In case you haven’t heard, Jack Eichel and the Vegas Golden Knights will be in town on Thursday night for the first time since Kevyn Adams sent the former captain and a third-round pick to Sin City for Peyton Krebs, Alex Tuch, a first-round pick and a second-round pick. Due to his return, much has been made about whether fans should or should not boo Eichel when he plays at KeyBank Center. Beyond that, there is a growing opposition to the way that the Sabres organization has been run over the past decade, and the festering animosity toward ownership resulting from that mismanagement may boil over on Thursday as well (but more on that later).
It is the editorial opinion of this Sabres blog that paying fans should boo whomever they like for whatever reasons they see fit, and there is one concrete reason that booing Eichel in particular is a completely defensible position.
When Eichel sat down with Elliotte Friedman for an interview taped shortly before his trade from the Sabres, he admitted that he had asked to be traded following the 2020 season – a season in which he was a bona fide Hart Trophy candidate.
“It just seemed that we were heading towards another…I don’t want to say rebuild but, we weren’t really in a position that we were going to try and win,… Eichel told Friedman. “I went to the team and said I wasn’t really happy with the idea of that. If that’s the route they wanted to take, maybe it would be better to move me, to use me as a jumpstart.…
The team tried to patch things over by signing Taylor Hall in an attempt to make their disgruntled #1 center happy. That didn’t work, and Eichel seemed to indicate that his heart wasn’t in it during the beginning of the 2020-21 season.
“It was kind of a disaster in terms of a personal season for myself,… Eichel said to Friedman. “I didn’t have a great year. I was obviously injured in March and things just didn’t go well. But yeah, I think probably that conversation that happened a year ago probably had something to do with part of the process being so difficult.…
That difficult process included scoring only two goals and adding 16 assists in 23 games. At the time, there was some thought that a nagging abdominal injury was leading him to be easily knocked off pucks which was totally unlike the Eichel that fans had seen in the past. Eichel seemed to indicate in that interview that he had one foot out the door during the 2020-21 season while fans paid good money to go see him drag himself around the ice.
That is a booing offense.
Players not giving their all has always been a perfectly acceptable reason for fans to boo, as evidenced by the recent Sabres win in Toronto when Leaf fans booed their team off the ice following an absolute spanking by Don Granato’s Sabres. That was a valid occasion for fans to boo. This is a valid occasion for fans to boo.
Now the process that led Eichel to the point of giving up is definitely not all his fault, and it can largely be put upon the comically inept nature of the organization during the years Eichel played in Western New York. Going through all the examples of poor coaching, bad supporting players, unfortunate injuries and weird ownership decisions would take up an entire blog. Still, we’ll try to fit in a few here because it speaks to the broader desire to boo the organization at large.
Fans don’t have the opportunity to boo Ralph Krueger for not only being the worst head coach in Sabres history, but also for being a terrible quasi-assistant-general-manager to rookie GM Kevyn Adams who – again, this bears repeating – had no official assistant general manager for almost a year after the Pegulas purged an enormous contingent of hockey personnel along with Jason Botterill in 2020.
Ralph Krueger is gone and out of hockey. There will be no opportunity to boo him because he was exposed as utterly inept and as a result, he is almost assuredly never returning to NHL hockey.
Likewise, fans don’t have the opportunity to boo the Pegulas because they aren’t shown on the jumbotron at games. If they were, they would be booed because they have owned the Sabres for 12 years and for the past 11, the team hasn’t made the playoffs.
That’s a booing offense.
Add to that the fact that ownership repeatedly muffs opportunities to connect to fans on anything approaching a human level, and well, you get this: President Kim Pegula recently told reporter Greg Wyshynski that there “isn’t a ton of crossover… between Bills fans and Sabres fans because “a football game is long, a hockey game is long… and therefore fans will “pick and choose.…
This statement is patently ridiculous, but let’s play devil’s advocate and give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s talking about crossover season-ticket holders rather than general fans. One reason that they may not see a ton of ticket crossover is because the hockey team has been a smoldering tire fire covered in dumpster juice for more than a decade and people don’t want to buy Sabres season tickets anymore.
The result of the President’s most recent comments is a fan-led plan to wear Bills attire to the Sabres game to demonstrate that there is, indeed, enough time to watch a long football game and a long hockey game because Buffalonians do indeed care about both teams. It’s just that one of them has been awful since 2011 and plays in a run-down arena, while the other is good and is poised to get a brand-new venue.
Fans should absolutely do that if it makes them feel better. It’s an awful feeling as a paying customer or even just a fan watching at home to feel as if no one in the organization cares as much about the team as much as they do. Connecting to the fans and making sure that they feel valued has often been a failing of this ownership group throughout its tenure and it may now finally be reaching a crescendo.
The Sabres haven’t filled the arena this season, but on Thursday it could be the biggest crowd of the year, and they all figure to be ready to boo. Fans want the best for this team and they haven’t gotten anything close to that over the past decade; neither Eichel nor the Pegulas delivered.
So boo them all: boo Eichel, boo the former coaches, boo the former GMs, boo ownership.
Get your money’s worth.