Buffalo Sabres: Jeff Skinner talks prove they are content with losing

Zero Stanley Cups later, and the Buffalo Sabres are about to be paying Jack Eichel and Jeff Skinner a combined $20 million, or what competitors like Daniel Briere and Chris Drury were denied. Ryan O’Reilly’s comments in the spring of last year make more sense to me now.

It’s inevitable. The Buffalo Sabres and Jeff Skinner will soon be together for about the next eight years and maybe $80 million dollars. He’s staring down an AAV of more than nine million dollars, according to Bob McKenzie. As a lifelong fan, I could not be more hopeless.

You could argue the specifics of the dollar amount. And you could also say that it isn’t a done deal. You could even say my assessment comes from an extremely-dated fandom bias (and you’d be right). We all know that doesn’t matter when looking at how the Sabres have been rebuilding for years.

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I remember the most recent championship-caliber teams in Buffalo. Though I was a little guy, I can recall the ’06 and ’07 seasons vividly. I was privileged enough to see two games in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

One was Game 7 in Raleigh. It was the Eastern Conference Final against the eventual champions, the Carolina Hurricanes. The Sabres had to dress one and a half pair of defensemen after Jay McKee got infected with something. They lost a close game off a Rod Brind’Amour goal and an empty netter by Mr. Game Seven, Justin Williams.

What stung the most is how far the Sabres came that season, similar to Ryan O’Reilly and the 2019 St. Louis Blues, they just never gave up. Plus, the Eastern Conference Finals were the real Stanley-Cup sweepstakes, as the winner got to play an atrocious Oilers team for the trophy, and the Sabres could’ve easily won it.

The other game I saw was Game 5 between the Sabres and Rangers at HSBC Arena when Chris Drury tied it with about seven seconds left on the clock. My dad was trying to leave and beat the nightmarish traffic on South Park Ave (of which we’re all familiar) when I urged him to just watch the last ten seconds (I swear I said that you can ask him).

Despite the goal, I think my favorite moment of that game was when the packed arena collectively called Sean Avery an [expletive] and my 10-year-old self was allowed to take part. The Sabres won the game in the opening seconds of overtime and went to the Garden to eventually win the series in six games. I lived this stuff.

Why am I recounting these moments in history? Think back to the two best skaters on that Sabres roster. Excluding the most talented U.S. goalie of all time, Ryan Miller, the two superstars on those teams were Daniel Briere and Chris Drury. What happened to them?

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Well, their contracts both expired after the ’07 season. They both wanted larger contracts than GM Darcy Regier was comfortable giving. So the GM let them both walk. It made some sense, as a green-eyed Briere was hoping for a huge, front-loaded contract. He got it with the Philadelphia Flyers and became the highest-paid player in the league for the ’08 season.

Drury, meanwhile, simply did not like Buffalo and wanted to leave as soon as he became a free-agent. Like Briere, he gave the team an absurd number to meet, then booked it for a richer team in a bigger market.

The money they both wanted to stay in Buffalo was a significant portion of the cap at the time (which was about $50 million dollars in 2008) but they would not have combined for $20 million like Skinner and Eichel will this upcoming season and beyond (it would’ve been more like $17 million AAV for the both of them, decreasing annually).

They still would have taken up a sizable portion of the cap, slightly higher than Skinner and Eichel will next season. However, there’s no doubt that they would have also kept the Sabres’ formidable for many years. Instead, the long-time GM decided not to put his team in a salary-pickle for two superstars whose greatest accomplishment was a Conference Final appearance.

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Regier let them go and assigned larger roles to the homegrown trio of Thomas Vanek, Derek Roy and Jason Pominville. He was retroactively fired for his decision more than five years later by a new ownership group (the Pegula fam) who wondered what happened to the glory days and the greatest uniforms of all-time.

Drury and Briere continued to be successful though not for the entirety of their long, hefty contracts. Drury paired up with some dude named Jaromir Jagr and remained productive on a rather mediocre Rangers team.

The slightly wealthier of the two, Briere led Philadelphia to two Conference Finals, then butchered the entire Eastern Conference in 2010, en route to a 30-point playoff performance and a berth in the Stanley Cup Final. Oh, what could’ve been.

The effect that Regier’s extreme measure had is such – new management is doing the polar-opposite as he did, and is paying somewhat-talented players the maximum value they have on the market so that they don’t skip town, or sometimes bribing them to come.

It’s how players like Tyler Ennis, and, more recently, Kyle Okposo, get millions padded on their deals when they otherwise wouldn’t. Simply because the organization is bone-dry on talent. And the poor drafts don’t help, but I’ll go into that another time.

What’s worse? Is it letting talent walk to save money? Or overpaying talent to keep some on the roster and fight for an eighth seed, maybe, in a year or two? I’m not in hockey op’s so I don’t care to know the answer. It’s clear though, that the Sabres think they do.

They view Jeff Skinner as the second best roster player and will reward him as such. Finally a 40-goal-scorer in his eighth season, Skinner has yet to experience even one round of playoff hockey. His potential salary combined with what the Sabres already pay Eichel, a mere twenty goal scorer himself, and similarly ignorant to playoff hockey, is more than the Sabres would have paid Briere and Drury (AKA two players among the most accomplished in Sabres history) and for a longer period than those two veterans were seeking.

The Sabres are now rewarding minimal, individual accomplishments, and hype with fat contracts that no competitive team would dare pay them. The two players keep a few fans in the seats and seem happy living in Western New York. Who, though, wouldn’t be happy to get paid lots of money with no pressure to win? Winners, I guess.

As Skinner and his agent threaten to leave town until Jason Botterill makes it rain, fans shouldn’t wonder why the team has been a mediocre rebuilding project for almost a decade. Unlike a team such as the Chicago Blackhawks, who paid Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews $20 million combined after hanging Stanley Cup banners in the United Center—the Sabres are content on paying top dollar hoping to achieve success.

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I will always be a Sabres fan and I respect the toll these guys are taking on their bodies, and minds especially, but I don’t see winning in the team’s future. That is, so long as the players are well-paid and OK with losing. They aren’t hungry. Ryan O’Reilly was right. The Sabres franchise is paying a bunch of individuals quite handsomely just to keep them (and the fans) around. Believe me, I would love to eat my words.

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