Is "accountability" even possible in the Sabres organization?

[Cage]

13 minutes ago, LGR4GM said:

Fire Adams and the entire coaching staff with the exception of Bales to start. 

5 years of being bad and you're in here defending Adams. It's breathtaking. He's been GM for 2 of 3 Sabres 13 game losing streaks. He needs to be fired and an adult with actual brains brought in. Howdy Doody's palm trees and want to be here act has worn thin. 

5 years. 0 playoffs. 1 top 6 forward brought in via trade. The dude is incompetent. 

I actually didn't advocate in my post that Adams should be retained.  I stated that I was at a loss for how to proceed.  I also acknowledged that his moves clearly haven't worked out and the whole team seems to be painted into a corner.  I guess we can fire him and others, I'm not sure it's clear to me what that would achieve??  Will existing players play harder?  Will trade targets drop Sabres from their no-trade lists?  Will free agents come here?  Will prospects develop faster?  Do we want to fire-sale players to restart another rebuild?

Surely, this is a bad situation as we see where the various moves have left the team....

[Carmel Corn]

1 hour ago, LGR4GM said:

The Sabres are in what? 31st 32nd in the league and you're arguing Adams fixed something? What did he fix? 

Instead of a culture of "what to be in Buffalo" he should have focused on "actually good at hockey". Also who gives a ***** of Levi some day some time becomes a starter and Kulich some day is a 30g scorer? In the 4 years since that trade Reinhart won a cup and is a 50g scorer. Great in another 3 years we might have something... only took 7 more seasons of losing! Victory. 

No ***** gm with a brain would have signed a 3rd pair defender with 58 total nhl games to a 7 year deal worth over 4 million. Also who gives a flying ***** if in year 6 of that deal is a "steal"? For the first 3 it's been terrible. 

Excuses is all I hear. Adams is a failure. 

Agree, GMKA is a failure and he himself is responsible for creating the environment where no outside player wants to come here .  He can’t use palm trees and taxes as excuses either.  He’s had more time than his immediate predecessors to turn things around and has made one bad decision after another to create this current mess.  He claims Pegula is 100% supportive, so I therefore feel he and only he is ACCOUNTABLE and needs to be relieved.

[Carmel Corn]

18 minutes ago, Cage said:

I actually didn't advocate in my post that Adams should be retained.  I stated that I was at a loss for how to proceed.  I also acknowledged that his moves clearly haven't worked out and the whole team seems to be painted into a corner.  I guess we can fire him and others, I'm not sure it's clear to me what that would achieve??  Will existing players play harder?  Will trade targets drop Sabres from their no-trade lists?  Will free agents come here?  Will prospects develop faster?  Do we want to fire-sale players to restart another rebuild?

Surely, this is a bad situation as we see where the various moves have left the team....

Not sure if you are advocating more patience or not?  That may be okay with other teams who have tasted some recent success and playoffs, but the Sabres are in very rare air with their long term failure.  IMHO - this franchise needs a quick and serious injection of credibility that can move the needle, which needs to move desperately.

[Pimlach]

2 hours ago, Cage said:

In these threads people keep using the word "accountable".... I'm not sure what that really means??  For fans, we can turn off the team and ice them out of our attention span.  Don't attend games, don't buy merch....  The local media hasn't exactly been love-festing over the team.  Suppose they could be harsher, but not sure what that would change?

For the team, they can fire Ruff, fire Adams or get rid of players.  This is where it where, to me, it gets very perplexing.  

When looked at individually, Adams has made a lot of moves that we would probably agree with in isolation.  I'll keep it at a high-level, but we can go into details as well.  First he wanted to build the team around players who wanted to be Buffalo Sabres.  I think we can all agree with that concept.  The Bills would do the same thing.  Beane just took a huge cap hit to get rid of Diggs.  So he traded frustrated players (Eichel, Reinhart, Risto) and got reasonable trade compensation for them.  He got a lot of first round draft capital, Tuch (who clearly was happy to come here) and Levi (we needed a top G prospect)

He's drafted well.  We're still the youngest team in the league.  Sabres prospect pipeline is routinely ranked in the top 5.  Not just the first round picks, but taking chances on good Russian players who are developing and he got at multi-round discounts.  He knew to trade up for Peterka.  Most every GM would hav picked Owen Power #1 overall (and he's still young).  They've forced most players to be successful on Amerks before progressing.  Amerks are stocked with developing draft picks who are growing as we should expect.

He's been careful, but taking reasonable risks on handing out long-term contracts.  While we might 20:20 hindsight some of those, the long-term signings for Thompson (nearly 50 goal scorer), Cozens (30 goal scorer at the time), Samuelsson (strong young D for $4m/), Dahlin are moves most GMs would have done as well.  He's being careful with cap space as he had been expecting that Quinn, Byrum, Peterka, maybe Krebs would continue to grow and he would need the space to resign them.

