With the Buffalo Sabres crashing back to earth in a big way over the past 12 games, the focus has again turned to the upcoming offseason and beyond.
The Sabres currently sit in 29th place and have looked worse than ever at times in this 1-10-1 stretch.
Whether it’s the goaltending falling off a cliff, the special teams remaining a special kind of awful, the injuries starting to mount or just general regression, the Sabres have had a lot of reasons to fall back near the bottom.
So now, with the season comfortably lost, the murmurs of who will finish the season as a Sabre, and who won’t, have picked up considerably once again.
The Sabres have a number of soon-to-be unrestricted free agents that have caught the attention of some teams, but the big fish is definitely defenseman Tyler Myers.
Myers seems to have found the point he left off at in his Calder Memorial Trophy-winning season, a development that is a huge boon to the Sabres moving forward. Many seem to forget he is only 24 years old and has many good years of hockey left in him.
That’s why it should come as no surprise that general manager Tim Murray made it clear yesterday that he has not made any effort to trade Myers.
In an interview with Dan Rosen of NHL.com, Murray was emphatic that he thought Myers was a big piece of the rebuild and that he was not actively seeking to trade him.
There are not many 6’8″, minute-hogging defenseman that can skate and move the puck as well as Myers. In fact, there really has only been one ever─Zdeno Chara─and his career is probably in its final act.
Chara is exactly why the Sabres have been so patient with Myers over the past few seasons when it seemed like he would never reclaim his Calder form. Chara was a tire fire when he started in the league with the New York Islanders. It was not until he joined the Ottawa Senators that he began to realize his potential, and that was with a lot of help from the then-dominant Wade Redden and Chris Phillips.
In fact, a reasonable argument can be made that Chara did not truly become a franchise defenseman until the age of 30, when he started to play for the Boston Bruins.
But therein lies the problem for Myers. He’s never had a Redden or Phillips to play with, and the ability to play with a guy like that could have hidden many of his growing pains over the past couple of years.
This is not meant to be read as an excuse for Myers and his past subpar play, it’s merely to illustrate the fact that his closest contemporary in the NHL took a while to get to his Norris Trophy-winning self too.
And if you think Tim Murray is not acutely aware of that, you are gravely mistaken.
This is why a Myers trade seems to be more of a media and fan driven pursuit than a legitimate desire of the Sabres front office.
Now, as Murray acknowledged in the interview, if an offer comes in that “knocks his socks off,” he would be willing to move Myers, but the same goes with essentially everyone on the Sabres roster. If Colorado offered Nathan MacKinnon and Ryan O’Reilly for Zemgus Girgensons, you would have to assume he would take it. They won’t, but the point remains the same.
It may also not be a coincidence that this show of support for Myers comes as the team that has been most interested in him, the Detroit Red Wings, are in Buffalo to take on the Sabres Tuesday night. Could it be a backdoor negotiating tactic on Murray’s part to make it clear that the price is high and will remain high?
Only Murray knows for sure, but it’s likely that Sabres fans will be seeing Myers in the blue and gold for a while.
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At first glance, it seems two Buffalo Sabres teams have taken the ice in the team’s first 41 games this season.
There’s the version that has gone 4-21-3 in two long stretches, and there’s the team that went 10-3-0 and gave the fans hope that maybe this team was good enough to make the playoffs.
As it stands now, the Sabres are 14-24-3, good for 31 points and 28th in the NHL. Any realistic Sabres fan would not have expected much more out of this team to start the season, and aside from the late-November through early-December run, things could be much, much worse.
To say the Sabres have been embarrassingly bad for most of the first half of the season is an understatement. Just looking at the more commonplace statistics, the Sabres are last in the NHL in shots for per game and last in shots against per game. They also have the least amount of goals for, averaging a meager 1.76 goals per game, while allowing the most goals per game at 3.39 per contest.
Those stats alone say everything that needs to be said about the Sabres’ season.
But it gets worse.
The Sabres have a Corsi differential of -1086 for the season so far. That means that the Sabres have about 26 more shots, whether they are on net, missed or blocked, directed toward their net per game than they attempt on the opposition’s net.
What this means at its simplest level is the Sabres spend way too much time in their own zone, and despite all the attention of the coaching staff on this, it’s really only gotten worse.
Including the Sabres’ 6-2 win against the Toronto Maple Leafs on November 15, they have won 11 games. Of those wins, they have controlled possession─had a Corsi-for percentage of 50 percent or more─only once, their 4-3 shootout victory over the Florida Panthers on December 13.
