The 10 worst moves the Buffalo Sabres have made during their playoff drought

When a team hasn’t made the playoffs for two or three years, that’s a retool or the start of a rebuild. When it’s been five to 10 years, that’s usually a rebuild with a bit of bad luck in the draft. When a playoff drought has reached 14 seasons, that is franchise ineptitude on a massive scale.

And that has been the Buffalo Sabres.

To put the Sabres’ playoff drought in perspective, only the Detroit Red Wings and Anaheim Ducks‘ droughts at nine and seven years are even close, and they are at the tail ends of their respective rebuilds, or at least trying to be at the tail ends. The Sabres may be entering their third rebuild. There are Sabres’ fans who are entering high school this year who have yet to watch their team play in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

A drought like this can’t be attributed to just bad luck or a few mistakes. This requires numerous errors, both minor and major, to have occurred for a team to struggle to make the playoffs for this long, with most of them causing a massive chain reaction to get to where we are now.

But which mistakes have been the most egregious? Let’s look at the 10 worst moves made by the Sabres since the beginning of this playoff drought in 2011.

Before we start, I’d like to shout out a move that would have been the worst: Terry Pegula’s purchase of the team. This doesn’t qualify for the list because Pegula bought the Sabres in February 2011, just a couple of months before their most recent playoff appearance in 2011. But let’s be realistic, once Pegula bought the team and began to interfere with operations, Buffalo had no hope. Almost every move that you’ll see on the list can be traced back to him as part of the problem, whether that be trying to make a certain move happen or being tight with his budget. You can’t have a “worst Sabres’ moves” list without mentioning him.

10. Trading Ryan O’Reilly to St. Louis

This list is certainly going to contradict itself later on with the initial acquisition for Ryan O’Reilly, and in terms of the context of the situation about him leaving Buffalo, it made sense. His comments at the end of the 2017-18 season about losing his love for the game made it very obvious that he and the Sabres needed a change of scenery, and it’s not like the return for him was horrible for Buffalo, with Tage Thompson alone recouping a lot of the value.

But at the same time, O’Reilly leaving the Sabres amidst those comments and the rumors of him being a locker room cancer, only for him to win the Stanley Cup with the St. Louis Blues the following season, is a tough look on the state of that mid-2010s’ Sabres’ core that was supposed to turn things around. O’Reilly kicked off the trend of Sabres leaving and winning a Cup with their new team, and him winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as well is just an added punch to the gut. The situation and return in the trade do keep this one from being higher on the list, and if anything, it’s a fitting kick-off to the misery that awaits.

9. Trading Sam Reinhart to Florida

Not only does the Sabres’ decision to move on from Sam Reinhart burn similarly to O’Reilly’s trade to St. Louis, but Reinhart’s performance since joining the Florida Panthers has left many in Buffalo wondering what could have been. While Reinhart proved to be a solid top-six contributor with the Sabres, he never got more than 25 goals during his tenure there, and he only had more than 50 points once. In the four seasons since joining Florida, Reinhart has never scored fewer than 31 goals and 67 points, all while seeing his defensive game reach new heights. And of course, there are the two Stanley Cups.

Much like O’Reilly, this move only finds itself lower on the list because the Sabres have at least gotten something out of the trade. While Devon Levi hasn’t established himself at the NHL level, he’s still one of the top goalie prospects in the game and could save this trade. And then the Sabres used their first-round pick on Jiri Kulich, who’s no Reinhart, but has at least proven to be a solid contributor in the NHL even at 21. Does it make watching Reinhart lift back-to-back Stanley Cups hurt less? Of course not. But it makes this move look better than what’s yet to come.

8. The Kyle Okposo contract

We’ll talk more about this later on. But the Sabres’ signing of Kyle Okposo in 2016 is a great example of how they jumped the gun far too early in their rebuild and attempted to turn the team into a contender before they were ready. They committed $6 million a year for seven years to Okposo, despite signs that many of his best seasons with the New York Islanders were elevated by John Tavares. Obviously, it didn’t pan out all that well for Buffalo.

The real giveaway for this signing being a bad move is that this happened in 2016, which was an all-timer summer for bad contracts in free agency. On top of Okposo, the likes of Loui Eriksson, Milan Lucic, David Backes, Andrew Ladd, Frans Nielsen, and Troy Brouwer all were handed far too much term and money. Unfortunately, the Sabres fell for that trap. While the fact that Okposo played out the contract and became a captain does keep this lower on the list, it was still a big error that hurt Buffalo’s chances of turning their team around.

7. Trading Brandon Montour to Florida

At first glance, having the Sabres trading Montour to Florida higher than the O’Reilly and Reinhart trades doesn’t make sense. After all, both players were much more impactful with their new teams, and were also intended to be bigger pieces of that mid-2010s Sabres’ core. Meanwhile, Montour spent barely two seasons with the Sabres, collected just 42 points in 112 games, and then was dealt to the Panthers. Certainly O’Reilly and Reinhart’s departures sting a lot more for Buffalo fans, no?