He also was creative in solving long-standing G issue.  He didn't give up on UPL, got top prospect in Levi and took a shot at an emerging possibility in Comrie.  While Comrie didn't work out, he was thinking about the issue the same way as Beane may have when he signed as yet unknowns like Poyer and Hyde some years ago.  

As much as people liked Granato, the players needed "accountability" (there's that word again), so he brings back Ruff, which seems like a sound move at the time.

Obviously all of this hasn't progressed as planned, but I don't see large-scale defect in the thinking that we would expect from a GM.  I honestly am stuck with where the problem is with this team??  They should be like last year's Houston Texans or two years ago's Detroit Lions and be on the rise with the rest of the league nervous about playing them.  If that was the case, the stands would be full.... the Bills notwithstanding.

 

Adam’s represented a major Pegula Covid related cost cutting and another rebuild that allowed the old Core to get out.  No qualified POHO/GM would work with those constraints, not even Boterill.  Adams hiring as GM was both jaw dropping and eye rolling.  

Winning will make hockey players want to be here.  Nothing else. Just like with the Bills.  If football players from California, Florida, and Texas like to play here then hockey players from anywhere else will too.  Just make winning the priority, set the culture to demand and promote excellence.  Stop running the place on a shoe string budget. 

What you missed is roster building.  Adam’s cost this team one playoff birth already by not bringing in a goalie when he blew the Ulmark signing.  Tokarski, Dell, Anderson, Comrie … what was that all about?   Waiting for Levi   

Roster building - he handed NHL jobs to young players with 0 and 1 year in the AHL like candy at Halloween    He purposely prevented competition with his “no blockers” stance.  Some of the vets he brought in just wanted money and then wanted to leave immediately (Hall, Stahl) and some had no tread left to make any real impact (Anderson, E Johnson).   The roster still lacks experience and players to support all the hockey roles that are required of winning teams.  He publicly complains about how hard it is to make trades but it’s his job to do so.   

Salary Cap - a puzzling use of the cap.  More like a fear of the cap.  Still operating under the cap in seasons that he publicly declared “all in”.  He is obviously resource constrained by his boss.  He is under the thumb of his boss, even for on ice hockey related moves.  ( “Everything they need is in the room”. -  right?)  

Skills and experience - what other team had Adams on their radar for GM?  We can review his resume again but why bother.  

Bottom line right now is that he has a bevy of very good prospects (credit him for that) but I would not trust him to know what to with them.  They all won’t make the team, some should be moved to build a playoff team right now (actually next off season would be better).  The  losing has to stop now before the current core players burn out and go the way of the last core.  Sitting in last place on Christmas, the odds are stacked that this year will be another with no playoffs   

It’s time for better. Adams did his job I guess, the team made it through Covid.  That seemed to be what all the panic in Pegulaville was about.  Maintaining their family standards and all that talk. 

When can we get back to winning?  

[Archie Lee]

18 minutes ago, Cage said:

I actually didn't advocate in my post that Adams should be retained.  I stated that I was at a loss for how to proceed.  I also acknowledged that his moves clearly haven't worked out and the whole team seems to be painted into a corner.  I guess we can fire him and others, I'm not sure it's clear to me what that would achieve??  Will existing players play harder?  Will trade targets drop Sabres from their no-trade lists?  Will free agents come here?  Will prospects develop faster?  Do we want to fire-sale players to restart another rebuild?

Surely, this is a bad situation as we see where the various moves have left the team....

You typically don’t see a GM in pro sports get a 2nd chance with a course correction. The Sabres are legitimately a lottery team this year. This is four years after we drafted 1st overall. We have a legitimate chance to do so again. Two years after missing the playoffs by 1 point and in a year where the GM himself stated we are in win-now-mode.

There are many reasons to be terrified of any decision Pegula makes related to the Sabres. Barring a historical turnaround to this season, keeping Adams would just be further evidence that the Sabres continue to not operate like a normal NHL team. 

[Cage]

1 hour ago, Carmel Corn said:

Not sure if you are advocating more patience or not?  That may be okay with other teams who have tasted some recent success and playoffs, but the Sabres are in very rare air with their long term failure.  IMHO - this franchise needs a quick and serious injection of credibility that can move the needle, which needs to move desperately.

I'm honestly not sure what to advocate.  Though I have to say I don't see any solutions in this thread other than to rage-fire the whole front office.... after that, what will fix this?

Edited 20 hours ago by Cage

[LGR4GM]

2 hours ago, Cage said:

I'm honestly not sure what to advocate.  Though I have to say I don't see any solutions in this thread other than to rage-fire the whole front office.... after that, what will fix this?

Pegula selling the team and experienced hockey ppl being brought in to run it without financial constraints. 

This season is over. 

@Cage i take exception to the "rage fire" comment. It's not rage fire. The pp has sucked for years. The defense has sucked for years. The same coaches don't get brought back in a serious org. It's not rage, it's refusing to accept their ***** mediocrity.