darcy went all in to build the team around Thomas Vanek. Both players are loaded with skill, but neither is the bona fide badass that can carry a hockey team to greatness on their shoulders.

When you say "scorers"...

Savoie will now proceed to win multiple Cups with the Oil.

Well, he has a few seasons with odd-numbered PIM totals, which means he must fight once in a while, right? You can't have odd-numbered PIM without the 5s.

I don't buy the weather argument - Buffalo is considerably warmer, with much longer winter days than a lot of places where pro hockey players come from. You refer to it as 'hockey Siberia'. Vladimir Tarasenko is literally from Siberia.

Ristolainen, Mittlestadt, and Ullmark fit the pattern best. Sabres draft picks who could have been stars, but instead were victims of the post-tank washout.

Could Mitts be next in line for an ex-Sabre Stanley Cup?

Still not ahead of Hasek and not in my top 5, but he can certainly get there someday.

Agreed - It's a very different league from when Lindy last had success in Buffalo, and a lot of his tactics, along with the types of players that could execute on them, are not part of the game anymore. That said, Lindy has clearly found success in the 'new' NHL as well. I just come back to 'these Sabres need a coach who's been around the block a few times and can get in their faces', and Lindy is definitely that.

Taking his Sabres history out of the conversation, he's as good as any other established NHL coach - call him a retread if you want, but what the heck. It's fine. It's not a great team anyway, so why not give Lindy Ruff a shot? Would Peter Laviolette or John Tortorella really yield better odds of Stanley Cup glory? And if there is some rising young genius out there in the coaching world that they could have hired instead, I don't even know who that would be. If the Sabres don't improve next year, it will be hard to blame Lindy. Let it ride, I say.

I guess if you look at it objectively (ie, imagine his previous Sabres stint was with some other team), it looks a lot like any other retread coaching hire. Not that I think Lindy is a bad coach, its just a boring hire the way hiring Laviolette, Hitchcock, Babcock, etc. would be. I didn't realize Ruff was so high on the career coaching wins list. But still no cups, and I don't see him bringing one to Buffalo at this stage of his career, nor with this particular team.

Sabres now have a kick-in-the-grapes Mount Rushmore: Sam Reinhart, 50-goal scorer Ryan O'Reilly, Stanley Cup Champion Jack Eichel, Stanley Cup Champion Linus Ullmark, Vezina Trophy winner

I know how this movie ends.

Darcy Regier had about a seven year run, beginning with the Drury/Briere/Vanek-offer-sheet debacle, and culminating with a team so devoid of hope that the only option was to Tank. And there are other examples from other eras that represent far worse GM seasons than this one. This year is nothing!

The problem is that they actually showed some legitimate promise in the latter half of last season. They have massively regressed since then. It's easy to be patient when the overall trajectory is upward, even if it's a slow climb. But right now, the once-upward trajectory has reversed. Badly.

It doesn't take insider knowledge to know that the Sabres organization is a dumpster fire.

Oh, for crying out loud. Of course they care. They just aren't very good at winning these days.

I know, it's like a good fart. Timeless.

Not always, but it certainly can be. Look at guys like Messier, Chelios, Jagr - or their football equivalents like Bruce Smith, Clay Mathews, Jerry Rice - They all had significant injuries at some point in their careers (I think), but mostly they played game after game of violent pro sports at the highest level for much longer than virtually all of their peers could. And many of those peers worked every bit as hard at conditioning. They had the luck of good genetics, and probably a good measure of balance, skill, and smarts to avoid damage. That's TALENT. That said, most guys probably have to rely on conditioning and luck.

Ideally, he will end up as the Biron to Levi's Miller.