Issue is that no amount of vets that were available to acquire would have made this team a conference final caliber team. Over the last few years.
After the Eichel neck surgery fiasco, this team went penny pinching and embraced the rebuild, despite whatever Adams was saying in his press conferences.
It sucks that the drought continued, but the team is honestly in a pretty good spot right now moving forward. Had they traded all that youth for aging vets to make the playoffs, they likely would have been smoked in the first round and the future would be no where near as bright.
This team is still super young and they are only going to get better. Should be a fun ride for Sabres fans going forward.
The idea that no combo of players acquired could have made a significant difference is silly, especially when Adams was GM during an expansion draft and had ample amount of cap space and draft capital to work with and he moved a top 10 NHL center.
The Sabres opting for a futures heavy deal for eichel rather than going for a star for star swap, for one. I mean, who says he couldn't have gotten Matthew Tkachuk for Eichel. Or some combo of Lindholm +
He likely could have made a deal with Seattle with 1st OA for 2nd OA + whatever player(s) he wanted in the expansion draft.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly reverse engineer some league wide moves and construct a conference finalist team.
Go get Devon Toews for two 2nd round picks in 2020 and go from there. Trade Eichel before the neck injury. Re-sign Ullmark and Reinhart before the 2020-21 season to long term deals.
And even without the benefit of hindsight, things could have been done differently from the get go. If they had opted to do smart things in summer of 2020 instead of swing for the fences with the Hall signing and Eichel doesn't get injured....much different outcomes.
Adams started badly, got unlucky (Eichel injury), then it spiraled into dumb and dumber decisions making.