Archie Lee

This isn't surprising to me. Although they are frequently pilloried by Sabre fans as being replacement-level 4th liners, any objective review of the 4th lines of NHL playoff level teams, most-definitely including the Bruins, reveals that Okposo and Girgensens would be upgrades to many rosters.

In a lot of ways Benson reminds me of Reinhart early in his career. A high hockey IQ, responsible in all areas, good playmaker but lacking in the speed/size/strength combo to fully flourish (though Reinhart is bigger). Reinhart, who was the 2nd overall pick and who was 8 months older than Benson at the time of their drafts, went back to junior for what was his 19 year old season. This year we opted not to send Benson back for his 18 year old season. In time I think Benson will develop similar to Reinhart. I don't mean he will ever have a year like Reinhart is having this year, but Benson will be a very good top-six winger with probably a bit more hate in his game. Regardless, my frustration is that Benson should have been an asset left in junior where his strengths are highlighted and where the mystery remains about how his weaknesses will translate to the NHL game (for that matter, I think he should have been a long-shot to make the team next season). By keeping him in the NHL, we have highlighted his weaknesses (he is small, slow and has a weak shot). He has 1 assist in his last 16 games. He should have been in the mix (with Rosen, Kulich, Savoie and Östlund) as a high-end prospect that we are willing to move in exchange for legitimate veteran help. As is, we have committed to having a 19 year old in our line-up next season who to this point has shown he is not ready to consistently contribute on offence. More than any other move by Adams, this unforced error has caused me to question where he is taking the team.

I don't live anywhere near Buffalo and have only been there once. I have no connection to the city other than I am a 50 year, near life-long, fan of the Sabres (and, much more recently, the Bills). I don't have a connection to the Sabre "franchise" either. I don't care who owns the team, how much money they make or how much they could be sold for. My connection is to the team. The team I root for is the Buffalo Sabres. I could never cheer for the Salt Lake City Sabres.

The #'s are a bit misleading though. Benson may lead in the % of his shots that are from the 5-7 foot tough area, but if you apply the %'s from the data you highlight, he is 6th on the team in the number of shots from the 5-7 foot tough area. The top 6 are: Skinner 46 Cozens 36 Peterka 34 Tuch 33 Thompson 32 Benson 29

I agree with you that Mittelstadt is not the 3C. Right now he is our best centre. Whether he will be, over the bulk of what could be a long-term contract, is unknown. It could be that Mittelstadt's below average skating is a worry to them in the context of a deal that would take him into his 30's. I would personally extend Mittelstadt. I think the Cozens/Thompson deals are basically templates with there being an argument for Mittelstadt to come in a little lower based on goal scoring outputs. I would give him 6.5 x 7 and not lose any sleep. I'm not concerned about the cap and in particular am not concerned with the impact it would have on retaining either Quinn or Peterka. In the summer of 2025 if Quinn and Peterka have both earned high $$$ long-term extensions we can find a way to move off Skinner or Tuch or one of the 3 centres if we need to. Or, we can trade Quinn or Peterka as we have lots of wing depth in the organization. Even Mitts, Cozens or Thompson can all move to wing if Krebs eventually pushes himself up the line-up or Östlund hits. That said, outside of Dahlin there is no player in the organization that should be untouchable. While I reserve the right as a fan to hate any trade, I will say that from a philosophical standpoint I would only object to a Mittlestadt trade if the return was futures. Even then though, I would be ok with a Mittelstadt futures trade if the stated intent was to then move picks/prospects (including those acquired for Mitts) in the off-season as part of a team remake. In other words, trading Mittlestadt for futures during a lost season doesn't need to set us back for next year, if the intent is to then use futures in the off-season to acquire veterans who re-set the roster.

I heard Bruce Boudreau on the radio this morning talking about Foligno. He coached Foligno in Minnesota. He spoke about how Foligno has developed into a complete player who can be fully trusted in all situations and implied that he had not been good defensively early in his career. He thought the recent contract Foligno signed, even at Foligno's age, was something many team's would gladly take. Patience with young players is important.

