Now that the Buffalo Sabres‘ opening game of the season is less than 72 hours away, it’s time to really analyze what they have the potential to do this year. Both Lindy Ruff’s and Darcy Regier’s future rest with that potential. So what players does this team’s success (or lack thereof) depend upon most?
Surprisingly enough, it’s not Thomas Vanek or Jason Pominville.
Sure, they’re both veteran leaders who Buffalo will need to produce offensively. But if they stay healthy, you know you’re going to get that from them, no matter who their center is.
No, this team’s playoff hopes rest more so with guys like the one who’ll start the season in the middle of those two talented wingers.
Ahead, we’re going to look at five players crucial to the Sabres’ hopes in 2013, ranked in order of importance.
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Every Buffalo Sabres fan seems to have their eye on one player these days: Mikhail Grigorenko.
The Russian phenom has come to training camp and captivated the collective masses, from fans to the media to his potential teammates. Whether they praise his vision, his poise or his skating, most seem to think that Grigorenko should be sticking with the Sabres this year.
Now, the legions wait for the most important vote of them all: Lindy Ruff.
Ruff certainly has not hidden the fact that he feels Grigorenko has played and practiced well over the course of camp. With a day off Thursday and rosters needing to be finalized Friday, one would think that Ruff and general manager Darcy Regier are coming to a decision tonight about the short-term future of their potential star-in-the-making.
So why should he stay?
The simple answer is, as of right now, the Sabres don’t have a true third line center on the roster. Beyond Grigorenko, the Sabres are looking at the possibility of having to use Jochen Hecht, Cody McCormick or Matt Ellis at center on the third and fourth lines.
Grigorenko is certainly not defensively acclimated to Lindy Ruff’s system, and that is what got Luke Adam in trouble last season, but Adam didn’t have the defensive capabilities of Steve Ott and Ville Leino on his line. Grigorenko also immediately makes Leino a far more dangerous offensive threat and Steve Ott has the ability to pot some goals as well.
With Hecht in that slot, the offensive push of that line is immediately diminished, and it becomes a defensive line that doesn’t help the Sabres’ long standing issue of secondary scoring that has been hampering them since Danny Briere and Chris Drury left in 2007.
Not that you can or should expect Grigorenko to come in and score 30 or 40 points in the shortened season because that would be incredibly naive. Even if he adds 20 points, he’s probably doing great things for the team and his fellow linemates.
Hecht had some success over in Germany, yes. But to think he can score 12 points in six games in the NHL is ridiculous and that’s not even considering his injury propensity the past two seasons.
McCormick and Ellis are fourth line guys, and they play a vital role in that position, but having the ability to move Hecht down to the fourth pivot and have those guys take on wing responsibilities will likely be the best option for the team.
Are there risks with Grigorenko staying up? Sure.
He’s 18 years old and might get physically battered, especially against grittier teams like Boston, Philadelphia and the Rangers. He may not pick up the system quickly and may be lost for most of the year.
Many have pointed out that he didn’t “tear up” the World Juniors like he should have, but to say that means you just looked at the stat sheet at the end of the game and saw he wasn’t posting three point nights. He was everywhere on the ice and only—easily—outplayed Nail Yakupov, the No. 1 pick in the draft last year.
But, in reality, the biggest risk is that he only plays third or fourth line minutes, and his development is stunted by the lack of playing time, especially given the fact he’d be playing 20 minutes a night in the QMJHL guaranteed.
So, that’s the real decision. It’s not whether or not he’s good enough to be here. The question is whether or not being here is the best situation for him and his development moving forward.
To think he won’t be here next season is almost laughable given his performance in camp this week, so he knows he’s not too far off, but should he be here now?
Based on who they have placed on waivers—Kevin Porter, Mark Mancari, Nick Tarnasky and Adam Pardy the last two days—it seems they have plans for him to stay with the big club. At least for five games.
Ruff sees his offensive upside and his patience and his skating, so giving him beneficial time is just a matter of him assimilating himself to the NHL game.
Don’t be surprised to see that happen real fast.
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The Buffalo Sabres 2013 schedule has them playing 48 games in a mere 97 days. They can thank that monumental waste of time over the last five months for that. So what are some of the necessary steps for them to take to effectively get through such a heavy workload?
Something that should give them an edge right off the bat is that Lindy Ruff has always been a coach to roll four lines.
His top defensive pair also rarely play more than 24 minutes a game. Ruff trusts his players, many of them in a multitude of situations.
However, what he’s also “notorious” for is overplaying his goaltender. Whether it’s been Dominik Hasek or Ryan Miller, too often, the Sabres have had tired and worn-out netminders come April.
