Buffalo Sabres: Is it playoffs or bust for Taylor Hall and company?

Do the Buffalo Sabres need to make the playoffs to retain Taylor Hall?

When Taylor Hall signed a one-year, $8 million contract to join the Buffalo Sabres for the 2020-21 season, it turned a number of heads around the NHL.

Sure, having an ability to reunite with Ralph Krueger, his former coach with the Edmonton Oilers in 2012-13, certainly helped with the decision, as did the opportunity to play alongside superstar center Jack Eichel, but why… Buffalo? Surely some team with a winning record was willing to offer up a similar contract, right? Why choose to sign with another middle-of-the-pack team after wasting away the back half of his 20s on the Devils and Coyotes?

Well, per Hall himself, the move was simply ‘the best for me’.

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At his introductory press conference (via ESPN), Hall broke it down like this, “When you’re able to look past the smoke that’s surrounded the Sabres the past couple of years, you see a team that has elite players, ownership that’s really committed to building a winner and a coach that I feel can get a lot out of his players,”

But honestly, who cares? It’s not about how Hall got to Buffalo but what Buffalo is going to do now that Hall is in place.

For this year’s iteration of the Buffalo Sabres, that answer appears to be a simple one: Playoffs or bust.

Now granted, that may be a bit of an all-or-nothing, not-so-nuanced look at the team. If that is your take, you are 100 percent within your rights to feel that way, but objectively speaking, this 2020-21 Sabres squad could look very different next season if they don’t live up to a sudden surge of lofty expectations.

You see, according to Spotrac, 10 of the Sabres’ 21 active roster players are going to be either unrestricted or restricted free agents upon season’s end, including five of their defensemen and both of their goalies. While some, if not most of these players could obviously opt to re-sign with the team moving forward, it’s hard to imagine players like Hall, Linus Ullmark, or even former second-round pick Jake McCabe opting to stick around if the money is even on a better team.

What the Sabres need to do, is make themselves the better team in order to not only retain Hall well into the 2020s but potentially find even more offensive talent to pair up with franchise stalwarts Jack Eichel and Jeff Skinner.

As things presently stand, Buffalo is not one of the top three teams in the Atlantic Conference. They are not better than the Toronto Maple Leafs, they are not better than the Boston Bruins, and they are most certainly not better than the reigning champion Tampa Bay Lightning. What they could be, however, is better than the Florida Panthers and the Montreal Canadiens, both of whom made it into the NHL bubble in 2020 and only finished out the season with five and one more win(s), respectively. While both teams did add quality players in free agency, neither pulled off a signing as splashy as Taylor Hall and thus theoretically could be poised for an upset if the Sabres come in hot.

Then again, adding a player of Hall’s caliber doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, as the Arizona Coyotes only won 14 of their 35 games with the 28-year-old winger on their roster to finish out the year with a 33-29 record. Even if the Sabres make a similar jump with Hall under contract, does he really want to commit long-term to a team destined to win 35-45 games a season?

Needless to say, this season is going to be consequential.

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Who knows, maybe Taylor Hall is the missing piece to finally elevate the Buffalo Sabres into the next echelon of NHL teams. Maybe the team makes a splash in the playoffs, looks great, and they double-down on winning now with their $41-plus million in available cap space. But for that to happen, the Sabres need to hit the ice skating. Will they do it? Well, my friends, that’s why we watch the games; to find out.

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