Of the 10 youngest teams in the NHL to start the season, only the Flyers currently occupy a playoff position. Of the 7 oldest, only Carolina and Dallas*** (who, yes, like all NHL teams, "has young guys") are currently in playoff position. https://media.nhl.com/site/vasset/public/attachments/2023/10/17309/By The Numbers 2023-24 Opening-Day Rosters.pdf In a year where there should be no excuse for the Sabres to not be actively trying to make the playoffs, there is really no excuse for the team to be as young and inexperienced as they are. They had cap and assets available to bring in veteran players at key positions and chose not too (a point you have made and that I acknowledge you are correct on). There is no denying though that they are young and that they are not the only young NHL team that is struggling; indeed, nearly all of them are. That's not to say it's an outright excuse for poor play. Surely, though, there is a reasonable balance that can be found between acknowledging that youth and inexperience are factors in the team's inconsistent performance and making a blanket statement that the Sabres are too young?

I learned a long time ago that nothing I think, feel or express has any bearing on how any of my favorite sports teams perform. I can buy a ticket or not. I can watch on TV or not. I can come to places like this and share my thoughts and enjoy reading the thoughts of others, or not. There are probably 10-12 people associated with the Sabres whose opinions matter when it comes to the performance of individual players. Three or four people whose opinion matters on the performance of an assistant coach. Two people when it comes to the head coach. One when it comes to the GM. None of them post here. Like most of you, I take this way more seriously than is rational. That's the great thing about being a fan of a team: you get to experience the highs and lows of extreme emotions over something that is ultimately meaningless. No doubt though, we are overdue for some joy.

I agree and think he would be a great pairing with Luukkonen, particularly in a solid defensive system like exists in Vegas and Winnipeg (and maybe now in Buffalo). The Sabres certainly will have the cap space to sign a goalie like Brossoit. The problem, as a Sabre fan, with any roster building exercise, is that there are certain players on the team who have not shown they are ready for the NHL roles they have been given but who the GM/organization appears wholly committed to. Signing a UFA goalie like Brossoit, and assuming UPL is back, means that the organization would be committing to Levi being in Rochester next year. I can imagine a scenario unfolding where Levi's performance drives him to Rochester, but I can't imagine a scenario where Adams makes an off-season move that makes it a certainty.

I read the bolded and thought, man am I getting old. Then I was comforted a bit when I realized you are off by a decade.

It was reported that McLellan was interviewed before the Krueger hire (along with Dave Tippett) and it was written that he told Pegula that Pegula's reputation around the league was as a man who lacked patience. Somewhat interestingly, today the fan base largely thinks Pegula is being too patient.

Not defending Pegula, Adams or Granato with this post, but in the 8 year period from Feb 2013 to March 2021 the Sabres fired 3 general managers and 6 head coaches, averaging more than 1 major firing per season.

Not quite ready to give-up on Kulich at 19?

Over the stretch of our 7-4 run, Detroit and Tampa have produced even better records. That is why we haven’t made up space. Obviously we won’t make it if the teams in playoff positions keep playing better and racking up more points than us. I’m not holding out a lot of hope. We are too far back with too little season left to play. But, the right approach is to focus on getting to real or DeLuca .500. We are 5 games below now. It does not guarantee a playoff spot by any means, but if we get to real .500 we will separate ourselves from the bottom of the conference, we will pass 2-3 teams ahead of us and we will, most-likely enter the playoff conversation.

The only coach on staff who has ever coached in the NHL playoffs is goalie coach Mike Bales. It is not a criticism is the individual coaches to state that none of them have ever helped to successfully implement a system that took a team to the NHL playoffs. This off-season, if they are serious about being a playoff team, experience needs to be added in key areas.

I’m ok with this take so long as there is an acknowledgment that playing sound defensive hockey doesn’t mean that you play slow or passive or without energy or aggression. We aren’t playing slower because we are trying to be better defensively. Either our players are not ready yet, from an experience standpoint, to play good defence or our coaches are not able to teach it. I said this earlier. We gave up 300 goals last year. You have to go back to 1993 to find a team that gave up 300 goals and made the playoffs. We absolutely needed to get better defensively.