That part may be true, but the Montour trade itself was not a good one. While O’Reilly got the Sabres Tage Thompson, and Reinhart got them Devon Levi and Jiri Kulich, all Buffalo got out of Montour’s trade was a third round pick in 2021. They used that pick to select Stiven Sardarian, who hasn’t shown strong signs of an NHL career up to this point. The Sabres just have a lot less to show for trading Montour, who also hit his stride with a new team and won a Stanley Cup in Florida.

6. The Ville Leino contract

Ville Leino was the original Bad Buffalo Sabres Move, made back when they were still looked at as a playoff contender and the thought of a playoff drought reaching 14 years seemed insane. Leino had a successful calendar year riding the coattails of Daniel Briere and Scott Hartnell during the Philadelphia Flyers‘ run to the 2010 Stanley Cup Final with 21 goals in 19 games, and then built on that in the 2010-11 season with 53 points in 81 games.

The Sabres felt a bit of his wrath when he had three goals in their 2011 first-round series against the Flyers (Buffalo’s last playoff appearance, by the way), and they decided to sign him to a six-year contract with a $4.5 million AAV in hopes of boosting their offense and sustaining their playoff contention.

In case you couldn’t tell, Leino didn’t help their playoff chances. Leino had just eight goals and 25 points in his first season with the Sabres, and his contract immediately became one of the biggest laughing stocks of the league. After that, he played two more seasons for the Sabres, managing just two goals and 21 points in 58 games. It should have been more obvious that a player with just 20 points in 68 games prior to his breakout would have ended up like this, but alas, the Sabres took the bait. The only reason this contract isn’t higher up is that they used one of their two compliance buyouts to get rid of the contract and managed to escape it with minimal consequences.

5. Trading Brayden McNabb to Los Angeles

You may be wondering why Brayden McNabb, of all players, has found a way to surpass trades like O’Reilly, Reinhart, and even Montour. It surprised me to find this trade mentioned on a lot of “worst moves” posts as I did my initial research for this article. But as soon as I saw the return was Nicolas Deslauriers and Hudson Fasching, I knew this would make the list. While Deslauriers has carved out a solid 12-season NHL career thus far, it’s largely been in a fourth-line role, and Fasching has never been more than an NHL/AHL tweener. That alone is not a good return for McNabb, who’s been a consistent top-four defenseman with the Los Angeles Kings and Vegas Golden Knights in his career.

But the trade gets worse. How, you may ask? Well, McNabb was not the only asset traded to Los Angeles in this trade. Along with the defenseman, the Sabres traded Jonathan Parker and two second-round picks. Not one. TWO! And one of those draft picks was used to select Erik Cernak, who’s also turned into a very reliable top-four defenseman for the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s quasi-dynasty. Imagine how much better the mid-2010s’ Sabres would have been with McNabb and Cernak in their top four. It’s the kind of move that seems so small at the time, but ends up having significant ramifications in the long run.

4. The Jeff Skinner contract

For as bad as Okposo and Leino’s contracts were, Jeff Skinner’s was significantly worse. The initial trade with the Carolina Hurricanes to bring in Skinner was actually a steal on Buffalo’s end, only giving up a second, third and sixth-round pick and Cliff Pu (although the second and third have since turned into Pyotr Kochetkov and Alex Nikishin). On top of that, Skinner’s first season in Buffalo was a big success, as he scored 40 goals for the first time in his career. However, he was an unrestricted free agent after that season, and that’s where it all went wrong.

The Sabres liked what they saw in Skinner’s 40-goal season, and signed him to an eight-year deal with a $9 million cap hit. They hoped that he could replicate that production going forward in Buffalo. But even if you ignore the fact that Skinner’s season was an outlier in his career, a $9 million AAV was an overpayment even for a regular 40-goal scoring winger. Add in the fact that COVID-19 froze the cap and stagnated the market to make that contract an outlier, and this was almost a disaster. And then just as Skinner’s game was clicking and he was scoring 20-30 goals again, the Sabres bought him out in 2024 and did nothing with that saved cap space to replace his offense. All in all, it was a poorly thought-out situation.

3. Their drafting

If there’s one essential part of the rebuild for a team to nail, it’s the draft. Not only is it important to get high draft picks to get those elite talents to be the key cogs of the future, a rebuilding team also need to accumulate enough draft picks beyond those top picks so that they can hit on enough to fill out the rest of the lineup. The Sabres failed to do that. Outside of their four top two picks in Reinhart, Jack Eichel, Rasmus Dahlin, and Owen Power, their resume in the first round is a lot more misses than hits, at least relative to where they were selected.

