Archie Lee

He should sue Adams for not sending him back to junior last year and again this year. He could be captaining team Canada and a W team on its way to a championship run. He could be one of the best junior players in the world and a player we would all look forward to watching in the next couple of years and a coveted asset. But he is just another struggling young Sabre.

True. You generally don’t fault a goalie for goals on odd man rushes, but Luukkonen has and can make saves on those and they do impact games. This is not on him. I don’t blame any player for this. The players are lost and defeated. The owner and GM are guilty of malpractice and should be ashamed.

You could see tonight his confidence is gone. Slow reactions, not getting to his proper depths.

I guess you are right. We could be selling before Christmas.

I’m skeptical, but it would fit in with the mounting evidence of an internal cap. For the Sabres to bring in a player, money will have to go out.

I'm not saying Granato did the most amazing job or anything. But he definitely got the team to over-achieve slightly in 21-22 and by quite a bit in 22-23. Last year, the Sabres finished about where the models projected them to finish (83-56 points) based on talent and experience. This year we are grossly underachieving. We don't have a playoff roster, but we should not be a sub-70 point team and a legit contender for the 1st O/A pick, either. There is more to this than Ruff to be sure. I really do think that it has now fully sunk in for the core players on this team that they are not good enough on their own and they are not getting any help from ownership or management. Ruff isn't a great coach though, in my view. There are reasons for why he has never been high on the list as an option for contending teams. We would not have been worse off with Granato, in hindsight. I would prefer Todd Nelson; there is recent precedent for poaching another organization's AHL coach mid-season.

I think you are right. This is why when O’Reilly lost his love for the game and when Eichel asked for a trade, Pegula didn’t look in the mirror, but rather thought “get these ungrateful punks out of here”.

The Fenway group being interested in the Bruins makes lots of sense. Delaware North having interest in the Sabres makes some sense to me. Pegula getting the Penguins in the deal is the tough part for me to wrap my head around. The NHL will remember how awful things were in Pittsburgh pre-Lemieux and again pre-Crosby. Letting one of the league’s current worst owners take over that market doesn’t seem like a great idea.

By being cheap Pegula is ensuring that his biggest potential revenue stream is significantly under-maximized. I did the math on what Pegula spending $8 million more on Sabres salaries would be relative to his net worth, and it would be like a family buying a couch. Not a really nice couch either. This would be like a couch from the Brick (perfectly fine…no disrespect to the Brick, where I have bought some things over the years). And all the couch gets a family is a place to sit, it doesn’t open up potential revenue streams.

I’m ready to try Cozens on wing. I stand by my view though that he would be a better centre with better wingers. I would like to see him get 6-10 games with Tuch and Zucker as his wingers. It’s not a crazy expectation for a “playoff” team to give its young 7 million $ centre, a couple of capable and experienced wingers. Of course, it would leave Thompson playing with the kids, so not likely to be a net positive for anyone but Cozens.

Great article. Thanks for posting. If Adams is limited in spending, and all signs are he is, that is still not an outright excuse. He has spent the cap money he does have poorly. Cozens and Power and Samuelsson could have been bridged (like Dahlin was). That would have saved $5 million plus in space under any internal cap. There are successful teams who bridge quality youngsters (Dallas bridged Oettinger and Harley).

I think it has a lot to do with the culture in the room and the personality of the GM and / or head coach. Vegas seems to get away with it. Tampa did a similar thing to Ryan McDonagh. They ended up trading him to his team of choice, Nashville, but the only reason he waived his NTC for Nashville was under threat of being placed on waivers and the knowledge that he would be claimed by a team that he didn’t want to go to. So other teams do rather cut-throat things and the locker room doesn’t revolt. The Ranger saga may be a bit different. The Goodrow situation seems to have been orchestrated specifically to get him to San Jose. I don’t think there was a long list of teams that wanted him so it wasn’t like Drury could say, pick your trade destination or we will waive you and you’ll end up with the Sharks. San Jose WAS the trade destination I think. And Drury and Laviolette might just be poorer communicators than the GMs and coaches in Vegas and Tampa. Or the player leadership group in NY is less committed to winning (not uncommitted to winning, but culturally less committed) than the comparable groups in Tampa and Vegas.

I will never find the quote, but I remember when our hands were forced on the big Vanek extension, Regier saying (and I’m definitely paraphrasing) that with the contract comes the pressure of being the face and leader of the franchise, whether the player is ready for it or not.

$3 million in LTIR space! Was it Elliott Friedman who summarized the situation as: "Pegula and Adams don't think they have built a good enough team, so why spend more money"? Here is a list of veteran forwards, playing for teams that are out of the playoff hunt, none of whom have any trade protection, and who are pending UFAs (so they wouldn't prevent us from giving extensions to anyone else): Frank Vatrano, Brock McGinn, Joel Armia, Jake Evans, Michael Granlund, Luke Kunin, Nico Sturm, Ryan Donato, Gustav Nyquist. I didn't say it was an exciting list. Of course, we are firmly in the territory of 168 days late and 8 million dollars in unused cap space short, but there are players out who could help and who we should be able to beat any offers for. Then again, maybe at this point any player that we trade for would be so negative about coming to Buffalo that it would do more harm than good.