On the coaching front, I was looking back at some other NHL coaches and their backgrounds and who they had on staff early in their careers. Jon Cooper’s first full season as head coach of the Lightning was 2013-14. Rick Bowness was added to his staff as an assistant that year. Bowness served as an assistant under Cooper for 5 seasons. At that point of his career, Bowness had 25 years of NHL coaching experience including 6 as a head coach. I will credit Adams in that he has surrounded himself in the front office with some people who have been considered for NHL GM jobs (Karmanos, Ventura). If Granato is back next year, he needs to be willing to add someone to his staff who could replace him.

There was absolutely a disconnect between a group of players who felt they were ready to take the next step and a GM who, while not actively trying to sabotage progress, was not quite ready to commit to “taking the next step” as the sort of goal for which falling short is considered failure. I think the decision by Adams to not address the shortcomings on the coaching staff, in net and on forward actually had two separate negative impacts. The first is obvious. 1.) Physically we are just not good enough. Too young, too inexperienced, too lacking in natural grit. We physically don’t have all of the needed elements to consistently thrive over an 82 game season. 2.) Psychologically we are fragile. This ties back to number one (youth, inexperience, lack of a physical presence), but was exacerbated by the decision to not address obvious needs and to instead roll into the season with an 18 year old at forward and to start the year giving 4 straight starts to a young goalie who didn’t even have a good preseason. The message was clear, while we aren’t trying to lose we are also not doing everything that we can to win.

For clarity, are you now of the view that Benson should have gone back to junior? No worries either way, but just curious if your position has changed?

I'm not sure this is wholly accurate. Adams recommended the firing of Krueger and assistant coach Steve Smith. I'm sure Adams won't be keen to go to Pegula and recommend firing a coach who he is close with and who was recently given an extension. I think though that Pegula understands how it works. A year ago, things were going well and Granato was going into the last year of his contract; typically in that situation you give the coach an extension. Now things have gone south and Pegula's much larger investments in Dahlin, Cozens, Thompson, Power and Samuelsson are in danger of not getting the required return. If Adams gets to the point where he thinks Granato needs to go and he presents Pegula with a viable alternative, I would be surprised if Pegula did not give the green light for a change. The bigger problem to me is that Adams did not address enough of the team's short-comings in the off-season to know for certain what the root cause of this year's regression is. Of course, it is likely a combination of things. He didn't address the coaching, which was likely a big factor last year in poor special team's play and poor d-structure. We didn't address goaltending, and, somewhat frighteningly, if we had brought in a veteran, the odd man out may well have been Luukkonen. He didn't address the lack of depth up front when it was known Quinn was out, Tuch was battling something and Granato had wholly lost faith in Olofsson. Instead he opted to "not block" our youngsters and left a spot open for the prospect who showed best in camp. He then allowed himself to be fooled by the kid with the most confidence, and now Benson is getting 8-10 minutes on his way to an 8 goal season when his value as an asset could be soaring while he scores 50 goals and 130 points in junior (not Benson's fault as he just showed up and played hockey). The team had cap space and the necessary draft and prospect capital to trade for a Tyler Toffoli and sign an Alex Kerfoot. I fully acknowledge that this is in the category of hindsight is 20/20, but swap Appert and Peca with Elis and Christie (Ellis and Christie to Rochester), sign Cam Talbot to replace Anderson and partner with Luukkonen, send Levi to Rochester, trade Oloffson at 50% and a 2nd for Toffoli and give Kerfoot more AAV or an extra year of term to what he got from Arizona and I think we could be in a much different place right now. There are a hundred variations of this that could have been done. The good news may actually be Adams's inexperience. His inexperience might mean that he is not bad at what he does so much as he is learning. He has done some good things and there is no denying that the team improved sharply in the first two full seasons post-Krueger. I do think that sometimes when an inexperienced person has early success they can trick themselves into thinking it is because they are smart and did smart things and forget that they still need to observe and absorb what works elsewhere and for others. Here is hoping that Adams actually understands that he made off-season mistakes and learned from them and now starts to fix them.

