biturbo19
Registered User
- Jul 13, 2010
- 27,725
- 12,897
I think in an ideal world, this is the sort of direction that makes sense for the Sabres. Basically...sell off the UFA pieces (Zucker, Greenway, Jokiharju), maybe even try to unload that Samuelsson contract for something if you can. Basically collecting more futures.
Then make your Top-5 Draft selection (and don't screw it up
). Then combine those futures from the deadline "sell off" with what the Sabres already have in a huge pool of prospects and picks, trying to put together some "package deals" for solid established NHL players. Things more like the Savoie for McLeod deal. Ideally on a bigger scale, but you've gotta take what you can get and take your medicine, get raked over the coals for "bad value" in a vacuum. Buffalo has long had an issue where they've seemed to "hit" on a lot of similar sort of players. They've got so many smallish/skilled scoring line guys, and mostly wingers. And stumbling upon offensive-minded defencemen. At some point, you just aren't ever going to have room for them all to thrive in the Top-6 with lots of Powerplay minutes at the same time. So you've gotta try to consolidate all these Benson / Quinn / Kulich / Rosen / Ostlund / Helenius / Krebs / Kisakov / etc. (i'm sure i've missed a bunch) down from having these little skill guys coming out your ears, to a smaller number of different profiled players who can either play a more effective, grinding, complementary role in the Top-6, or can be more effective playing rugged Bottom-6 minutes, without prime offensive zone starts, powerplay time, etc.
Now the problem is...a lot of the perceived "strength" of the Sabres prospect pool is perennially in the sort of "steals" that everyone here always loves at the draft. You get the "swing for the fences" smallish high skill picks and that's great for "winning the draft" and even winning the "prospect pool depth competition". But the reason everyone glosses over for these player types often "slipping" so far in the draft, is that in reality...other teams are simply placing more of a premium on other traits and skillsets that are necessary to building a coherent overall "team", over just acquiring the "most skill possible". So while it's easy to say at the draft, "just pick good players and you can trade your way out of it"...the reality is, it's really really difficult to actually do, because teams don't tend to trade big shutdown RHD and quality Top-6 two-way Centers for collections of smallish skilled wingers and stuff.
So that's where ideally it makes an abundance of sense for the Sabres to just bundle a bunch of those guys and draft picks for the pieces they need like that. But in reality...it may end up being a tougher pill to swallow, where you have to think about moving the guys who have risen to the top in "value" like Peterka, Byram, Benson possibly if the bloom is still on that one. Then you have to hope that some of the many other "in house" solutions for puck-moving defencemen and skilled wingers who are underperforming or haven't made the jump yet, can develop well and ultimately backfill those spots.
It's that concept of, "you've gotta give to get". It requires a lot of faith in the futures pieces coming up to "hit". Though that's really the whole issue with trying to package those guys for a better fit in the first place; where this would just be Buffalo betting on their own guys, rather than asking another team to stretch on that belief in someone else's prospect/young player that they didn't pick themselves.
But i understand why the optics of that sort of approach would be hard to stomach for the Sabres fans. To take a guy who looks like he's really becoming something like Byram...and moving him rather than Power who has the big contract and seemingly stagnating a bit. Or to move a guy like Peterka or Benson or maybe even Kulich...to try to get something badly needed to fill those glaring holes in the lineup, and counting on that "next wave" of forward prospects to backfill their roles. It's an awfully deep hole the Sabres have dug for themselves, and i'm not sure there's an elegant, optically rose-coloured solution to getting out of it.
