It’s the end of an era.
The Sabres traded Jack Eichel and a third-round pick to the Vegas Golden Knights this morning in exchange for Alex Tuch, Peyton Krebs, a top-10 protected first in 2022 and a second-round pick.
The Jack Eichel era will undoubtedly go down in Sabres history as the worst, most depressing, and brutal stretch of hockey in Sabres franchise history. It’s also true that Jack Eichel was – for the most part – the only reason to tune into any of the games during that godforsaken era.
And that’s the paradox of Jack Eichel’s time with the Sabres.
Now it’s not fair to pin all or even most of the failure of the post-2015 squads on Eichel. His time with the Sabres started inauspiciously when the lottery balls fell to the Edmonton Oilers and that team was given the opportunity to draft Connor McDavid in 2015, while former Sabres GM Tim Murray looked on visibly upset with the consolation prize of the center from Boston. Murray also didn’t do the former Sabres captain any favors by trading for the oft-injured Bogosian, problematic figure Evander Kane, Robin Lehner who struggled with personal issues, and Ryan O’Reilly who desperately wanted to be the man.
That core group of players never came together to approximate anything resembling a cohesive team. Add to that Sam Reinhart, who is a good-but-not-great complementary piece, and Rasmus Ristolainen who can eat 30 minutes a night while dishing up tasty giveaways, and well, the Sabres of the post-tank era had a very flawed group.
Oh, and let’s not forget the coaching. Out of Dan Bylsma, Phil Housley and Ralph Krueger, only one of those former Sabres bench bosses currently has any kind of position in the NHL. None of them managed to get anything out of teams that, at points, had some very nice talent but nothing to show for it.
During his six seasons in Buffalo, Eichel was a dynamo on the ice. He never scored fewer than 24 goals in his first five seasons, and he finished above a point-per-game during the last two “full… campaigns he played. The 6’2… center has an incredible and unique skating style whereby he stands up nearly straight and manages to absolutely fly down the ice. Passing, shooting, skating; the guy can do it all. It was an absolute pleasure to watch him pick apart teams, especially the Toronto Maple Leafs whom he had a special passion for destroying. He sent a lot of sad Leaf fans home from the KeyBank Center with his beat downs of Toronto during his time here.
There were highlight reel goals, like his overtime buzzer beater on a looping dump-in from Evander Kane, and numerous beautiful feeds which led to Jeff Skinner scoring 40 goals and getting a $9m per year contract (thanks, Jack). Joking. that 10-game win streak with Eichel and Skinner leading the way was perhaps the best period during his tenure here.
The teams he led were awful, though. They finished 23rd, 26th, 31st, 27th, 25th and 31st with Jack Eichel as the centerpiece of those squads. The failure seemingly grew worse and worse every year with no answer in sight. Late this afternoon, Eichel made his media rounds and let the hockey world know that he in fact had asked for a trade prior to the 2020-2021 season, which would end up being his last.
“We weren’t really in a position of, you know, trying to win,… he told Friedman.
It’s incredibly hard to win with one foot out the door as the Sabres found out early last season. Eichel never looked right, and was often pushed off pucks, something that fans had never seen the strong center struggle with. It was chalked up to a lingering abdominal injury at the time, but now it’s fair to wonder if it was a case of “get me out of here… disease instead. Eichel seemingly acknowledged that asking out of the team led to his bad play last season when discussing the situation with Friedman.
“It was kind of a disaster in terms of a personal season for myself. 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 had something to do with part of the process being so difficult.…
That certainly sounds like someone who quit on the team, which is something I never thought I’d say about Jack Eichel. After 20 games, the neck injury popped up and that was all she wrote for his tenure in Buffalo.
So what do we make of Eichel’s time in Buffalo? Well, frankly, it sucked. It was a waste of time, resources and the energy expended on the team. Eichel never quite grew on the fan base the way that Buffalo Bills QB Josh Allen has. He often came off as brash, cocky and he generated no positive results to back up that demeanor which often didn’t sit right with portions of the fan base. It was obvious that the team and Jack Eichel both needed to move on.
With this trade, the Sabres are seemingly moving on in the right direction. Let’s be clear here: you never win a Jack Eichel trade. Jack Eichel is the best player in any trade so the goal is to assemble a grouping of pieces that in sum can approximate the on-ice impact of a top-10 center in the NHL. The Sabres sure received some nice pieces to achieve that goal. Alex Tuch will be a fan favorite in town with his work ethic, strong skating, nose for the net and physical attitude. He’s going to be given a chance to be a full-time top-six option for the Sabres and they hope they can coax more than the 45ish points out of Tuch that the Golden Knights saw. At the very least, fans will get +/- 20 goals and an attitude that they’ll appreciate.
Tuch has also said that it’s been a dream of his to play for the Sabres, as he grew up a Sabres fan in Syracuse, which is clearly important to GM Kevyn Adams who has repeatedly emphasized the desire for “players who want to be here.… There is no doubt that Tuch wants to be here. Not for nothing, he’s also a very nice player.
Peyton Krebs will give the Sabres another stab at a top-six center along with other Sabres organizational options like Dylan Cozens, Casey Mittelstadt, Tage Thompson and perhaps even Jack Quinn. He’s a shifty skater and a puck dispenser which could work well with Jack Quinn. Krebs will join Quinn in Rochester rather than joining the big club, probably because he hadn’t scored a point in nine contests in the NHL this season.
Finally the Sabres got a top-10 protected first-round pick and a second-round pick in exchange for a third-round pick. Vegas figures to be a very strong team, as they have been for the past five years, so that pick figures to be somewhere in the 20-32 range where you’re much more likely to select a Mark Pysyk than a Jack Eichel. The second-round pick is even more of a crapshoot (there had to be one Vegas pun in here) so whatever, it’s a throw in.
The past six months have seen the Sabres purge the last vestiges of the failed rebuild with the team receiving three first-round picks, two second-round picks, Alex Tuch, Peyton Krebs, Robert Hagg and Devon Levi in exchange for Rasmus Ristolainen, Sam Reinhart and Jack Eichel. That’s a pretty decent haul for a core that totally failed to achieve anything that could remotely be called success.
Jack Eichel is moving on. The Sabres are moving on.
There's a twinge of regret and sadness about what could have been, but the fact is it was time for both to move on.