In fact, including the Panthers win, the Sabres only cracked 40-percent Corsi-for four times. Four times! That in turn means that the Sabres were the beneficiaries of a high shooting percentage and a very hot goalie in Jhonas Enroth.
Well, since that win against the Panthers in December, the Sabres are 1-8-1, and Enroth has cooled off.
Granted, the Sabres have done a bit better with possession (in a relative sense) having carried possession twice in the last 10 games, but Enroth and Michal Neuvirth have combined for a .867 save percentage, a stretch that has normalized the season numbers for both.
Now, circling back to the initial premise of the article, it was said that the Sabres seem to have skated out two different teams this season, a winning one and a losing one.
In reality, the stats show that the Sabres have been the same team all along but a team that rode a hot streak—also known as luck—to a record that had them four points out of a wild card at one point.
And with that realization in mind, Sabres fans should expect a long second half of the season.
Ted Nolan can kick and scream all he wants, but until he institutes any semblance of a power play or tightens up the penalty kill—ranked 30th and 29th in the league, respectively—this team will not improve.
General manager Tim Murray also has a few players that he can likely corral for a few more future pieces. Armed with three first-round picks in June’s draft, Murray likely will be hard-pressed to land another one unless the player going the opposite way is named Tyler Myers, but names like Drew Stafford and Chris Stewart may yield a second-rounder for the Sabres.
But the picks or players that may be the Sabres’ is entirely speculative and not worth the time. What is worthwhile is the simple fact that this roster is going to have some potentially significant turnover in the very near future. That turnover, especially if it includes Enroth, Stafford or Myers, could make this team even worse, much like the Ryan Miller-Steve Ott trade did last year.
So while the tanking talk is understandably divisive among the Sabres fanbase, it may not be much of an issue to debate for much longer. If this current 1-8-1 stretch is indicative of the next 41 games, 30th place is a given, not a possibility.
All advanced statistics courtesy of war-on-ice.com
Follow me on Twitter for NHL and Sabres news all season long: @SwordPlay18.
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The Buffalo Sabres are not a good hockey team. The consensus pick for dead last in the NHL before the 2014-15 season even started, the Sabres in an average game allow the opposition almost two shots at the net for every one they take.
This is a team so self-admittedly terrible that it had presumptive first overall pick Connor McDavid’s Erie Otters come to town and play a game; McDavid himself noted to the Canadian Press earlier in the season that every time the Sabres lose his Twitter timeline explodes with mentions (h/t Sportsnet).
But then, the Sabres haven’t lost much at all lately. This is a team with nine wins in its last 13 games, a team that with 28 points sits closer to a playoff spot than it does to last place in the NHL.
The chances of the club finishing 30th overall and becoming the favourite to land McDavid are getting slimmer by the day. That’s a problem because even though the Sabres are winning games they’re still playing terribly.
Let’s start by unpacking that record a little. In the team’s current 9-4-0 run, it has a plus-one goal differential, scoring 35 times and surrendering 34 goals against. Winning hockey games comes down to scoring more goals than the other team; it doesn’t take a genius to understand that a team scoring 50.7 percent of the goals won’t go on winning 69.2 percent of its hockey games. The Sabres have done it by going 8-2-0 in 10 games decided by a single goal.
As an illustration that it can’t last, consider the Montreal Canadiens. A month ago, the team was 14-4-1 despite a modest plus-eight goal differential; at the time we noted the club’s ridiculous 7-1 record in one-goal games and said it was too good to last.
Since then the team has gone 1-5 in one-goal games and 6-6-1 overall, with the latter the kind of record the team’s goal differential and underlying numbers suggested all along. The Sabres too will see their record eventually reflect their goal differential.
A team’s record tends to regress to its goal differential. Goal differential in turn tends to regress to the level of a team’s shot metrics (give or take a brilliant goalie or a lights-out power play). That’s the second problem with the Sabres: Their underlying numbers are brutal, and that hasn’t changed over this winning streak.
In the interests of brevity, we’ll just look at shots. Over Buffalo’s lovely 13-game run, the team has surrendered 484 shots against; that ranks 28th in the league. Meanwhile, the Sabres have taken an NHL-low 337 shots; that’s 17 fewer than the 29th-ranked Rangers, a team which has played one less game in that span. At this, the high point of its season, Buffalo is the worst offensive team in the NHL married to almost the very worst defensive team.