Tage went on a 5 week heater from Oct 31 - Dec 7 last season. 18 goals and 36 points in 18 games. Outside of that stretch he had 29 goals and 60 points in 60 games. He is probably a 30-35 goal and 60-70 point guy, which is what he produced in his breakout season. I think I have seen enough good things from Tage this season to think he is going to give us several years of that at least. Also, a quick internet search of the top 10 scorers in the NHL over the last 30 years or so shows that there are lots of guys who had pretty substantial drop-offs in production within a year or two of having career years. I'm not saying Tage will never duplicate last year's performance (though I don't think he will), but I don't think the drop-off is as unusual as some are making it out to be.

I’ll confess that I was not expressing a lot of concern over the goaltending situation, forward depth, special teams play, and the more intangible things like toughness and experience, in the off-season. These were concerns, but after last season I just thought we were closer than we are. In hindsight I was wrong. The Sabres had multiple areas they needed to improve. They opted to address one of those areas and improve their depth and experience on defence. In the other areas, including with their inexperienced coaching staff, they opted for internal growth and development. While they can still jump back in it if they have a stretch like they did to end last season, it is looking increasingly unlikely that they will. They now look a little foolish for squandering developmental years for Levi and Benson (a bit less so for Ryan Johnson) on a season where they are looking like a bottom 10 NHL team again. Levi should just stay in Rochester.

Saw a Harrington tweet from yesterday where he blamed the analytics department for pressing the coaches to focus on D, resulting in a style change that “broke the team”. Here are a couple of analytics: 1.). The Sabres allowed 300 goals last season. 2.). The last time a team made the NHL playoffs allowing 300 goals was 1993. We were 100% not making the playoffs without improved D. Either our coaches are unable to teach a defensive system that does not sacrifice offence or our players are not yet mature enough to grasp that playing a good D structure does not mean you can’t also be good offensively. I sense it is a bit of both.

I don't think it was wrong to focus more on defence than we had in the last two years. We didn't outscore our bad defensive play last year (though we came close). It is proper to have a goal of defending better than we did last year. I think there are several factors in why it hasn't worked: - As Bob Sauve28 has said, the PP has not held up it's end. If the PP was in the top-half of the league it would make a huge difference. As is, it is doubly detrimental in that not only is it not producing goals but it is directly leading to discouraged play on our part and inspired play by the opposition. If we were scoring more on the PP we would be in closer games, getting to overtime, not giving up empty net goals, etc. It all adds up. - We are too young. I'll write it again, the down the middle core of our team (Thompson, Mitts, Cozens, Krebs, Dahlin, Power, Sammy, Joker, UPL and Levi) had an average age of 22 to start the season. Collectively, that group is too young and inexperienced to have consistent success. Add in other young players like Peterka, Quinn, R. Johnson and Benson (the last thing this year's team needed was an 18 year old who can hold his own while on his way to an 8 goal / 28 point season) and I don't think we have the experience and discretion needed to understand how playing consistently good D structure does not require sacrificing offence or creativity. They can go together. We have too many young players who are learning this lesson at the same time without the necessary veterans surrounding them to help. - Granato and his assistants are perhaps just not good enough. This doesn't mean they are individually bad coaches. But if it was easy to coach an NHL team to the point where you are squeezing as much out of your line-up as you can then there would be more coaches who do it. There is a reason for why the same coaches get recycled and end up having new successes with new teams; it's because they are good at what they do. There is no doubt in my mind that we would be a better team today if in the offseason we had somehow flipped Granato and Power for Bruce Cassidy and Brayden McNabb (not suggesting for a second we make such a swap). Coaching matters. The good news is that we still have all of the assets that we had at the start of last off-season and that could have been used to make necessary roster adjustments. Also, there are and will be experienced coaches with winning track records available. The bad news is that we do not seem to be motivated to make the needed changes.

Factoring in everything (performance, contract status, cap hit, future value to team), I would say Girgs and Eric Johnson are the most likely to be moved assets. If we eat 50% and are willing, if needed, to take a contract back, then I think there are contending teams that might see them as valuable depth additions. I don’t think we trade Okposo unless he asks for it. I don’t think there are contending teams looking to add RFAs like Joker and Krebs. I think Olofsson’s contract, even at 50% retention, makes him hard to move and we have gone out of our way to make him nearly impossible to move with how he has been used. Unless Adams changes strategy and makes a big acquisition, it will be a quiet deadline. Maybe a couple of vets out (Girgs and Johnson) for 5th rounders.