Year	Draft Pick	Player	Career Totals (GP-G-A-P)
2011	16th	Joel Armia, RW	586 – 103 – 104 – 207
2012	12th	Mikhail Grigorenko, C	249 – 26 – 50 – 76
2012	14th	Zemgus Girgensons, C	770 – 91 – 103 – 194
2013	8th	Rasmus Ristolainen, D	776 – 56 – 248 – 304
2013	16th	Nikita Zadorov, D	723 – 51 – 117 – 168
2014	2nd	Sam Reinhart, C	775 – 294 – 325 – 619
2015	2nd	Jack Eichel, C	616 – 239 – 369 – 608
2016	8th	Alex Nylander, LW	126 – 25 – 24 – 49
2017	8th	Casey Mittelstadt, C	438 – 81 – 155 – 236
2018	1st	Rasmus Dahlin, D	509 – 83 – 277 – 360
2019	7th	Dylan Cozens, C	362 – 82 – 131 – 213
2019	31st	Ryan Johnson, D	44 – 0 – 7 – 7
2020	8th	Jack Quinn, RW	178 – 39 – 58 – 97
2021	1st	Owen Power, D	242 – 19 – 92 – 111
2021	14th	Isak Rosen, RW	15 – 0 – 1 – 1
2022	9th	Matthew Savoie, C	5 – 0 – 1 – 1
2022	16th	Noah Ostlund, C	8 – 0 – 0 – 0
2022	28th	Jiri Kulich, C	63 – 15 – 9 – 24

Have the Sabres generally produced NHLers with these picks? Yes. But outside of the obvious choices, their draft selections have usually gone on to become middle-of-the-lineup players at best, and fringe NHLers at worst. Even the best-case scenarios, like Ristolainen and Zadorov, are only higher-lineup players due to reputation and not their actual play. If you want the real culprit of the Sabres’ playoff drought, this is it. Eichel and Reinhart had no help from within the organization when they were with the team, and the same now goes for Dahlin and Power.

Their list of successes beyond the first round isn’t much better. The only picks to play more than 200 games are Jake McCabe, Linus Ullmark, J.T. Compher, Brendan Lemieux, Victor Olofsson, Will Borgen, Brandon Hagel, Jacob Bryson, Mattias Samuelsson, and J.J. Peterka, and a lot of them only found their success outside of Buffalo.

2. Trading Jack Eichel to Vegas

To the surprise of no one, the Sabres’ trading Eichel backfired in spectacular fashion. It was easy to see how moving on from Eichel wouldn’t work out for Buffalo (I said exactly that five months before he was traded during my days with The Leafs Nation), and it played out exactly as such. Eichel recovered from his total disc arthroplasty, returned to his elite form, and like most former Sabres, found himself hoisting the Cup with Vegas just over a year after the trade.

To make matters worse, the return for the Sabres just hasn’t given them the value they gave up. Alex Tuch is probably the lone bright spot for the trade, seeing his game reach new heights in a consistent top-line role in Buffalo. But beyond that, Peyton Krebs still hasn’t hit that first-round potential at 24, Noah Ostlund has the potential to be good, but not at the level of Eichel, and the second-round pick was dealt the following season to bring in Jordan Greenway.

Eichel requested a trade after the 2019-20 season. Then there was everything with the artificial disk replacement. That stubborn decision not only fractured his relationship with the Sabres, but also Reinhart’s. There are just far too many negative consequences to not place this high up on the list, and it’s probably the point in this lengthy playoff drought that made it apparent that a retool was needed, even if Buffalo put that off for a couple of seasons.

1. Going “all-in” in 2015

While trading Eichel was the end of the core that the Sabres tried to put together in the 2010s, acquiring Evander Kane, Robin Lehner and O’Reilly in 2015 was, in hindsight, the beginning of the end. In a vacuum, all three trades were fine. The most notable players of consequence dealt for Kane were Tyler Myers and Jack Roslovic, for O’Reilly were Zadorov and J.T. Compher, and the Ottawa Senators used the first-round pick they got for Lehner on Colin White.

The problem is that the Sabres jumped the gun on the rebuild far too quickly. They were about to get Eichel with the second-overall pick, and they wanted to start taking that next step and build a team around him. The problem is that, as touched on previously with their drafting up to that point, they didn’t have that team. Of their six first-round picks since 2011 prior to Eichel, only Reinhart had any signs of being a strong piece, not to mention that they depleted said-prospect cupboard by trading three of those six players in the three deals (Armia, Zadorov & Grigorenko). Sure, Kane, O’Reilly and Lehner were going to improve the lineup, but they didn’t have enough depth to be a playoff team.

The biggest sin of these premature all-in moves was trading two of their three 2015 first-round picks. 2015 was looked at as a strong draft at the time, and has since been looked at as one of the best drafts in the 21st century. If there was a draft to really go all-in on to build your team, that was the one, but the Sabres’ flurry of moves left them with just six picks in that draft.

Yes, the two picks were used on two of the weaker first-round options in White and Roslovic, but Brock Boeser was taken just two picks after White, and Sebastian Aho slipped into the second round past Roslovic. And then there’s the fact that players like Aho, Roope Hintz, Rasmus Andersson and Vince Dunn were available with the second-round pick that they sent to the Colorado Avalanche.

It just wasn’t a smart decision in hindsight, as it stunted the growth of the team they were trying to build, and is probably the most impactful decision during this 14-year drought.

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