The Sabres have been getting away with it because their goalies have posted a 0.930 save percentage while the opposition’s goalies have posted a 0.896 save percentage over the same span, which is the equivalent of Dominik Hasek at one end of the rink and a below-average AHL goalie at the other end. It’s a measure of just how terrible Buffalo is that even with that kind of goaltending imbalance it’s only breaking even in terms of goal differential.
Still, we know barely short of a certainty that Buffalo is going to collapse at some point. The percentages will even out, general manager Tim Murray will ship off the team’s long list of pending free agents and the Sabres’ results will dive faster than Sean Avery getting hit by Jaromir Jagr.
For the sake of argument, let’s project the record of the NHL’s other 29 teams over 82 games. That’s probably a favourable projection for the Sabres, since a lot of bottom-feeders will get worse as they sell off free agents, but it’s a decent back-of-the-envelope figure. How bad does Buffalo have to be to end up at the bottom of the league?
To finish 30th, the Sabres need to underperform the Edmonton Oilers, now a draft dynasty the way they used to be an actual dynasty. Edmonton is on pace for 51 points; if that continues Buffalo needs to go something like 10-37-3 to finish in last. Even for the Sabres that’s going to be tough to do; that’s a significantly worse record than the team managed last season when it was 14 points back of 29th place.
Where would Buffalo finish if the team suddenly transformed into that wretched 2013-14 group? That team had 52 points in 82 games, which translates to roughly 32 points over the final 50 contests (for a 60-point season).
If the Sabres fall to that level immediately and the other teams continue as they are, they would finish 28th overall, ahead of Edmonton and Carolina. That would give them a 1-9 shot at winning the draft lottery and picking Connor McDavid.
In other words, it’s probably a good idea for Sabres fans to hold off on buying that McDavid jersey.
Statistics courtesy of NHL.com and war-on-ice.com.
Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.
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So this was unexpected.
Coming off of two straight wins against the Montreal Canadiens, the Buffalo Sabres have now won five of their last six contests and have climbed from the basement of the NHL to 27th.
In those five wins, the Sabres defeated the Canadiens, currently in a four-way tie for first in the Eastern Conference, twice, the San Jose Sharks, the Washington Capitals and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
All five are solid wins against solid opponents. Ignoring an uninspired performance against the Winnipeg Jets, one might surmise that the Sabres are likely out of the basement for good.
Well, maybe not.
The Sabres’ Fenwick-for percentage is still solidly last in the NHL at 37.49 percent on the season. The Colorado Avalanche, the 29th-place team, sit at 45.43 percent. To put that disparity in perspective, the Avs are less than 11 percentage points away from being in second place in the NHL. If not for a truly dominant Chicago Blackhawks squad, they would likely be closer to first than the Sabres.
And if you think the last six games have improved upon that Fenwick-for percentage by much you would be very wrong.
In this six-game stretch, the Sabres’ best Fenwick-for is 43.75 percent, and that was in the loss to Winnipeg. In their last five wins, the Sabres have had a Fenwick-for percentage under 40 percent, and the highest total came during the 6-2 win against Toronto at 41.96 percent.
Yes, you read that correctly. In a six-goal game, the Sabres were still only able to hit about 42 percent on the Fenwick-for chart.
And many who are not accustomed to or a fan of advanced stats may laugh and say these numbers don’t matter and that it’s just the performance on the ice that means anything at the end of the day. But these numbers do say something.
What they tell Sabres fans is the Sabres are still woefully bad in terms of puck possession and that they are giving up a hilariously high number of scoring chances every game.
So how have they been able to come up on top then? Stellar netminding from Jhonas Enroth and Michal Neuvirth.
Enroth has played in five of the six games due to a lower-body injury Neuvirth suffered Nov. 18 against San Jose, and he has played spectacularly. In his five appearances, Enroth stopped 157 of 165 shots for a save percentage of .951. It doesn’t need explaining that that number is well over the league average and almost 20 points better than Pekka Rinne’s .933.
Needless to say, that level of netminding is unsustainable in long stretches. If Enroth were to have played at Rinne’s league-best level (Jets backup Michael Hutchinson has only played in eight games this season) during that stretch, he would have allowed three more goals, enough to arguably lose the Sabres two of those games.
To take it a step further and use Enroth’s career average save percentage of .913, the Sabres probably would’ve lost all those games, as they would have allowed about seven more goals.
This is obviously not to take away from the performances Enroth has had—it’s just to say that it is next to impossible for him to maintain this level of play for much longer, let alone the entire season. And if the Sabres are going to be outshot close to a 2-1 margin every game, he needs to play like this for them to have a shot.
