“If you're reading this, you've gotten out. And if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don't you?… – The Shawshank Redemption
Sabres fans have crawled through a river of excrement for the past decade and are jaded by rebuild-upon-rebuild with no tangible success. Ownership and management have asked them to buy into 3-year plans, and 5-year plans, and I suppose a 10-year plan. None of these plans have accomplished anything worthwhile.
You’re sick of hearing about how things will eventually turn around and everything will be fine after this latest rebuild has come to fruition. You’re tired of being told that prospects like Owen Power, Erik Portillo, JJ Peterka, Peyton Krebs, Mattias Samuelsson and Jack Quinn are going to rescue the Sabres from sub-mediocrity and deliver them to the promised land of Stanley Cup contention.
I get it, and I’m not here to convince anyone to jump on board with a franchise that’s still under the same ownership that brought you “trading Ryan O’Reilly before his $7.5m bonus was due.… If you listened to Elliotte Friedman when he joined Andrew Peters and Craig Rivet on their “After The Whistle… podcast, you’ll hear Friedman heavily imply that the reason Jack Eichel failed is due to organizational forces way above the former center’s paygrade.
If you’re ready to jump off the bandwagon now, after 10 years of misery, do it.
Every man has his breaking point.
If anyone is looking for Rasmus Dahlin to save this team at this point, well, in the words of Dante: “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.… Dahlin looks at this point to be a serviceable top-4 defenseman who gets walked often. He’s not going to save the franchise. He doesn’t have the speed of a Cale Makar or Quinn Hughes (or Luke Hughes) and he doesn’t provide enough offense to justify the terrible results he's producing defensively. He’s not going to be a generational defenseman. That simply isn’t going to happen and the Sabres – and their fans – need to accept that now lest they wait forever to see his emergence as a Norris winner.
Likewise, Dylan Cozens doesn’t belong in the NHL currently. He might be a future captain and top-six player someday, but that day certainly wasn’t Saturday. The Sabres were leading 3-1 against the Detroit Red Wings on Saturday night when Cozens gave the puck away in the offensive zone (again) with a drop pass and then had to take a tripping penalty to avoid a clean breakaway going the opposite direction. Cozens has a proclivity toward those type of soft offensive-zone giveaways and hasn’t managed to offset that with sufficient offensive production to merit his continued presence in the lineup. He needs to go to Rochester and the Sabres could easily replace his presence in the lineup by signing Rochester Americans forward Mark Jankowski to an NHL contract.
Those are the reasons (among many others) to abandon ship after 10 years of failure.
If you’re still invested and looking for hope, though, here it is:
Jack Quinn is lighting it up in Rochester to the tune of 12 points in 8 games for the Rochester Americans. JJ Peterka has 9 points in 8 games. If you want to look deeper into the organizational structure, 2021 4th round pick Olivier Nadeau has 22 points in 13 games while playing in the QMJHL. Peyton Krebs – he of Jack Eichel trade fame – has demonstrated his puck-distribution prowess with numerous chances created through one game in the AHL. The Sabres have promising forward prospects at all levels of competition below the NHL, and they also have a pretty fun NHLer in Alex Tuch waiting to come back from injury.
As for blueliners, the aforementioned Power and Samuelsson will add some defensive stability to the defensive ranks of the Sabres in the next few years. Power figures to be a solid – if unspectacular – two-way defenseman who is responsible at both ends of the ice. Samuelsson can bring some physicality and added simplified play on the backend as well.
The goaltending situation of the future looks solid, too. Devon Levi and Erik Portillo look ready to contribute to the Sabres goaltending situation in the medium-to-long-term, even if Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen is sputtering in Rochester currently.
So what does all this mean? Does any of this work for Sabres fans at this point?
That’s for each Sabres fan to answer individually. It’s been 10 years of abject failure and misery, so it’s hardly surprising that KeyBank Center is filled to one-third capacity on any given night. The people of this city are tired of a bad product, and who can blame them? The team this year doesn’t look to be much better, especially when they’re missing Casey Mittelstadt and Victor Olofsson who provide quite a bit of offense on a team that’s otherwise devoid of firepower. Hilariously, the goaltending situation of Craig Anderson and Dustin Tokarski can’t be faulted for the uneven play of the team this year as they’ve generally been good, or at least respectable.
There are pieces coming, though, if fans can wait for them. The question is whether Sabres fans at large have the appetite to wait for them.
I'm not going to give readers the Andy Dufresne hope speech from Shawshank. Hope is running awfully short in Sabreland. It may not be dead, but it’s certainly on life support.