What Ruff needs to do is utilize one of the best backups in the league in Jhonas Enroth.
Buffalo has nine sets of back-to-back games in this abbreviated campaign. Ideally, Enroth should get eight to 10 starts throughout the season to keep Miller fresh for playoff time.
Gone are the days of Patrick Lalime, when backup goaltender was a huge liability for this team. The young Swede has shown he can win games in this league, so his coach needs to trust him.
Keep in mind, though, this entire plan is predicated on the Sabres having secured a playoff spot before the last couple weeks of the season.
If that spot is in doubt or up for grabs, Miller will be starting every night—and rightly so. If this ends up being Ruff’s last hurrah as coach, he’s certainly going to go down riding his supposed franchise goalie.
The reality of this schedule is that the Sabres don’t have three consecutive days off until March 13-15. Only twice all year will they enjoy that.
Plus, all of the matchups are interconference, which makes the impact of each contest that much more important to the playoff picture.
A benefit of being in the East is less travel.
The Sabres visit Florida twice and Winnipeg once. There are no long, six- or seven-game road trips they have to face (four being the longest).
With that said, the biggest key regarding the schedule in 2013 is how they play on home ice.
The last two years, including overtime losses, Buffalo is 42-40 at home. That’s not going to cut it for a head coach and general manager who are going to be on the hot-seat early if this team struggles.
The Sabres close out with eight of their final 12 games at home.
If April begins without a playoff spot locked up, the Lindy Ruff/Darcy Regier era may end in an ugly fashion if they don’t succeed in front of the First Niagara Center faithful.
Whether you think they should have been fired years ago or not, they don’t deserve to go out like that. And all Buffalo fans should hope they don’t.
That’s because the playing field is as even as its ever been in today’s NHL.
We watched an eighth seed and the second-lowest scoring team in the league last year win a Stanley Cup. Jonathan Quick was masterful in leading L.A. to an unlikely championship.
Who’s to say Miller isn’t next?
One thing is for sure about this compacted 2013 season. It should determine the long-term vision and direction of this franchise under new owner Terry Pegula.
Is it time for puck drop yet?
Read more Buffalo Sabres news on BleacherReport.com
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Anytime a team doesn’t make the playoffs, they have a lot of questions they need to answer about themselves. No matter what happened, the reality is the team was not good enough to get into the postseason, regardless of the reasons.
The Buffalo Sabres faced those questions at the end of last season and are now ready to undertake the start of the shortened 2013 season with a few tweaks in their lineup.
Essentially, general manager Darcy Regier saw enough in the team at the end of last year to keep most of it intact this offseason, choosing to find the answers from within.
With that in mind, these are the five biggest questions the Sabres will have to answer to get over the playoff hump this season.
The Buffalo Sabres schedule was released late Saturday evening after the NHL and NHLPA finally put their signatures on the Memo of Understanding under which the two sides will operate the shortened season.
It goes without saying that the Sabres schedule, along with the entire NHL’s, will be high-paced and frantic as every team will play their 48 games in less than 100 days.
While the compressed season and schedule will lead to enough drama for the Sabres, there are certainly some games that the team will be looking to a bit more than the others.
Here are the five games you absolutely cannot miss this season.
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Now that all of this lockout nonsense is behind them, the Buffalo Sabres can finally look at the 2013 NHL season as a certainty. They hope to erase the memory of a terribly disappointing 2011-12. So what are some of the issues facing this team as it begins to prepare for the shortened campaign?
Besides the typical topics like goal-scoring and goaltending, the biggest question marks are surrounding the Sabres’ psyche as a unit.
After the now-infamous Milan Lucic incident last year, Buffalo’s tepid response made them the laughingstock of hockey.
They tried to save face later in the season, but at that point it seemed forced rather than genuine.
With that said, let’s take a look at five things the Sabres need to address as they get ready for the start of training camp.
As you handle your elation—or indifference—about the new CBA, the Buffalo Sabres look forward to turning the ship around from a disappointing 2011-12 season.
The Sabres had a relatively quiet offseason prior to the lockout, signing depth players like John Scott, Kevin Porter, and Nick Tarnasky, and trading Derek Roy to the Dallas Stars for Steve Ott and Adam Pardy.
Yet there has been a lot going on in the AHL and junior ranks while the NHLers have endured the work stoppage.
So what will the 2013 Sabres look like.
For a team that’s never won a Stanley Cup, the Buffalo Sabres still have a long list of playoff dramas. Those runs have seen this team captivate a city like few others in professional sports.
So who has the most memorable playoff goals in franchise history?
As with any list, there will be some candidates left out that certainly have legitimate reasons for being included.