But on a more positive note, the Sabres look to have something special in both Tyler Ennis and Zemgus Girgensons. In this stretch, Ennis has two goals and seven points, and Girgensons has three goals and five points. Both have stood out and showed they will be a big part of turning this Buffalo team around in the future.
So with everything that’s been discussed above, where does that leave the Sabres?
All the signs point to a pretty significant regression from the current production in the wins column, especially with some pretty tough contests against some excellent possession teams coming up.
Tampa Bay and Los Angeles are good and getting better as the season goes. Florida is in the middle of the pack possession-wise, but the Panthers always seem to give the Sabres fits with their speed and size down the middle. Calgary is the only poor possession team coming up in the next five games, but the Flames are still almost 10 percent better than the Sabres on the season.
These next five games will go a long way to showing where the Sabres actually are this season. The hope for the playoffs is dim at best; so will they be a middling team, or will they find themselves back where they started the season?
Sabres fans will soon find out.
Advanced stats courtesy of war-on-ice.com.
Follow me on Twitter for NHL and Sabres news all season: @SwordPlay18.
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The Buffalo Sabres ended a 40-game streak of scoring three or fewer goals with Saturday’s 6-2 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs at the First Niagara Center, per Elias Sports Bureau (via ESPN.com).
The unfortunate streak was the third-longest of its kind in NHL history, and both previous instances occurred before 1930, back when forward passing was illegal in the offensive zone.
Buffalo’s streak dated back to Feb. 28, when the Sabres recorded a surprising 4-2 win over the San Jose Sharks.
Now just 4-13-2 this season, the Sabres had a 6-30-4 record during the 40-game run of futility. They only scored three goals on four occasions during the streak, which included eight games without any goals.
Four different Buffalo goalies lost at least one game in regulation throughout the 40-game span, with Connor Knapp adding an overtime loss in last season’s final game.
While things seemingly can’t get any worse for the Sabres, the team hasn’t shown any signs of improvement this season aside from Saturday’s blowout victory.
Buffalo’s 10 points are worst in the NHL, and the team’s minus-38 goal differential is in a league of its own. Entering Sunday’s action, no other team has a goal differential worse than minus-15, a mark held by both the Columbus Blue Jackets and Edmonton Oilers.
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It’s certainly no secret that the Buffalo Sabres are a tire fire this season.
One of the few questions that could possibly remain for Sabres fans, aside from how bad the team actually could be, is the fate of head coach Ted Nolan.
Nolan made a triumphant return to Buffalo last November alongside former Sabre great Pat LaFontaine, and the smile on the coach’s face said everything. Nolan had finally made it back to the NHL after a brief stint with the New York Islanders from 2006-08, something that probably seemed extremely unlikely a few years before.
But that smile faded quickly.
The Sabres finished with a record of 21-51-10, including a 17-39-9 mark under the leadership of Nolan. LaFontaine, who was hired as the president of hockey operations, left the organization in March for reasons that no one is still entirely clear on.
Yet despite all of that, Nolan was signed to a three-year extension at the end of March. This came as somewhat of a surprise, especially given LaFontaine‘s exit, but Nolan was given the opportunity to take this full-on rebuild to the contending stage.
That brings us to this season.
Seventeen games in and the Sabres are a spectacular mess. Their 3-12-2 record is the worst in the NHL, and the supporting statistics suggest that they are lucky to have won three games.
Of the three games they have won, two have been with a PDO─the sum of a team’s shooting and save percentage in a game─over 104. That suggests a high amount of luck on both ends of the ice and, more specifically for the Sabres, a couple of amazing goaltending performances. In their overtime loss to the Bruins a few weeks ago, the Sabres had a PDO over 105.
Essentially, what that is saying is that with even with above-average goaltending performances in those three games, the Sabres are likely 1-14-1.
Even those who don’t take to the advanced stats cannot say they have seen anything that can refute what the advanced stats are saying. The Sabres have almost no transition game to speak of, and their offensive-zone play is almost hilariously bad. With two power-play goals to this point, the Sabres have essentially been giving opponents who take penalties a well-deserved two-minute breather.
So, with all of this, Nolan has now found himself squarely in the crosshairs.
While that may seem extremely premature given the expectations for the Sabres this year, it’s hard to turn a blind eye to what has happened on the ice. Yes, the roster is not a contending one, but the Sabres shouldn’t look like a college team.
