The Buffalo Sabres have become quite proficient at shooting themselves in the foot. They buy bad players, hire mediocre managers and inexperienced coaches, fail to draft and develop effectively, and in general provide a negative working experience for their players.
Ryan O’Reilly could tell you something about that.
As an organization, the Sabres are right there with the worst in sports. They don’t need any help to be lousy.
Every once in a while, however, every 20 years or so, the NHL helps out anyway by putting the screws to the Western New York Swordsmen. We won’t go through the 1999 Stanley Cup final all over again, but Brett Hull’s got a ring and so do the rest of the Dallas Stars and the NHL still hasn’t explained successfully why that Cup-winning goal on Dominik Hasek counted.
This spring, it was like Gary Bettman’s front office suddenly realized they hadn’t taken a tire iron to the Sabres recently, and got to it. When the league announced that 24 of the 31 teams would possibly resume play in late July or early August, the Sabres weren’t among those invited.
Now, let’s be clear. The Sabres weren’t a very good team this year. They started out like a house afire in October and by the winter couldn’t win a game. Even Ralph Krueger, praised as a genius in many media corners despite his curious lack of good NHL results, couldn’t get the ship righted.
When the music stopped in March, the Sabres were in 13th place in the Eastern Conference. three points behind 12th place Montreal with two games in hand. The Habs had a .500 points percentage and the Sabres were at .492. Buffalo had the edge in regulation/overtime wins, which can serve as a tiebreaker. Both teams allowed more goals than they scored. Basically, the two teams were even, with Montreal having the scheduling advantage of having played more games. Both on home ice.
So naturally, the Bettman administration plunked the Habs into the 24-team format, and kept the Sabres out.
How in the name of Roger Crozier was that fair?
Instead of Jack Eichel, Rasmus Dahlin and the rest of the youthful Sabres getting a shot at gaining some post-season experience against Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins, it will be Carey Price and Company. It’s hard to argue that Buffalo or Montreal was particularly deserving of inclusion in post-season play, but the Canadiens certainly weren’t any more deserving than Krueger’s Sabres.
One wonders exactly how the NHL reached the decision to put Montreal in. It appears to be completely arbitrary, like the call on Hull’s goal. The league could have addressed this issue by having a single play-in game or miniseries between the Habs and Sabres, and nobody would have complained. It would have been an intriguing competition to watch.
But no, it was much cleaner to just boot the Sabres to the sidelines. Buffalo is now grouped with the three California teams, Detroit, Ottawa and New Jersey in some sort of unofficial NHL second division. These teams won’t get to hold training camps this summer, and won’t play another game until the 2020-21 season, which might not start until December. Or later.
So the Discarded Seven could be nine months between games by the time NHL owners finish turning not one but two seasons upside down. Joe Thornton might have time to grow his full mountain man beard back.
This will provide Sabres GM Jason Botterill lots and lots and lots of time to try to understand how a team like Edmonton finally got its act together, but his team could not. Botterill will get that chance because co-owner Kim Pegula said he’ll be back for his fourth season. She explained to a perplexed Sabres Nation that she and her husband, Terry, “have a little bit more information than maybe a fan does.”
By all means, use that exclusive information, Mrs. and Mr. P. Don’t hold back. The city’s only been without a playoff game since 2011.
Meanwhile, there’s a five-alarm fire going on with Eichel. After five seasons, he still has yet to taste playoff action, and in recent days he’s sounded a little like O’Reilly, who before being traded to St. Louis and winning a Cup said he’d lost his “love” for playing in the NHL as a member of the Sabres.
Eichel said being a Sabre has “definitely worn on him.”
“Listen, I’m fed up with losing, and I’m fed up and I’m frustrated,” he told reporters. “It’s been a tough couple of months. It’s been a tough five years with where things have went.”
The 23-year-old is only two years into an eight-year, $80-million (U.S.) deal, so his chances of worming his way out of Buffalo are almost zero. He’s also not alone. Defenceman Rasmus Ristolainen, a talented enigma as an NHLer, has said he’d be happy to be traded after seven seasons and no playoff games. Ristolainen’s comments on life as a Sabre were even more damning.
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“If I think my whole career, in Buffalo and before I came to Buffalo, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been on a team where there’s been a winning culture,” he said. “Sometimes you ask the question, ‘What is it?’ I haven’t really seen it before or in Buffalo.”
Had the NHL seen fit to give the Sabres a fair shake, players like Eichel and Ristolainen might have had one or more post-season games to feel differently about life as a Sabre. That didn’t happen.
Now Botterill gets to deal with the fallout. He can’t even make a trade, unless it’s with one of the other Sequestered Seven. The Sabres just get to sit there, waiting indefinitely, until the NHL invites them to play again.
