Jack Eichel and Samson Reinhart arrived at Sabres training camp in luxurious style.
In the wee hours of Thursday morning, while you were eating your Pop Tarts while texting and driving on Rt. 198, the two room mates made a grand entrance on their first official day of hockey school. The forwards kicked off their junior year by pedaling to the office.
The boys rummaged through the One Buffalo storage bin and dusted off the deluxe tandem bike of former Buffalo Bills head coach Rex Ryan.
Eichel and Reinhart will have the last laugh when they rip into training camp 2018 in tricked out matching Lamborghinis. Eichel will be signing his brand new eight-year mega-contract in the days to come. Hell, his new $80M to $84M contract can buy him an entire fleet of Lambos. Reinhart, a pending RFA as well, will be hitting the lottery next July 1. With a 6-70 point campaign in 2017-18, Reinhart is staring down the barrel of a $48M to $50M eight year contract himself.
For now, the NHL version of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn will go green and pedal power to work.
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Congrats to Marcus Foligno.
The Buffalo native and former Sabre has signed a four-year contract worth $11.5M.
Foligno has earned every penny of his $2.875 AAV. I expect him to score 15-17 goals this season for Bruce Boudreau and the Wild.
In June 30, the 26-year old power forward was traded from Buffalo to Minnesota along with forward Tyler Ennis for defenseman Marco Scandella and forward Jason Pominville.
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Thanks, Sabres.com
Jack Eichel isn't believing his own press clippings. Eichel isn't breaking his arm patting himself on the back. The North Chelmsford, Mass. native said Thursday morning he hasn't proved anything in the NHL in his first two NHL seasons.
"I have a lot to prove," Eichel said on the first day of Buffalo Sabres training camp. "Actually, I think I've proven nothing. It's a huge year for me personally and as a team. We want to obviously take the next step as a team, and I think for us to do that we need some guys to take the next step as players, and I need to be one of them.
"I just need to step up around the room, on the ice, big situations for our team do more and prove that I can be our go-to-guy."
Short. Sweet. To the point. Candid. Transparent. Never satisfied.
Spoken like a man.
Spoken like an NHL captain.
Hello, Jack. Welcome back.
Eichel doesn't want to hear about how great he was when he scored 48 goals and 113 points in his first 142 NHL games played.
Eichel wants you to save your platitudes and your gratuitous compliments. Eichel isn't buying any of it. Jack is back. He isn't content. He's motivated and more driven than we have seen him in his first two professional seasons.
Like his locker neighbor Ryan O'Reilly, Eichel is here to tell you he has much more to give.
"If you look at what I've done, it hasn't been a whole lot. Two mediocre seasons on a losing team," Eichel said. "We just need to be better as a group this year, and I think everyone went home with the right mindset that we wanted to get better and head into this season, hit the ground running."
Mediocre?
Far from it.
Hell, he suffered a high ankle sprain day before the 2016-17 season opener in a collision with Zemgus Girgensons. He missed the first 21 games of his sophomore season. Eichel then went on to score 57 points in 61 games. You call that mediocre? I call it mug macho.
Eichel, the 2015 Hobey Baker winner, expects more of himself. The face of the Buffalo franchise confidently stepped to the podium to tell you that he isn't impressed by his own personal stats nor is he distracted by his in-progress mega-contract negotiations.
"It's the third year, so if there's ever a time to start winning and be a good team in this league it's right now," Eichel said. "All the guys are pretty sick of losing and not playing in the playoffs. I don't think I'm the only guy. I think I can speak for a lot of guys in the room that we've got to be there at the end of the year.
"You've got to be a playoff team, and it starts now. That's the ultimate goal. You want to be there at the end of the year. You want to be playing in the postseason. I think this city, this team, this organization is starved for it."
I love that Eichel is critical of his own game. He isn't a selfish guy. He's a highly competitive person. He wants to deliver a Stanley Cup to hockey mad Buffalo.
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Eichel recently told ESPN.com that he is pleased to be playing for Sabres legend Phil Housley.
"I've spoken with him a few times on the phone, and I just met him. He seems like a really down-to-earth guy. He can have a conversation with you that doesn't involve hockey. As players you appreciate that. When he got the job he called me, and we had a good conversation. He told me the way he wants to play this year, what his expectations are."
No shade thrown at former head coach Dan Bylsma, however, Housley, is a people person. He's a Hockey Hall Of Famer, and he can easily relate well to today's pro hockey player. I've seen how Housley interacts with his players and prospects. He has such an easy communication ability. Housley was a high school coach in his native Minnesota just five short years ago.
Eichel wants to get to know more about his coach other than systems, strategy and coach-speak.
" If coaches are hard on me, they're hard on me. That's fine. I also like my coaches to have a personality. I want them to be able to talk to me about things that aren't about hockey. You come to the rink every day and some days you're in a good mood and some days you're in a bad mood. I like coaches to be able to relate to me a little bit. I've had hard coaches, I've had easy coaches, and it doesn't matter to me how they are as [far as] their personality. I just want to be able to know them outside the neutral-zone forecheck and the offensive zone."
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Phil Housley is ready to get his plan in place.
Housley wants his team to play at 110 mph on offense and 120 mph on the back check.
Housley's team will play an aggressive brand of hockey.
"We've talked about playing aggressive offensively but we need to talk about playing aggressive defensively. I think defense gives you a chance to win every night. They [players] will understand but we want to be fast and aggressive. The days are gone when a guy makes a breakout pass and the defense just watches the rush go up in the play. They have to get up in the play, not only to maybe join the rush and add to the attack but to be in the offensive zone, being able to keep pucks in or else you're going to start playing defense. But when the puck gets turned over our mindset and our back pressure is going to be aggressive. We're going to try and take time and space away so teams can't make plays. That requires playing without the puck. We've got to be accountable that we're just not going to think offense. I'm not saying playing wreckless hockey because you have to take what's given but when we're playing defense we want to be aggressive in that area too and that's one of the things that come when you talk about aggressive style."
In an effort to create more competition and cohesion within his forward group, Housley said that he will be playing wingers at center and centers in the wing during exhibition games.
"We are going to play guys that played wing and put them at center, and guys that played center put them at wing," Housley said Thursday in KeyBank Center. "We want to try different combinations, try to find the right mix.
"Yeah, I would say Sam is probably going to play some center."
Moving Samson to center on the third line would open up a wing job for Justin Bailey, Hudson Fasching or Alex Nylander. I'll be watching the center assignments closely.
Thanks, Sabres.com
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ESPN.com asked Eichel If he wasn't an NHL player, what would he be doing instead for a career?
"That's a great question. I would still be in college, but I wouldn't be at BU. I wasn't a bad student in high school, but I probably wasn't smart enough to go to BU. I probably would have gone to a school out West in California, or the South. I always thought it would be cool to be in the CIA or Homeland Security. It's obviously kind of scary, but if you watch enough shows about it, you get curious enough."
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A leaner Robin Lehner put an end to any speculation that he is upset that Tim Murray is no longer the GM of the Sabres.
Thanks, Sabres.com
What's not to love about Lehner?
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