The Buffalo Sabres show fans they don’t care by keeping Jason Botterill

The Buffalo Sabres are still perfectly okay with being the laughing stock of the NHL.

The Buffalo Sabres missed out on the NHL’s expanded 24-team Stanley Cup Playoff format, pushing their postseason drought to nine consecutive seasons, by far the longest drought in the NHL. Naturally, ownership immediately assured fans that Jason Botterill, the general manager who hasn’t gotten this team any closer to the postseason, will return next season.

“I realize, maybe it’s not popular with the fans, but we have to do the things that we feel are right,” Sabres owner Kim Pegula said in an interview with the Associated Press. “We have a little bit more information than maybe a fan does, some inner workings that we see some positives in.”

Maybe that’s fair. An ownership group that has no background in hockey and hasn’t made the playoffs once since taking over definitely knows what solid hockey operations would look like. Why don’t we take a look at some of those “positives”?

Botterill was hired by the Sabres in 2017, promising that “we (the Sabres) will be better” in his introductory press conference. Three full seasons later, the Sabres have not been better in the slightest.

In Botterill’s first season with the team, the Sabres finished dead last in the league. Next season it looked like the Sabres were finally ready to be good again after going on a ten-game winning streak in November. All they had to do to snap the playoff drought was just play average for the rest of the season and they’d be in. Instead, they collapsed and didn’t even come close to the playoffs.

This season, once again the Sabres came out of the gate strong, and once again fell apart way too early in the season. Never once have the Sabres hit 80 points in a season since hiring Boterill.

How Jason Botterill has failed the Buffalo Sabres organization

Botterill’s most infamous move was trading the unhappy Ryan O’Reilly to the St. Louis Blues for a pathetic return that included two salary cap dumps, a mediocre prospect, and a first round pick. O’Reilly would help lead the Blues to their first Stanley Cup and win the Conn Smythe, while the Sabres would shockingly discover that they no longer had any center depth. Botterill would then just not sign or trade for a replacement, and wingers would be forced to play center instead.

Botterill’s best move was prying Jeff Skinner out of Carolina for a steal in 2018, with Skinner scoring 40 goals in his first season with the team. However, Skinner was in the final year of his contract and rode an absurdly high shooting percentage with all metrics pointing to the season as an anomaly compared to how he performed previously.

Botterill threw all caution to the wind and signed Skinner to an eight-year contract worth a staggering $72 million, destroying their salary cap space. Skinner immediately plummeted this season, scoring a measly 14 goals and 9 assists, meaning the Sabres paid $281,548 for every point he scored this seasonm according to CapFriendly. Did I mention it also has a full no movement clause? Only seven years left on that contract.

The Sabres even bought instead of selling at this year’s trade deadline despite being far out of the playoff race, giving up a conditional 2021 fifth-round draft pick to the New Jersey Devils for Wayne Simmonds, with the condition being on the Sabres making the playoffs. The Sabres won just one game out of seven after the trade deadline. The playoffs were even expanded to 24 teams, and the Sabres still didn’t make it.

That doesn’t even include keeping too many defensemen on the roster until February, making a meaningless trade for Michael Frolik, and putting the team right up to the salary cap with no results to show for it. It’d be a futile exercise to try and list everything else that’s gone wrong under Botterill, but the list goes on and on.

In fairness, Buffalo showed some semblance of structure under new head coach Ralph Krueger, but were once again sunk by a lack of depth scoring and shaky goaltending. That falls on the general manager and the team he has built. There are no more excuses or people left to blame. This is no longer the mess of former general managers. Botterill has not built a good enough hockey team in Buffalo despite having plenty of opportunities.

Apathy towards the Sabres organization goes far beyond just the fanbase who “doesn’t see the positives.” Sabres captain Jack Eichel voiced his frustrations with the way his career has gone in Buffalo, and that he is “fed up with losing.” It doesn’t take a detective to figure out who he’s talking to.

Sounds pretty similar to what O’Reilly was saying with how he was “losing his love for the game” shortly before he was traded to St. Louis, or maybe it sounds like Patrik Berglund who found that leaving $13 million on the table was preferable to staying in Buffalo after being traded there in the O’Reilly trade.

Poor Eichel has done everything that he possibly can to get the Sabres back to the playoffs since being drafted second overall in 2015. This past season was his best yet with 36 goals and 78 points in 68 games, but when only one other player has even cracked 50 points on the team with only two other forwards even above 30, there’s only so much you can do.

If the Sabres don’t turn this around soon, it’s not a stretch to say that Eichel could be demanding a trade sooner or later. If that ever happens, you can bet plenty of Sabres fans will follow their captain out the door. Botterill has done nothing to prove that he is capable of cleaning up this mess, and if anything has just made it worse.

Maybe the Pegula’s just think the fans aren’t smart enough to see what’s going on with their team, and will just keep blindly supporting the team if this streak of futility and driving players out of town continues. The Sabres fanbase have remained one of the most hardcore hockey markets in the world despite a decade of futility, but even they have grown apathetic towards this team. To see the Sabres organization continue to take them for granted is a travesty. Buffalo deserves better than the Sabres.

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