Nolan is beloved by (most) Buffalo fans, and a second exit would likely not go over entirely well with that segment of the fanbase, but as the season moves forward, and the team moves backwards, the decision might be an easy one.
The real problem is that the issues plaguing the Sabres and Nolan are ones that have caused many to question Nolan’s ability to coach in the NHL in the past.
He is not an X’s and O’s guy and typically resorts to stressing hustle and heart over implementing any systems to help improve the team’s play. After Nolan’s extension was announced, Justin Bourne of the Score wrote that “Nolan is one of those motivational guys who think that if you’re losing, you’re not competing hard enough.”
That certainly has been the theory this year, as in pretty much every bad loss, Nolan has commented on the Sabres’ effort level as the main reason they lost. Not the horrific power play. Not the penalty kill that parts like the Red Sea at the worst of times. Not the sheer lack of shots on goal.
John Vogl of The Buffalo News wrote an article earlier this week citing Nolan’s insistence that if the Sabres work harder, they’ll be more successful. While the players, especially captain Brian Gionta, seem to be buying in to that line of thinking, it’s hard to believe that it will last much longer if they continue to struggle at this level.
Honestly, it’s almost insulting to hear over and over again that the reason the team is struggling so badly is their effort level when a casual observer can see that the team is not well-coached to begin with.
And that point brings the other major criticism of Nolan to the forefront: his inability to develop young players.
As a rebuilding team, the young talent on the Sabres is clearly the most important thing this season. As it stands, of the players that can be deemed prospects, only Rasmus Ristolainen has played significant minutes game to game.
Nikita Zadorov is in limbo, but he has seen time in the last three games. Sam Reinhart was (rightfully) sent back to his junior team after spending a majority of his time with the Sabres on the fourth line. Mikhail Grigorenko, Mark Pysyk, Chad Ruhwedel and Joel Armia have all been sent to Rochester when one can make an easy argument that they should all be with the Sabres based on their talent.
The key to the future is not with Cody McCormick or Torrey Mitchell. The key is in any number of the young guys who could turn the franchise around.
If Nolan continues to be hesitant to give significant minutes to more of these players, general manager Tim Murray will send him packing as fast as he extended him.
Needless to say, Nolan may be working on borrowed time from this point forward. If the Sabres were not in such a hapless position, he could have very well already been handed his walking papers. But they sit in last place and seemingly with no answers about how to improve their plight.
Many will say that this was the plan given the treasure that lies at the end of this ugly, ugly rainbow, but Murray has to make sure he has the guy behind the bench to move forward with either Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel.
So, while there is a lot more hockey to be played, Nolan’s fate could be one of the few mysteries left this season, and it’s a divisive enough topic to keep most Sabres fans interested.
Advanced stats courtesy of war-on-ice.com.
Follow me on Twitter for NHL and Sabres news all season long: @SwordPlay18.
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With the amount of young talent the Buffalo Sabres have on their roster, it was only a matter of time before a significant hurdle was encountered.
Enter the Nikita Zadorov saga.
Zadorov, the Sabres’ second first-round selection in the 2013 NHL draft, is currently the center of a rights conflict that encompasses three leagues.
When the season began, many assumed that Zadorov might stick with the Sabres for any period of time less than the 10 games it would take to have his entry-level deal kick in and then head back to London of the OHL for the remainder of the season. Essentially, they would handle him the same as they did last season when he played seven games with the Sabres and then went back to play for the Knights.
However, there is a wrinkle many were unaware of: Zadorov can─apparently─only play for a team in the CHL if the KHL signs a transfer agreement.
As acknowledged in the ProHockeyTalk article, and more specifically by Sabres general manager Tim Murray, the entire situation is incredibly unclear and he, and many others, are not too sure how this whole mess will work out. What is known is CSKA Moscow drafted Zadorov fourth overall in the 2012 KHL draft and own his rights there.
But despite no one seemingly really knowing how to navigate the issue, the Sabres are left with two clear options: send Zadorov down to London and hope all goes well or keep him on the NHL roster and burn a year of his entry-level deal.
Now, as with most things, these options both have their pros and cons, but the biggest consideration in all of this is likely to be the control of Zadorov’s development for the remainder of the season.
No matter what you make of Zadorov’s inability to get into the lineup this year─ignoring the last two games─the kid has all the measurables to be a top-flight NHL defenseman in the very near future. He’s 6’5″, 235 pounds and is loaded with excellent skating and an explosive shot.