This is more a reflection of overall roster construction than it is of the shortcomings of individual players. No team has 14 forwards and 8 d-man who eagerly go to the opposition crease or enthusiastically clear their own. We have too few such players.

I agree. But getting better means having better players. If we are comfortable waiting on Quinn and Peterka and Benson and Kulich to become players who collectively (not individually) are good enough to help us win, then we are in the same boat as Anaheim or San Jose or Chicago, and our expectations should be adjusted accordingly. You can’t have 4 developing or struggling forwards 23 and under in your top 9 and expect to win in the NHL. Well, you can I guess, but you would be unrealistic in your expectations.

Agreed. It’s starting to feel hopeless. On the one hand, what went wrong with the current iteration of the team is not that hard to diagnose. Since April 2023, management has failed to support their young core with a commitment to winning, solid veterans, superior coaching, and bold decision making (also known as the mainstream approach to winning in the NHL). The core is still young. With the right person in charge and the right coach, this should still be salvageable. On the other hand you have 14 years of Ville Leino, “there will be some suffering”, Pat Lafontaine, Ted Nolan, pee-pee slaps, “I’ve lost my love for the game”, Ralph Krueger, EEE, flat management, artificial disc replacement, “sustainable success”, palm trees, and “the solution is in the room”, and it’s enough to make you wonder why you invest any $$$, time, or emotion, in this vain and doomed project.

I would bet on Drury fixing the Rangers or on him getting another job and getting his new team high in the standings and deep in the playoffs, before I would bet on Adams. The Kakko trade is a warning about falling in love with young players. There were some who thought trading Quinn in the off-season in a package for a legit top 6 forward was crazy (more than crazy actually; some fans thought that trading Quinn straight-up for an actual good established NHL player would have been GM malpractice). No doubt Adams shared that view. Today, Quinn’s value has surely sunk below what Kakko just returned.

It is hard not to conclude that Adams has no authority to spend beyond a certain level. While the Sabres could use a top tier talent, I think the current swoon could have been avoided with 2-3 additional vets in the Zucker, Greenway, Clifton category. Such players are available, I think. They mostly don’t have trade protection. I’m not letting Adams off the hook. He could spend the money he has more effectively. But I think we are in a $ in / $ out situation. Sad.

He might be able to tell Pegula that. I don’t think he could tell Ken Holland that.

It might be wrong and this time Pegula is just going to dig in and let things spiral further and further out of control. But I don’t think he is on an island. There are likely people around him other than Adams who will tell him that things are beyond repair as is. His kids perhaps? Guelli maybe? Ruff? Maybe Adams asks for mercy at some point. This reminds me of when Krueger was fired. Things seemed hopeless and as though nothing would be done. But the negativity became overwhelming and something had to give. Once the national media start mocking you, it is tough to ignore. Maybe it’s different this time and Pegula is weighing what makes him a bigger laughing stock: firing Adams and hiring his 5th GM or not firing Adams and hoping that somehow against all odds things don’t degenerate even further. It is just depressing all around.

Agreed. The context of the situation that has developed is unique. The players of course are responsible for their own performances, but in the big picture I believe they have been hung out to dry by bad mgmt. The Sabres are 13 years out of the playoffs and their GM made no truly meaningful off-season acquisition to address the top 6 forwards or top 4 D. Then, before they even got home from Prague there are stories floated about how the GM is looking to do something big, meaning he doesn’t believe in the team. Now that he has failed to do anything and has blamed it on geography and has let things slip to the point of no return, he tells them it’s all good and not to expect him to do anything to make the team better. At this point, it would be an act of mercy to trade any of our players.

We just might be approaching that point where a 1st o/a pick pulls an Elway, Lemieux, Lindros, Manning, and says “don’t draft me”. I don’t think a Power or Slavkovsky-level pick would have the nerve. But a Bedard-level 1st o/a might just say “for the sake of my career, I will not sign with the Sabres”.

First of all, I agree with your post about how the players may have took the message. Indeed, I’ve been saying for some time now that the team culture, that had shifted to positive by the end of 22-23, has slid very badly and that the reason for this is that the owner and GM have not committed to winning. It’s been said by many an insider that there are times at the trade deadline that a team will slip if management doesn’t make a meaningful acquisition. The culture in the room can change to: “If this doesn’t matter to the GM, why should it matter to us?”. I think we may have seen that last night. I do not blame the players for any of this. That said, everyone is making up what was said when Pegula met the team. None of us were there. I just don’t think he said we are not making any changes the rest of the year. I’m sure Pegula didn’t want to fire Krueger, but things got so bad he had no choice. We are more than 1/2 way there after last night. Also, if we are going to take the literal approach, they only said not to expect a “big” trade. What is a big trade? Does that mean lots of players? Or big name players? Or lots of big name players? And how long does this trade moratorium last. Until Christmas? The trade deadline? The draft? Forever? What was said exactly?

On a recent After The Whistle, Rivet made a great point. He spoke about the various times in the later portion of his career that he was teamed with a young or rookie defensive partner. He said his role was to show the kids how to play and be assertive and physical at the NHL level and to let them know that everything will be ok, cause he would be right there. If anything got out of hand, he would be at their side. Adams has not given anything that even remotely approaches that level of veteran support to Power or Cozens or Dahlin or Peterka or Quinn or any of our young players.