From what I understood it wasn't the organization, it was the insurance. They wouldn't cover his salary if Eichel got what was an experimental procedure. So of you want to blame the Buffalo organizers for not wanting to be on the hook for sixty million if something went wrong, then go ahead. But I don't blame the Sabres organization for doing what they did.
• The Sabres organization hired Tim Murray as GM.
• Murray vacillated back and forth from immediately salting the earth within minutes of losing the lottery to having to balance out that crap reaction with management promising planets to Eichel - who was, at the time, a teenager.
= leverage some blame at that FO’s questionable decision making. They could have researched - they have Google, just like Bill Foley does. The public-facing look of it was like they stuck their fingers in their ears. Could have been down to insurance, but the fact that Vegas was willing means that a
portion of the refusal was up to FO choice- pretty sure the parameters of the contract don’t change that drastically when a player is traded.
There’s one thing BUF could have done that would have absolved blame, and they didn’t have the guts to do it then:
they should have just traded down.
Sure, less fanfare and hype, but imagine if they’d done something similar to Boston and lined up a few consecutive picks in the middle of the 1st round…..say, right after Barzal. Suddenly, that war chest has Kyle Connor, Evgeniy Svechnikov and Thomas Chabot…..sounds exponentially better for the team effort, having three horses to pull the weight from several positions rather than one. Put Tage Thompson in THAT and the rebuild looks to be accelerated by 2-4 years.
I’m not going to say that Eichel was blameless, but the FO is there to run a business and manage a team -
roles not taken up by the teens they draft. They remind me of the South Park trope in that way,
“it’s alien vampire werewolves; f*** you!!!” - blaming whatever assumed outside influence. In that step, they ignore the over-promising, under-delivering, and demonizing someone who was still respected by Erie County hospitals for his contributions when he came back to town with the Knights.
Kinda like a syntactical ambiguous sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Management’s convinced Buffalo fans that the guy they brought in to be a Buffalo Sabre was to be buffaloed after they wouldn’t/couldn’t buffalo the guy into an undesirable surgery; now a number of Buffalo fans buffalo anyone with the nerve to state that as Buffalo buffaloed that particular rebuild effort into the toilet themselves because they over-promised to a teenager (at the time), it may be because it isn’t the teenager’s job to get buffaloed into running the team *and* correcting inept management.
Given that Eichel produced at about a PPG clip until injuries and rudderless management got in the way, had his surgery and has looked 90% back to form with Vegas since and his name isn’t Nail or Alexandre, this isn’t a player letting attitude kill his career…..despite the Pegulas/Tim Murray likely being quite amenable to that narrative, since it means they didn’t squander anything.
Doesn’t change the fact that they did.