Assuming Tyler Myers stays put, which admittedly may be a bad assumption, the Sabres will have three potential top-four defensemen standing at least 6’4″ in Myers, Zadorov and Rasmus Ristolainen. While Myers has shied away from being the ultraphysical presence on the ice during his career, Zadorov and Ristolainen have shown a penchant for throwing their bodies around on top of their skills elsewhere.
Simply put, Zadorov is a huge part of the future for these Sabres and letting whatever happens happen with him for the next six-to-eight months is probably not something Murray is all too comfortable with.
Yes, staying with the Sabres for seven more games burns a year of his entry-level contract, and yes, most of this year may be spent in the press box, but Murray has him under his supervision during that time. Risking that he goes to the KHL and does not develop to Murray’s standards is a huge risk.
Beyond that, per Bill Hoppe of the Olean Times Herald, Zadorov is enjoying his time with the big club despite his lack of playing time up until this point. Not only that, but coach Ted Nolan is impressed with his desire to play as well as his work ethic in practice. If those things hold true, the worst thing that can happen is losing a year of his deal.
Now, it must be said that the dream would be to have Zadorov play in the AHL with the Rochester Americans. That is prohibited by the NHL-CHL transfer agreement, which does not allow prospects who do not turn 20 by December 31 of the year the season begins to play in the AHL. They must either play in the CHL, which is comprised of the OHL, QMJHL and WHL, or the NHL.
Murray has been a huge advocate of changing this rule in some way and has been very vocal about it since Sam Reinhart was sent down.
But unfortunately, Zadorov is stuck in limbo, which means he’s “stuck” on the Sabres roster and maybe in the press box for now. The situation is not ideal, but it may be the best of a few terrible options out there.
Follow me on Twitter for NHL and Sabres news all season: @SwordPlay18.
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The 2014-15 Buffalo Sabres are a bad hockey club. More breaking news to follow.
They are 1-6-0 and with road games this week with the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks, 1-8-0 is practically an inevitability. With a 38.5 percent Fenwick close and a PDO of exactly 100, there’s a terrific chance that the Sabres of the moment will be the Sabres of the next 75 games. A second consecutive historically bad season is on the horizon.
The good news: At the end of this rainbow comprised of sadness, shame and frustration is Connor McDavid, a generational talent who has drawn comparisons with Sidney Crosby.
The bad news: The Sabres might be so beyond help that the arrival of McDavid won’t offer the instantaneous turnaround that occurred with Crosby and the Penguins.
(Of course, the draft lottery could result in the Sabres picking second, thus losing out on McDavid, but let’s say the Sabres catch at least one break this season.)
Let’s assume McDavid is the equal of Crosby, which is a big assumption considering Crosby is the best player in the world by a mile. In Crosby’s final two seasons of junior in the QMJHL, he led the league in scoring with 135 points in 59 games in 2003-04, then posted a league-best 168 points (102 assists) in 62 games the following season.
McDavid finished fourth in the OHL with 99 points in 56 games last season; with nine goals and 29 points in 10 games this season, he’s on pace for an astronomical 197 points in 68 games.
McDavid is a game-changer, a player for which tanking should be mandatory for the likes of the Sabres. If the Sabres offered fans a chance to play goaltender for a period in all home games this season in an effort to facilitate landing McDavid, I don’t know if anyone could blame them. At least then they’d be honest about their tanking.
The question with McDavid is, just how much game-changing could he do with the Sabres?
Consider the arrival of Crosby to the Penguins in 2005-06. The 2003-04 club finished dead-last with 58 points, which seems like an attainable number for this year’s Sabres. Crosby posted 39 goals and 102 points in his rookie season, helping the Penguins attain 58 points in the standings for the second season in a row.
Three years later, Crosby and the Penguins won a Stanley Cup in 2009. All three seasons featured playoff berths, with the final two seasons including a trip to the Stanley Cup Final in 2008.
Within four years of Crosby’s arrival in the NHL, the Penguins went to two Stanley Cup Finals, winning one of them.
Despite the greatness of McDavid, it seems far-fetched to think the same thing can happen with the Sabres.
Crosby’s first season will probably look a lot like McDavid‘s presumptuous first one in Buffalo. Crosby led the Penguins in goals his rookie season with 39 and was followed by 37-year-old Mark Recchi (24), 36-year-old John LeClair (22) and 26-year-old Ryan Malone (22).
Recchi, LeClair and Malone have a real Brian Gionta, Matt Moulson and Drew Stafford feel to them, don’t they?
