The Capitals actually draft decently well. Not great but they don't do dumb things with their first round picks, or their 2nd round picks. If Buffalo had managed even that since 2014 we would not be where we are. It all comes back to drafting poorly, something Buffalo needed to fix as early or even before 2005.
From 2005 to 2011, the Buffalo Sabres drafted 52 players of which 12 managed to play 200 NHL games and only 2 managed to be impact players (.25pts for def and .5pts for forwards). That means only 23% of the players we drafted made it to 200 games and only 4% Were what we could call top 6/7 or top 4 players (before you yell at me, I know that defenders can be below .25ppg and still be impactful but I needed a cutoff and that was a reasonable one. It does not exclude any defender that we would otherwise consider amazing based on non-pts related play). For those wondering why I picked 2011 it is not simply because that was the last time Buffalo made the playoffs, it is to demonstrate the underlying rot that was in place before any decisions to rebuild had occurred. By the time Buffalo lost in 2011, the pipeline was a depleted and barren mess with almost no quality to speak of and since the lead time for most NHL guys is 5 years, we were already terminal by the time we reach the 2012 draft. There was nothing outside of aggressive trading that would have salvaged the team. Darcy Regier was not capable of doing that and the lack of pipeline only hindered that effort anyway.
Darcy also had the 2012 and 2013 drafts. I separated them out because I think they require a little context. In 2012 the Sabres managed to get 200 games from 4 of the 8 players they picked, which is pretty good. The issue? 1 of them is an impact player the rest are not. Linus Ullmark is the only player in the 2012 draft that is a true impact player, although I could see an argument for Jake McCabe who sits at that .25ppg threshold so let's include him. Buffalo getting 2 impact players was good! The issue is that both their first rounders are replacement level types of guys and both of them were forwards, Grigs and Girgs. But we still got 2 impact players which brings us to 2013 where Buffalo drafted 11 times and managed to get 3 players with 2 impact players in JT Compher and Ristolainen. Zadorov we could argue also should count but he's more of a useful 4/5 defender and falls below the threshold. That's great! Except that JT Compher the only forward here doesn't matter, because he gets traded by Tim Murray before ever playing for Buffalo. In the 2 years prior to GMTM Buffalo has actually managed to suck less at drafting. They go from an abysmal 4% impact rate to a nice 16%. They go from a 23% hit rate to a nice 37%. Issue being we have 3 defenders, 1 goalie, and a forward who wont be on the team. We roll into 2014 with just crap developing at forward.
The Murray years. First, the decision to draft Nylander over Sergachev, to this day is one of the worst drafting decisions not only in Sabres history but in NHL history. True stupidity. Anyways, Murray comes away for his 3 drafts with a record of 24% 200 games and 16% impact players. He made 25 total picks and 4 of them matter but guess what? There's a catch. 2 of Murray's hits are Reinhart and Eichel so.. duh. The other 2 are also forwards which is good. Victor Olofsson is a great 7th round draft pick. The other one? Hagel, a guy that Murray's predecessor would castoff like trash. So he drafted 4 but only 3 ended up playing for Buffalo. He also traded Compher which would have been fine if ROR wasn't traded after 3 years. See the issue we have here is not that he traded for things, it is that he traded a lot for things that didn't stay very long. Murray's time as GM hurt the Sabres.
Jason Botterill did something stupid when he didn't sign Hagel but outside of that we get another bump in drafting. 33% of his picks end up with 200 games and 28% of them are impact guys which is kinda good. Mittelstadt and UPL we can say are impact players. Cozens, impact player, Dahlin and Muel, impact players. Here, finally after over a decade of subpar drafting with only 1 or 2 outlier years, we get 3 decent years on top of eachother. If Ryan Johnson ever becomes something, then it is truly a nice era of drafting. Remember the 5 years lead time? Well these are the guys who have crossed that line and many make up the core (Cozens, Dahlin, Muel, and maybe UPL). We can say the Dahlin pick was easy but there are no 1st round misses in here and the 2nd round guys are starting to look better too. Botterill would probably have kept his job without the "lifestyle maintenance" the Pegula's needed.
Finally, the only draft we can truly judge yet of the Adams era is the 2020 draft. 5 picks and he hit and hit well on 2 of them. Here we are fudging the numbers a touch because neither Quinn nor Peterka have 200 games but both are over our point threshold and barring injury should get really close to our game mark this year. These are 2 impact players and they make the 2020 draft well worth it. Again Buffalo has managed to hit on the 1st rounder and the 2nd. Good stuff.
The point of all this writing is to show you the history of the Sabres drafting problem that starts basically from the 2005 season and continued well into 2016. In 52 picks from 2005-2011, Buffalo had an abysmal impact player drafting rate of 4% and that cost them most of the support Eichel could have had in 2015 or 2016. The 3 players they get in 2012 and 2013 are all defenders or goalies so again, the forwards are just not what we need. Trades help that a bit but there was simply no pipeline of young impactful talent developing until you really get all the way to 2017 and then 2019 and 2020. We are talking Ennis, Foligno, and that's it for 2005 to 2017. I am excluding Reinhart and Eichel because any gm could have made those picks and frankly they needed more support coming up with them. We simply couldn't trade from our bad pool to fill all the holes that the bad pool had created.
2020 might be a turning point in the long run. Not because of Adams specifically, I think we have enough evidence against him to give him too much credit, but specifically because they got 2 impact forwards in the same draft. I think 2021 might end up as a very meh draft for the Sabres, there isn't a lot there that is exciting or showing signs of being impactful. 2022 gives me more hope and 2023 and 2024 do as well. There's a chance we get 2 impact players from each of the 2023 and 2024 drafts (Benson, Helenius, ???) and maybe a few 200 gamers in there too (looking at all the RHD defenders and Novikov). If Buffalo can dial it in (23 and 24 look like they finally got there) then instead of looking at 2020-2025 and saying "oh man, Buffalo missed on so many picks and it basically poisoned the well" I hope we can say that Buffalo hit on enough impact players that the pool stayed healthy enough for us to plug holes via trade or via promotion. Certainly from 2005-2011, we couldn't say that and I would argue from 2005-2016 we can't.
To retool you need tools; Buffalo spent a decade with a pair of rusty pliers and some paper clips trying to fix up their car and couldn't understand why they could trade those things to get the parts they needed.
I am going to lock this. Maybe we need a new thread with all the new adds? I have to run but if anyone is board... The 3 grittiest forwards ended up as: Zach benson Jordan Greenway Dylan Cozens The 2 grittiest defenders ended up as: Connor Clifton Rasmus Dahlin Wonder how much those forward rankings would change right?
