It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write anything. Not just as an avid Buffalo Sabres fan, but a hockey fan as well.
The Sabres have once again sucked the passion out of me with their lackluster performances game after game after game. The Buffalo Sabres are a laughing stock, and I honestly think I’m courteous calling them that. They’re once again a punchline for jokes. Not just in the NHL but even the world of sports in general. The culture in this city surrounding this hockey team has never felt this low.
We’ve seen this team go through bankruptcy, the league owning them, Drury and Briere leaving on the same day, and of course watching Ryan O’Reilly hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup and win a Conn Smythe Trophy one year after we traded him away for Tage Thompson, Vlad Sobotka, Patrick Berglund, a 2019 first-round pick, and a 2021 second-round pick. Buffalo has always been viewed as a tortured fanbase. Wide right, Flutie and Johnson, the Music City Miracle, No Goal, Phantom Goal. The list is almost as long as the quarterbacks to play for the Bills between Kelly and Allen.
After I made that phone call last year, I never thought in a million years the culture of this fanbase could get worse. It literally felt like rock bottom. We made national news outlets as a fanbase that has had enough. There was a protest. Constant booing at games and then a season that ended early because of covid, where had the Sabres won just one more game, they would have beaten out Montreal for the final spot in the NHL play-in round. Over a decade of losing, but how could it get any worse? Things can only go up? Boy, were we wrong.
This season started a little promising. The Hall–Eichel–Reinhart line looked unstoppable to start. A top-ranking power-play and the penalty kill had vastly improved from the previous season. We saw hopeful signs of progress. We, of course, questioned decisions. Like Jeff Skinner being buried on the bottom line and getting fewer minutes than players like Kyle Okposo. The regression of Rasmus Dahlin and Henri Jokijaru. Then the COVID-19 pause came, caused by the NHL’s inability to act swiftly when the New Jersey Devils had players added to the COVID Protocol list after the game against the Sabres, which ultimately forced the team to go into quarantine after multiple players tested positive.
Going into the COVID pause, the Sabres record was 4-3-3. They had an above .500 record for the first time since 2019 and seemed to be moving in the right direction. Since returning, they’ve only won two games, just lost their 12th straight game, and now fired their Head Coach Ralph Kreuger. Don Granato will fill in as interim head coach. He will be their 7th head coach since the Pegula era began a decade ago. We had all the excuses in the world. The aftermath of the COVID pause, no practice with a full team, Rasmus Ristolainen being out longer than expected because of the effects from COVID, and of course, as we recently found out, Eichel has been playing with one or more cracked ribs since training camp.
Sure, we weren’t expected to win many games with all of that and more working against us, but it wasn’t just the losing that has been unbearable. It was how we were losing. No passion. No energy. Giving up on plays and no bite to their game night in and night out. A few weeks ago, we saw a spark when rookie Dylan Cozens fought and dropped Ryan Lindgren from the New York Rangers. In a game they were losing, Buffalo only recorded five more shots on the net after that. It seems the only thing Cozens sparked was the fanbase, and even that didn’t last very long.
The defensive style Krueger insisted on implementing with a plethora of high offensively talented players wasn’t working, and his refusal to design his system around his player’s strengths was killing any hope our Sabres had at avoiding yet another embarrassing, playoff-less season. Buffalo has now been shutout six times in their 28 games. With the trade deadline approaching, they will almost certainly be sellers once again, with players like Taylor Hall and Eric Staal set to become unrestricted free agents. With Captain Jack Eichel and starting goalie Linus Ullmark still out with injuries with no date in sight to return, interim head coach Don Granato has his hands full. He will have to prove to Kevyn Adams, and the Pegula’s that he’s qualified to be a head coach in the NHL.
A few weeks ago, on a special episode of “2 Goalies 1 Mic”, we were joined by Sabres Alumni Rob Ray, Matthew Barnaby, Dixon Ward, and Derek Plante for a viewing party that was streamed live to fans of the infamous Game 7 against Ottawa from the 1997 quarterfinals. Where Plante scored in overtime when his shot dribbled off Ron Tugnutt’s glove and across the goal line, which led to our beloved Rick Jeanerett losing his mind and yelling, “Are you ready Legion of Doom? Here come the Buffalo Sabres!”.
During the banter back and forth between Ray and Barnaby, the jokes and reminiscing about their playing days together, Ray and Barnaby made a point that resonated with me regarding this current Sabres roster. They pointed out that there wasn’t a single player on their teams that was looked to as a guy that would stand up in the locker room and hold guys accountable. Everyone did that, and nobody was afraid to be criticized. Nobody took it personally. Everyone had a role, and rookies were treated as if they were veterans. They were a family and loved each other. This is something they all agreed is lacking on this current team. There’s no accountability. No jam or grit. Guys are afraid to step up and hold one another accountable. That if it were to happen, they’d take it too personally.
This simply can’t be the case if they ever expect to sustain success in this league, and Ralph Krueger clearly wasn’t the right coach to bring that type of accountability to this locker room. Through all the buzz words and rhetoric of his laughable post-game interviews, Krueger failed to give us any clear answer as to this team’s identity or how he planned to fix the issues offensively. He claimed Skinner, a player who just two seasons ago scored 40 goals on Eichel’s wing, wasn’t sound enough defensively to play a top-6 role. Nor could he ever explain why Kyle Okposo was held in such high regard and getting more ice time than Skinner. His inability to put together even the most obvious of lines to help this team score goals was handcuffing this team’s potential offensively and one of the many reasons he was eventually shown the door. Sorry Ralph, but we stopped buying the crap you were shoveling weeks ago, and finally, the organization stopped believing it too.
Now we move on to the Don Granato era. Granato has an impressive resume having already been a head coach at the Junior, College, Pro, and National levels. At the national level with the US National Development program, he would lead his teams to a 2014 World Under-17 Hockey Challenge championship and the 2015 IIHF World U18 Championship. He would also serve as Head Coach in both Worchester and Chicago in the AHL, and he would be named the winner in 2001of the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award for the AHL’s most outstanding coach. Granato also won the ECHL’s Kelly Cup with the Peoria Rivermen in 2000. He is also the architect of the Sabres’ previously lethal powerplay, which ranked first in the league for much of the season.
In Kevyn Adams’ press conference with the media, he stated that the search for a new head coach would start immediately. With names like Bruce Boudreau, Gerrard Gallant, and Claude Julien available, it’s easy to disregard Granato as a solution to our decade-long problem behind the bench, but I hope that Adams gives Don a fair shake. While I wouldn’t be disappointed with any of the three coaching candidates I listed as their next hire, I am intrigued to see what Granato can get from this group. I know I shouldn’t say it, but how can it get any worse?
Thanks guys…..I’ll hang up and listen.
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