Everything began to change for the Penguins in Crosby’s second season, which coincided with the first seasons of Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal. Malkin was in the Penguins’ system before Crosby, as he was taken in the 2004 draft, while Staal was the result of the Penguins failing to improve during Crosby’s rookie season.
It also helped to have selected Marc-Andre Fleury, who was years from falling off the cliff and becoming the goaltender he is today, with the first pick in the 2003 draft.
Crosby is the face of the NHL and will always get more credit and blame than he does for successes and failures, but the Penguins had a good thing going before and after Crosby’s arrival. That aided them into becoming the perennial force they are today.
What do the Sabres have?
They certainly don’t have their own Fleury. They have 26-year-olds Michal Neuvirth and Jhonas Enroth, who boast career save percentages of .911 and .913, respectively. If the Sabres are following the Penguins’ plan of drafting a star and raising a Cup four years later, it won’t be either of these goaltenders doing the Cup lifting.
In the system, the Sabres have sixth-round picks Nathan Lieuwen and Linus Ullmark, the undrafted Andrey Makarov, fifth-round pick Calvin Petersen and third-round pick Jonas Johansson. Based on pedigree and age, the 19-year-old Johansson might the team’s goaltender if and when things turn around in Buffalo, but that’s a 105-point font-sized if.
The Sabres also don’t have their version of Malkin floating around their system. While the Penguins were using Crosby-Malkin-Staal down the middle, the Sabres potential version of McDavid-Sam Reinhart-Mikhail Grigorenko wouldn’t be anywhere close to that.
The Sabres have the top-ranked prospect pool, according to HockeysFuture, but they don’t have the game-changers the Penguins had a decade ago.
If the rumors are true and the Sabres deal defenseman Tyler Myers, they will be so far behind where the Penguins were in terms of talent when they drafted Crosby that the time for imagining a similar rebirth in Buffalo should be brought to an end.
The one thing the Sabres have going for them is three first-round and three second-round picks in the 2015 draft. That means what they do after they theoretically select McDavid will decide their immediate and long-term success just as much as McDavid. With the foundation of Reinhart, three second-round picks and two third-round picks in the 2014 draft, the Sabres are set up more for the John Tavares method of rebuilding.
The Isles took Tavares with the No. 1 pick in 2009 but also selected defenseman Calvin de Haan with the 12th pick. They grabbed Casey Cizikas and Anders Lee, two players who will contribute this season, in the fourth and sixth round, respectively.
But it was the previous season that mattered just as much to the Islanders becoming a playoff team in 2013 and perhaps again in 2015, as they took forward Josh Bailey in the first round and defenseman Travis Hamonic in the second round. The Islanders didn’t exactly hit on a lot of their 13 picks in 2008, but they did enough to help foster a turnaround in the coming years.
That’s the path that seems to make the most sense for the Sabres, who won’t know for a few years how they did with their nine picks in 2014. If time reveals the Sabres did only a slightly better job than the Islanders in 2008, maybe they can be regular playoff participants by 2018.
That probably seems depressing, especially considering all the McDavid/Crosby hype and comparisons. But it’s probably for the best for Sabres fans to expect a gradual return to respectability along the lines of Tavares than it is to expect to be an instant, dominant squad like the Penguins became with Crosby.
All statistics via NHL.com.
Dave Lozo covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @DaveLozo.
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It’s been a rough start to the Buffalo Sabres‘ 2014-15 season, but not too many can say they didn’t expect it.
The team sits at 1-6-0, squarely last in the league while also ranking last in a number of important areas of the game. As far as starts go, it seems the 4-15-1 start under Ron Rolston last year is well within reach, and it could possibly be even worse.
So what can be gleaned from the Sabres’ first seven games? Well, beyond the fact that it’s going to be a long, long season?
Last week the Buffalo Sabres already had a major outlet reporting that one of their more prominent players is on the trading block.
Looks like not much has changed from last season, after all.
Darren Dreger and Pierre LeBrun of TSN both acknowledged the availability of Sabres defenseman Tyler Myers last week (h/t George Malik of Kukla’s Korner), starting the first Buffalo trade frenzy of the young season.
Myers has not lived up to his billing as the Calder Trophy winner in the past few seasons, but his play has certainly gotten stronger since last season’s departure of Ron Rolston. In an albeit small sample size, Myers’ play this season has been one of the few bright spots on this Sabres team.
So far this year, Myers is (somehow) an even plus-minus and is eighth in the league in ice time per game, including his 29-plus minute game Tuesday against the Carolina Hurricanes. His advanced metrics are even more impressive, as his plus-12.1 percent relative Corsi despite only 28.57 percent of his shifts starting in the offensive zone, via War-On-Ice, is excellent.
