The clocks will spring ahead an hour on Sunday as, up here in the wintery north, much-welcomed light will spill into our days, with the promise of warmth to come. In Buffalo, though, darkness can seem far more permanent than a passing season, as year after year the Sabres fail the local faithful.
This, too, shall pass? Whoever said that never cheered for a team that missed the playoffs for 13 straight seasons.
There’s no avoiding a 14th consecutive post-season whiff now for Buffalo. The Sabres just dropped their fourth straight game on Tuesday, a 6-2 setback at the hands of the actual worst team in the league, the San Jose Sharks. It’s yet another low point for a club that posted just a single victory in its first six outings this season and completely buried itself with a 13-game losing streak that basically lasted from U.S. Thanksgiving to Christmas.
Non-stop suffering, from turkey to stocking.
With their fate now sealed in the standings, the Sabres find themselves at this horrible intersection of urgency and danger. You know this has to —, no, really has to — stop, yet there’s the risk of stepping in it all over again by moving players out the door who become other team’s problem-solvers.
The list of former Sabres who were — for a variety of reasons — dealt out of Western New York and went on to hang banners with other franchises is as long as the collection of names we see swirling in trade rumours now.
Buffalo general manager Kevyn Adams, of course, wants to halt this hell, but how do you know Dylan Cozens, Alex Tuch or Bowen Byram won’t become the next Ryan O’Reilly, Sam Reinhart or Jack Eichel if you trade them away? How can you possibly stomach seeing Cozens, Tuch or Byram go somewhere else and lift the Cup the way their previously downtrodden Sabres forefathers did once they get a new lease on hockey life?
- Sportsnet’s hockey news breakers, analysts and reporters will have coast-to-coast coverage of all the moves made ahead of this season’s NHL trade deadline. Full coverage on March 7 begins at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+.
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The obvious and only answer is, tread very carefully and set sky-high prices.
There’s a reason teams have been calling on Cozens for what feels like months now, even if he is two years removed from a 68-point breakout campaign. He’s a six-foot-three, right-shot centre who just turned 24 and always turns in a good effort. The counting stats haven’t been there for a while, but the question you always ask in bad situations — the one that’s extra easy to lob at Buffalo — is, is the player’s poor performance him showing his true colours or is he largely a victim of a miserable circumstance?
Unfortunately, it’s just easy to see what’s gone on in Buffalo for 15 years and understand why a player would hit some speed bumps there.
Even in a less-than-ideal setting, Tuch — a Western New Yorker who loves wearing the Swords — has been good for Buffalo and could be on the poster for the type of big-bodied winger every contender would love to add for the post-season grind.
Byram, meanwhile, has suited up for all 60 of Buffalo’s games this season, further distancing himself from the frightening concussion troubles that plagued the start of his career in Colorado. He’s playing over 23 minutes a night and, at 23 years old, could just be scratching his NHL potential with a 40-point campaign this year. Getting him in a one-for-one with Casey Mittelstadt at last year’s deadline is actually the kind of work Adams needs to do more of. For goodness sake, don’t just send him away now because he’s due a new deal in the summer and you’ve already got big contracts allocated to other important members of the defence corps.
- Hockey Insider Nick Kypreos shares the latest intel on players who could be on the move ahead of the March 7 trade deadline.
- Latest list
As noted, the Mittelstadt-for-Byram flip is precisely what the Sabres need more of. If the New Jersey Devils — a team crying out for some muscle on the top two lines — want Tuch, find a way to pry right-shot defenceman Simon Nemec out of there. If Utah Hockey Club is getting frisky in its first season, see if you can lift a package that includes Lawson Crouse out of the mountains and into an Eastern Conference home that’s right next to his Southern Ontario roots. His six-foot-four body and 20-goal touch could help replace Tuch if he goes out the door. Or maybe you keep Tuch and build a lineup with two top-six guys capable of banging and scoring.
All options can and must be explored in Buffalo, just not with a we-have-to-do-something posture. The pitfalls are simply too plentiful when you come at it with that approach, and many paths just lead right back into the darkness.
