Archie Lee

I think you are right that UPL has, objectively, not been as good as last year. I think, though, that you are also underplaying the impact that the team's poor play has had on UPL's poorer performance. Unless I'm mistaken, a goalie who faces 10 shots from particular places on the ice, will have a specific xGA related to those shots, regardless of whether those 10 shots came over a game span of 25 minutes or 5 minutes. Too often we have put UPL in a position where he is under duress. 30 shot attempts, 20 shots, and 5 high-danger chances over 60 minutes is simply different than the same occurring over 20 minutes.

More seriously, good for Savoie. I hope the kid has a great career.

You mean they didn’t bring him up and put him on a line with the Oiler equivalent of Tyson Jost and Brandon Biro?

Complaints about Cozens are fine, of course. At some point they are misdirected though. The complaint should really be about the in-over-their-heads GM and HC who continue to put a young player, and the team, in a position to fail.

I now agree on moving Cozens to wing. I would put him with McLeod and Tuch for an extended period. Tampa traded for Brandon Hagel when he was in year D+6. He had 44 points that year. That’s about what Cozens is on pace for. Cozens is in D+6. I’m not saying he would be our Hagel. But if Cozens just becomes a 20-25 goal 45-50 point winger on a big, fast, hard to play against 2nd line, his contract will not be crazy (particularly 3 years from now when it rises to $113 million). And maybe he has a little more in him.

I agree that their value is not the same. I’m not interested in trading either, unless it is part of a larger strategy of improving the construction of the overall roster.

Spending more money and wisely would be best. Unfortunately, we do neither. We leave millions unused and the money we do spend we often waste. We are spending $10-12 million more against the cap than Calgary and Columbus and we are trailing both by 11 points. I think you are right, our GM has done such a poor job spending the money available to him, it may well be foolish to give him authority to spend more.

I think there are sound arguments for keeping Byram and Power and also for trading one of them. I don’t know why you think we would get very little in return for either player. I think both would be sought after if the Sabres made them available.

If I thought this were true, I would stop watching Sabre hockey. We could have traded for Sam Bennett. At the time he was acquired by FLA, his stock was down. He was a pending RFA. There is zero reason to think we would have been unable to extend him. We didn’t sign Hagel when we could have, but nothing stops us from identifying the next Hagel and trading for him. Tampa had the guts to offer what was thought to be higher than value. They won that one, then lost on Jeannot. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I’m generally a glass half-full guy. Looking at the approximately 100 players in this tourney, I would say about half are no-doubters. Then there are 35 or so who could be interchanged with similar players depending on the preferences of the management and coaches. Then there is the bottom 15 who are there because someone has to be (ie: the entire Finnish D). We have a legit no-doubter in Dahlin. We have a guy in the interchangeable category, IMO, in Thompson. We have a couple of additional forwards in Tuch and Peterka, who are in this tourney if they are Swedish or Finnish (Cozens, on reputation, might be also). Byram and Power are 1st or 2nd pairing Finns. Last year’s UPL belongs. We need a GM who knows what he is doing. To hell with the current “woe is me” guy.

I completely agree. There is a world where a different “new” GM has one meeting with Ralph Krueger and goes to Pegula and says the first thing I’m doing is firing this phoney. Then I’m hiring a real coach. Then I’m extending Reinhart and Ullmark and telling Eichel to go have his surgery. My point is not to defend the decision to tear things down. But, if Adams manages things properly starting in June 2023, I don’t think we are having this discussion. If we break it down to three questions: 1) Did the tear down need to happen? No, it didn’t. 2) Was the tear down managed well? Sure, but that was always going to be the easy part. 3) Have things been managed well since making the playoffs has been a reasonable expectation? Not close. Disastrously bad.

I have a little bit of a different view on the outcome of the tear-down trades that saw Hall, Montour, Staal, Risto, Reinhart, and Eichel moved. Those trades looked at individually, were never going to be wins unless one of two things happened: 1.) The player we traded fell on his face; or 2.) We somehow lucked into a star-level-talent in return. Both of those outcomes were always unlikely. Individually, the probability was always high that they would be losses. The point of the teardown was asset acquisition. You bring in a plethora of top picks and prospects and build an asset-base that eventually feeds your NHL roster through players that develop in your system and through trading those assets for NHL ready players. Adams did fine with the first part of the plan. He has failed miserably after that. I think that the absolute and utter failure of this season has cast a shadow of complete failure on Adams and his plan. I think that in many ways that conclusion is justified. The bottom-line is that in his 5th year at the helm, when the team should be at it's highest level of performance during his tenure, we are playing as badly as we have under him (post-Krueger). He owns that. Completely. He should be fired. The sooner the better. But, it should not be overlooked that in April 2023 we missed the playoffs by one point, with one of the 2-3 youngest rosters in the NHL, and while having a top 5 rated prospect pool. Adams's failing was not in the tear-down and was not with the assets he acquired in that period. His failure came from falling in love with those picks and prospects and not proactively moving the team forward when it was obvious to anyone paying attention that it was time to do so. As a GM, his failing is not in the moves and trades that he made, but in those he failed and refused to make.

Nice job!!

Yep. Incredibly, Dahlin will be in year 8 of his NHL career next season. Wasted.

This is largely how I felt, though my peak off-season optimism was when they fired Granato, which was quickly deflated when they almost immediately hired Ruff. Up until the Ruff hiring, I had convinced (tricked) myself into believing that when the time came to win that Pegula/Adams would pivot to ensuring the organization behaved like a normal NHL team. We would do an actual search for the right head coach. That coach would bring in a new assistant or two. We would make one or two prominent off-season personnel moves (not just 4th line changes). We would spend like a team that plans to win. We would be proactive if things were not going well. We would no longer worry about kids being blocked. Then we hired Ruff in what was an obvious charade intended to bring back a public-relations-nostalgia-hire who the owner and GM were comfortable working with and who would accept their preferred terms (2 year deal, no new coaches). This cemented for me that the Sabres are simply not a normal NHL team; the goal of winning has been displaced by a hundred sub-goals related to cost and personality and fear and apprehension. It’s too late now though. I’m in until the end.

Well, I already did when I replied to your earlier posting of the Lysowski quote. I pointed out the following: "...you look at the Florida Panthers and see Mikkola and Kulikov as the 2nd pair. Or Dallas and a right side of Lyubushkin, Dumba, and Ceci. Or Tampa and Raddysh on pair 1. Or Winnipeg with Samberg on pair two with Logan Stanley and Colin Miller as pair 3." I'm not saying we should go and get any of those players specifically. What I am saying is that every year teams make the playoffs, and in some cases have deep playoff runs, with players of this quality playing in their top-4. Often such players don't have trade protection. In some cases it isn't about being more talented, it is about being more experienced, or about having better support from forwards, or being better coached, or having better goaltending. Rasmus Dahlin is a legit top 10-15 D-man in the NHL. Three 3 years ago Bowen Byram played 2nd pair minutes on the Stanley Cup Champion. If Owen Power decided tomorrow to retire from hockey, the Sabres would still have ½ of a top-4 defense core, that is legitimately Stanley Cup capable. And, I'm just talking playoffs here. Any person worthy of being a legit NHL GM, could start an off-season with Dahlin, Byram, Connor Clifton, and Ryan Johnson, and piece together 3-4 additional d-men that an NHL team could make the playoffs with.