These stats are likely just one reason of why the Sabres have been receiving calls for Myers, with his size and talent also being a huge motivator for the rest of the NHL.
According to LeBrun and Dreger, the Anaheim Ducks, who just walloped the Sabres 5-1 Monday afternoon, seem to be the team most interested in the 6’8″ blueliner, but others, like the Detroit Red Wings have apparently also inquired.
But a passing interest is obviously different than coming up with an offer that Sabres general manager Tim Murray will find acceptable.
TSN‘s Bob McKenzie acknowledged that the price will be high, as one would expect, but how high is “high?”
McKenzie’s tweet acknowledged that “many teams” were interested in Myers, so one can expect that in order for a team to secure his services, they will have to outbid the others.
Myers, much like Zdeno Chara early in his career, is a unique commodity in this NHL. If he were to regain his Calder form, which he may─stress on may─be on his way to doing, his value would be near that of the top-tier defensemen in the league.
So what would the Sabres expect in return for Myers?
“High price” lends itself to some relatively easy assumptions, namely a top prospect and a first-round pick, preferably in the 2015 draft. That could also equal a top-six forward that can play in the NHL right away, plus some lesser draft picks.
The plus for Murray in these discussions is that both Anaheim and Detroit have deep prospect pools from which to create a deal.
For Detroit, one can imagine Murray’s eye is on Anthony Mantha, the leading goal scorer and point getter in the QMJHL last season. A 6’5″, 205-pound beast, Mantha would go a long way to solidifying the Sabres’ depth at right wing.
Now, the thought of the Red Wings trading their top-rated prospect (according to Hockey’s Future) is likely more than a bit far-fetched, especially for someone as inconsistent as Myers the past few seasons. That would likely mean some of Detroit’s other great prospects would come up in conversation.
Andreas Athanasiou, currently with the Grand Rapids Griffins of the AHL, is another high-scoring winger with size. Athanasiou finished tied for second in the OHL in goals last season with 49 before moving on to the AHL. Tomas Jurco has also been impressive in his brief time in the NHL, scoring 15 points in 38 games with the Wings.
The underlying aspect to any deal with the Red Wings will be their first-round pick, and the ever-present discussion of whether or not this is the year they finally miss the playoffs. Every year they seem to find a way, and even opened a 3-1 series lead over the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2012 Western Conference Semifinals.
But, this year, as with the last few years, the Wings are not a lock for the postseason. Murray might have his sights on what could be a third lottery pick, despite the New York Islanders‘ torrid start to the season potentially a flaw in that plan.
A deal with Anaheim, despite their deep prospect pool, may be a bit trickier because of an assumed reluctance to give away pieces of their active roster.
As it stands, the best Anaheim forward prospects currently not on the NHL team are Nick Ritchie, their 2014 first-round selection, Nick Sorensen, who is currently in Sweden, Stefan Noesen, who is coming off a significant injury, and Nicolas Kerdiles, the University of Wisconsin product currently with the AHL‘s Norfolk Admirals.
Ritchie certainly has top-end potential as a goal scorer, but one can imagine that he is about as close to off limits as it can get for a Ducks team looking to keep its depth. Sorensen and Kerdiles have shown top-six potential, but both are a ways off from that, if they reach it at all. Noesen has come back from a season-ending knee injury last season to start the year with Norfolk, so his pro game is yet to be truly evaluated.
If Murray is not content with one of those four guys being the centerpiece, the Ducks would have to part with someone like Emerson Etem, Rickard Rakell, William Karlsson or Jakob Silfverberg. That’s a move that would be harder to make simply because it affects the locker room this season, and the Ducks have already done some of that by trading for Ryan Kesler.
Basically, this is not an easy trade to make for either side. Murray would be giving up what is likely an excellent NHL player who is still only 24 years old. Anaheim or Detroit would be giving up something of pretty substantial value, and both teams have reasons to hold on to whatever Murray would ask for in exchange for Myers.
So while it’s easy to hear Detroit and assume Mantha and a first-rounder—and other teams will undoubtedly join the fold and similar packages will be pined for by Sabres fans—this is inherently more complex than that.
But if Myers continues to impress the eye-test people and the stats people as the Sabres continue to play so poorly, one can only imagine Tim Murray is going to have a lot of people that want to try and make it work.
Follow me on Twitter for NHL and Sabres news all season: @SwordPlay18
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