Buffalo Sabres: Keeping Jason Botterill makes no sense

The Buffalo Sabres continue to not get it by keeping GM Jason Botterill.

The Buffalo Sabres haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade. They couldn’t even make the postseason when it was expanded to 24 teams, or about 75% of the league. Yet the Sabres apparently aren’t going to making any huge changes, as they’ll be retaining the services of general manager Jason Botterill.

This comes after yet another underachieving season for the Sabres. Botterill has been the team’s general manager since 2017. With him at the helm, the Sabres have had three consecutive losing seasons while showing minimal progress as a team. Most of the progress the team has made has been due to the heroics of team captain Jack Eichel.

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

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Let’s take a look at some of those positives, shall we? The Sabres have Eichel. He’s easily one of the top 10 forwards in the league. If I could build a team from scratch, I don’t think there are more than five forwards I’d take over Eichel.

Rasmus Dahlin took a pretty big step backwards in 2019-20, but he’s still a promising young defenseman. But other than that, it’s hard to argue the Sabres are any better than the day Botterill got hired.

I’ll give Botterill a pass for his first season because that team was dreadful and it wasn’t his fault. However, after that season, he traded Ryan O’Reilly for peanuts and O’Reilly went on to win the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy. But to be fair to Botterill, that summer is when he also made a good trade by getting Jeff Skinner from the Carolina Hurricanes.

The Sabres came out swinging in the 2018-19 season, winning 10 games in a row to improve to 17-6-2 after 25 games. All they had to do was play .500 hockey and they had a good chance at making the playoffs. Instead, the Sabres won just 16 games in their last 57.

Much like the 2018-19 season, the 2019-20 season saw the Sabres coming out hot out of the gate, winning eight of their first 10 games. After winning three straight games in mid-to-late October, it took them nearly two months to have another three-game winning streak. The Sabres had just two more three-game winning streaks for the rest of the season.

Botterill Is Ruining The Sabres

Let’s go back to Botterill’s signature trade. Trading O’Reilly was a bad idea then and it’s looking even worse right now. Right now, the Sabres have nothing on their NHL roster to show for having traded an eventual Conn Smythe winner. Patrik Berglund had his contract mutually terminated, Tage Thompson is still in the AHL, and Vladimir Sobotka hasn’t been anything close to an impact player.

But trading O’Reilly wasn’t the big problem. The main concern is Botterill didn’t bother to replace his best center. He assumed Casey Mittlelstadt would grab that role, and it’s a role he still hasn’t grabbed despite having multiple opportunities to do so.

Botterill showed his ugly side again in 2019. Skinner had a great season for the Sabres and was entering free agency. Not wanting to lose him, Botterill signed him to an ill-advised eight-year deal worth $9 million a year. To no one’s surprise, when Skinner stopped playing a lot with Eichel, his numbers declined significantly.

He has proven he’s not capable of being a GM. You want your front office to make more “good” moves than “bad” moves. It’s hard to argue Botterill hasn’t made more of the latter than the former.

One of his biggest weaknesses is failing to understand the trade market. First, we have the O’Reilly trade. But there’s also the Marco Scandella trade. The Sabres got very little for him when they shipped him to the Montreal Canadiens. A few months later, the Habs flipped him to the St. Louis Blues for a second-round pick. Botterill also gave up a first-round pick for Brandon Montour who has been disappointing to say the least, in 2019.

The Elephant In The Room

Now, is Botterill the source of all the Sabres’ problems. Absolutely not. If you want to know the source of them, you’ve got to look a little bit higher. The Sabres problems started almost immediately after the Pegulas took over as the owners. With the Pegulas, the Sabres have only made the postseason once (2010-11).

The Pegulas care more about the Buffalo Bills than they do about the Sabres. This isn’t an opinion. At this point, it is a proven fact. The Pegulas have let Botterill and numerous others ruin their franchise. They’re wasting an elite player like Eichel. And Eichel’s starting to sound pretty darn pissed about being stuck on a mediocre franchise.

Once your franchise cornerstone starts sounding pissed about losing, you know you’ve got to make some changes. Those changes aren’t coming in the front office or the coaching staff, though. They’re probably coming via the roster.

But here’s the problem. The Sabres are a rebuilding team who don’t really have that many tradable assets. Sam Reinhart is an option, but obviously, he’s someone the Sabres should be looking to keep, not get rid of. Rasmus Ristolainen is an option as well, but Buffalo has allowed his trade value to evaporate quite a bit.

Speaking of Ristolainen, Eichel’s words were obviously the big story of the Sabres’ wrap-up interviews, but Ristolainen had the quote of the day.

That just about sums up the last decade for the Buffalo Sabres. The days of having a bright future are over. Sabres fans are passionate and they deserve a contending team. It’s become painfully clear Botterill isn’t the right GM to lead the team.