1996-97 saw the Sabres capture their first division title in 16 years and began their era as “the hardest-working team in hockey.” Derek Plante culminated their first-round series with the Ottawa Senators that year by clinching Game 7 in OT with a slapshot that just dribbled by Sens goalie Ron Tugnutt.
When Buffalo returned from the last lockout in 2005-06, Chris Drury ended a wild, seesaw battle in Game 1 of its second-round series, again versus heavily favored Ottawa. The OT winner finished an incredible 7-6 shootout.
In the following slides, we’re going to look at five postseason goals that should be ingrained in every Sabres fans’ mind, young or old.
The final grade on the Buffalo Sabres‘ 2011 free-agent signings remains incomplete because of the lockout. Christian Ehrhoff and Ville Leino are both coming off subpar seasons, but then again so is 95 percent of this team’s roster. So will Buffalo’s free spending last year hurt them down the road?
The answer is yes, even though there are a lot of undetermined factors still left to play out.
When a new CBA is finally signed, will the cap come down as much as the NHL wants it to?
And will the league be able to punish teams guilty of circumventing the cap under the previous CBA’s terms?
If the season started today, the Sabres’ cap number would be more than $4 million over the forecasted figure (around $60 million). That would mean the Sabres would have to face losing a significant piece of the puzzle just to get under that dollar ceiling.
This dilemma can be directly attributed to their signing of Leino, for whom many felt Buffalo grossly overpaid. Six million dollars in the first year to score eight goals and 25 points is impossible to justify.
So is giving a guy a six-year deal for $27 million after he has career highs of 19 goals and 53 points.
The Sabres had already made two splashes before the beginning of free agency on July 1 last summer. They had traded for Robyn Regehr as well as for Ehrhoff’s rights, which they turned into a controversial 10-year, $40 million deal that we’ll touch on shortly.
The big fish, though, of that thin UFA class was Brad Richards.
Although the Sabres were thought to be in the running for him, he ended up picking New York over LA when he signed with the Rangers.
With him off the market, Buffalo overreacted.
They had improved the defense but had come up empty at adding any scoring. And so they settled for Leino.
So, if the Sabres are faced with making a move to get under the cap once (or if) the season starts, there is absolutely no chance they will find someone to take on Leino at $4.5 million a season.
That means they’d have to look at unloading someone like Drew Stafford or Andrej Sekera. Come summer of 2013, will they have the cap room to go after the likes of Cory Perry or Ryan Getzlaf?
As for the other big-name acquisition last offseason, Ehrhoff’s contract may also hurt the Sabres in the near future. However, it wouldn’t be for the same reasons as Leino’s.
Buffalo signing Ehrhoff to the deal we mentioned earlier isn’t the problem. Four million dollars a season for a defenseman of his caliber is a bargain in today’s NHL.
The issue is with the front-loading that we’ve seen in numerous other contracts league-wide.
Now, for whatever reason, Gary Bettman and Co. seem intent on holding teams accountable for something they allowed to happen. Every single one of these contracts has to be approved by the league, so in essence they were complicit in allowing these teams to cheat the system.
Marian Hossa, Roberto Luongo and Henrik Zetterberg all signed deals that were heavily front-loaded. Yet the NHL chose to make an example of Ilya Kovalchuk and the New Jersey Devils.
Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo! Sports thinks that the Sabres and several other teams may be next:
What this provision does is punish not only the teams that circumvented the cap during the “hey, EVERYONE’S doing it” days, but also the teams that tried to sneak in under the wire before the CBA expired: Shea Weber’s 14-year contract, matched by the Nashville Predators after it was handed out by Ed Snider; Zach Parise and Ryan Suter’s 13-year deals that drop significantly in 2022; and going back to last summer, Christian Ehrhoff’s preposterous contract with the Buffalo Sabres in which he earns $6 million in the last four years and $34 million in the first six.
The provision he speaks of would put these teams on the hook for a cap hit every year of the deal, even if the player leaves or retires. For instance, if Ehrhoff retires after the seventh year of the contract, the Sabres would still see his $4 million hit for the following three seasons.
Whether this attempt by Bettman to wipe the egg off of his face is successful or not remains to be seen.
What we do know, though, is that the Sabres free-agent decisions in the summer of 2011 may slowly come back to haunt them.
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The Buffalo Sabres‘ AHL affiliate Rochester Americans have not minded the NHL lockout one bit.
The Amerks have been the beneficiary of plenty of NHL-level talent during the ongoing labor strife, and, despite their recent struggles, the team has been extremely competitive.
Here is a list of some Amerks players you may or may not know, but with whom should familiarize yourself for when the lockout comes to a resolution—whenever that may be.
