It’s amazing what the Pegulas can accomplish when they hire a people that knows the game!! Instead of the retread dinosaurs hired as coaches for the Bills, and instead of interviewing the coach themselves and then allowing the coach to hire his “boss” the GM, the Sabres ownership actually appear to have learned from their mistakes of the past (keeping Darcy, hiring GMTM, etc…) and found a GM and coach that understand where the NHL is going. What these two have done in a little over a year is to transform a big slow plodding team into a fast, skilled electric team that can score and defend with the best of them. Gone are the Josh Gorges, Hudson Faschings,Matt Moulsons and Justin Falks of this world. In are the Shearys, Skinners, Mittelstadts of the world. Speed, speed and more speed. Ryan O’Reilly is a good player. Playing with speedsters like Tarasenko and Bozek makes him much better than when he was here playing with slower guys like Okposo and Reinhart. You can get away with having one slower player on a line with two speedsters. You can’t succeed, however, in today’s NHL with two or three slow guys on a line. Look at the success that whomever Housley puts on a line with Skinner and Eichel has. Look at the teams that have been sucessful over the past five years: ALL HAVE TREMENDOUS TEAM SPEED.
Not just that but the Sabres have youth and speed. Dahlin, Eichel, Mittelstadt, Skinner,Risto, McCabe,Sheary, Pilut, Guhle, Olofson, Nylander, Nelson, etc… are all under 27. With the way some of these guys in Rochester are playing we should be good long term. We still have some dead weight (Bogo and Okposo come to mind) whose salaries don’t justify their production. these are holdovers from the GMTM dinosaur days. Could you imagine how good this team could be had they not traded draft picks for overpaid guys? How about having the brains to figure out that a 6’3” speedster like Leon Draisaitl woud be a better NHL player than a slow 6’ guy like Sam Reinhart?
Are the Sabres Stanley Cup contenders this year? Doubtful at best. Do they have the nucleus to be a team competing for the Cup the next ten years? You bet. Keep building with speed. Don’t regress into the “crafty slower Canadian with grit” guys that GMTM and many other GMs in this league have been. Go Sabres!!! You are actually fun to watch again.