Trending Topics: Buffalo sees the only path forward

Earlier this week, it was reported that if you were an NHL team that wanted a guy currently playing for the Buffalo Sabres, you were more than welcome to kick the tires on anyone who didn’t recently sign an eight-year deal worth $80 million.

You want Ryan O’Reilly? Give Jason Botterill a call. How about Evander Kane? Just pick up the phone and make an offer. Interested in Robin Lehner? He’s yours for the right price. Rasmus Ristolainen? Hey, the line is open.

And look, when a team with a new coach and a new GM, and a core of guys you really can’t get too enthusiastic about, it’s reasonable to expect change. Plus when that team is on pace for a whopping 53 points or so, the only recourse is for that new GM to hang a for-sale sign on everything within arm’s reach and hope someone will float him picks and prospects for the available wares.

On paper this is a team that has some talent. Eichel’s is obvious, as is Kane’s and Okposo’s, though the latter is certainly struggling this season in a way I don’t think anyone could have reasonably expected. He had a bit of a down year by his standards last season (0.7 points per game) but was still pretty effective when healthy. This season, though, he’s dropped off a cliff, averaging 0.4 points per game, in part because he’s shooting just 5 percent.

Nonetheless, if you can find someone to take this $6 million AAV that’s locked down for several more years, that’s something you have to consider. Okposo was signed — and Kane and Lehner traded for — assuming the Sabres were ready to stop the rebuild process and get off the ground once again. Instead, this team broke apart on liftoff to an ugly extent, so it’s back to the engineering phase of the process.

There are a couple other high-priced forwards worth mentioning as major issues for this team: O’Reilly has been pretty good but certainly not great, and certainly not worth the price to this point in 2017-18. Jason Pominville has likewise been fine, but “fine” doesn’t cut it for a $5.4 million cap hit on a 35-year-old who, by the way, is signed through next year and has both a no-move and a modified no-trade.

These contracts are, to one extent or another, untradeable. Okposo and Pominville fall into that category because of the clauses in their contracts. O’Reilly’s because who wants to (or indeed, can) take on $7.5 million against the cap through 2023?

(There’s also Matt Moulson, now buried in the minors and loaned to a completely different organization, but no one is taking that guy at anything close the $5 million a year for this season and next. Frankly, Buffalo couldn’t retain enough salary to make it worth anyone’s while.)

Evander Kane is eminently movable both because he’s having a dynamite year and because he’s in the final season of his current deal — and why on earth would he want to go back to Buffalo?

The other guy on this team who’s probably the most movable is Lehner.

Lehner, too, is a player having a bad season who otherwise has a track record of success. He has a career .919 save percentage, and he didn’t turn into a bad goalie overnight at age 26. He’s making just $4 million against the cap this season, and he’ll be an RFA this summer, so any team looking to trade for and subsequently sign what seems to be an above-average goalie at what might end up being a dirt-cheap price could find a good one here. But hey, it’s not like there are a bunch of teams that don’t have a goalie solution and might be looking for one these days, right?

Chad Johnson is also having rather a bad season, but he’s cheaper, also on an expiring contract, and also coming off a half-decent season.

Teams might shy away due to the save percentages, sure. But you have to think Lehner and Johnson are both better than this. Call it bad luck if you want, but the team in front of him is so bad that it seems like a more likely culprit. Maybe you say that’s an easy explanation, but sometimes the answers we’re looking for are right in front of us.

And indeed, right in front of Lehner and Johnson is the Sabres’ real problem: Their D corps. This is as a sorry a collection of NHL defenseman as there is in the NHL today. When Ristolainen — who Buffalo fanboys will stan for forever despite his obvious deficiencies — is your best defender by a pretty wide margin, your team is in a lot of trouble. And here’s the wild part: Not only is this defense bad, it also costs almost $24.7 million against the cap.

This defense is the reason an otherwise-okay forward group never really went anywhere. If you don’t have guys who can turn the puck over in the defensive zone and get it moving out to the neutral zone effectively, you’re not going to have much or any success. This is the problem in Edmonton and a few other places around the league, but I can’t imagine anyone’s D situation is worse than Buffalo’s when comparing price to quality.

Do any of the Sabres defenseman appeal to other teams? That Josh Gorges contract is finally nearing its fortunate end, but he’s been terrible and had a limited no-trade which may or may not still be in place since he was moved to Buffalo. Zach Bogosian and Marco Scandella are both signed for another three seasons and aren’t difference-makers regardless of price, never mind the fact that they’re both quite expensive.

Honestly, one has to applaud Botterill for having the balls to just put everyone not named Jack Eichel on the trade block. It would have been easy to let this team, with an okay roster, “try to figure it out” with their new coach, but things were so bad so early on, particularly on special teams, that he was given an excellent excuse to try to jettison some unneeded players.

Things don’t always go as expected, and in the NHL, where contracts are guaranteed, you’re bound to have some “buyer’s remorse” guys on your roster at any given time. However, the thing that separates good GMs from bad ones is a willingness to make radical change when needed. Too many executives are willing to roast in their own juices and make piddling changes that don’t end up mattering much at all. Not Botterill. Not with this team as it’s currently constituted.

Does this make Botterill a good GM? No. But since he inherited a mess, his willingness to get aggressive in fixing it probably portends good things for the future.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.