The Sabres are... bad? No way! (Trending Topics)

One of my big regrets so far this season is the fact that I repeatedly and confidently said out loud and in print, “There's no way the Sabres will be as bad as they were last year.” 

It seemed impossible. In the pantheon of “truly garbage” NHL teams in the Behind the Net Era — running from 2007-08 to present — the 2013-14 Sabres pretty close to No. 1, with all apologies to the 2007-08 Thrashers, 2013-14 Maple Leafs, and 2012-13 Maple Leafs (who are largely disqualified due to having only been only dreadful over 48 games and not the full 82).

They were very unskilled, of course, and their roster was wafer-thin. They changed coaches mid-season. They had numerous discipline and injury problems that drained any depth from the roster even more. They traded just about everyone they could get a third-round pick or half-decent prospect for. And again, they weren't even as bad as the Maple Leafs.

Finishing with just 52 points from 82 games seems like it cannot be a repeatable skill. (And make no mistake: This is something the Sabres were clearly trying to repeat.) Since the 2004-05 lockout, only three teams had slumped to less than 60 points in a full season prior to the Sabres doing it last year: the 2005-06 Blues and Penguins, and the 2006-07 Flyers. Those teams were bad, sure, but they were also hideously unlucky. And I was more than willing to put the Sabres in that boat as well. They were bad, but they weren't that bad.

(I was also willing to discount Ryan Miller's slightly-above-average numbers as being a product of teams playing with leads generally having lower shooting percentages because they're just not trying as hard to score. Pretty much everyone plays with a lead against Buffalo, so I figured even a slight downgrade in net wouldn't hurt them too badly. So far, though, Michal Neuvirth and Jhonas Enroth are proving me wrong.) 

But 10 games into the season — ahead of Thursday night's still-guaranteed loss to the injury-depleted Bruins — the Sabres look like they're on pace to pummel whatever records for futility their cap-era forebears had laid down. It's not that they're not scoring goals (but they're not, at 11 in 10 games) or not doing a good enough job preventing them (but they're not, at 33 in 10 games), it's that the fundamentals suggest they might even have been a little bit lucky in getting to this point. They have the worst goal differential in the league at minus-23, five behind even the winless Carolina Hurricanes, but their shot differential of minus-14.9 per game is the worst in the league by a wide, wide margin.

And look, they have four points from 10 games, but no one in their right mind can consider this a 40-point team. With the loser point, it's basically impossible to be that poor, and the standings over the last decade bear that out pretty clearly. But the is fact that this team is at minus-232 in shot attempts through 10, and one has to imagine that as the season progresses, and injuries pile up, and the few useful guys on the roster get traded, they're only going to get worse. The worst team in the league in the BTN era was last year's Leafs, at minus-1,092 corsi events at 5-on-5. Last year's Sabres were second at minus-967. It's not so far-fetched to see this year's Buffalo squad blow both those numbers out of the water.

So no, the Sabres will probably not be better than they were last season, in the standings or on the ice. I'm a little surprised that this is the case just because I thought last season's embarrassing exercise in futility was the logical, miserable rock bottom for NHL hockey.

But what is truly mystifying is the apparent shock — actual, Grade-A shock — in Buffalo that the team is this bad. Ted Nolan's dropping F bombs about effort and talking about scratching certain underperforming players (Cody Hodgson). Like, even if you didn't think the Sabres were going to be as bad as they were last season, you couldn't have thought they'd actually be good. It appeared, due to some additions they made in the summer and some steps back taken in Carolina, that they either pulled into a tie for 30th instead of being the outright worst team, or had perhaps even nudged their way up to 29th if you were particularly optimistic about Zemgus Girgensons' improvement, or for that matter down on how much Carolina would play Cam Ward.

Now, one can't expect Ted Nolan to not peel the paint after his team puts just 10 shots on goal against a mediocre-to-bad team like this year's Leafs. He's a professional, his guys are professionals, they have to show some amount of pride and try to gussy up what is the most patently obvious NHL tank job in recent memory. But his quotes using the terms “very, very disturbing,” and “mind-baffling,” indicate that maybe he doesn't understand how this was always going to work. Maybe you don't want to get flattened by the Leafs quite so badly as they did (just six even-strength offensive zone starts!!!), but you have to be realistic about this team.

What more evidence does one need that this team was always going to be bad than the fact that they're going out of their way — as crassly as possible — to say, “We're gonna draft Connor McDavid when we get the No. 1 pick,” at every turn? They had the kid play in Buffalo. It doesn't get much more brazen than that.

Another hilarious Nolan quote from after that Leafs loss: “I’ve learned a long time ago from one of the best coaches ever in the game, Fred Shero, and he said, ‘You have to learn to win with what you’ve got or you don’t win at all.’” Ludicrous coach-talk, obviously. Put together a team of the 20 best Puck Daddy readers, and send them out against even these Sabres. They get slaughtered. Give it 82 games, they lose 82 times. Because sometimes what you've got just isn't good enough to win. And what the Sabres have isn't good enough to win.

Should they be this bad? No. Matt Moulson doesn't have a goal yet (really dispelling the “he's not just a product of John Tavares” claims, hey? His goals-per-game drops to 0.22 from 0.39 without Tavares), nor does Chris Stewart. As a team they're shooting a league-worst 4.59 percent at even strength whereas last year they were 6.59 percent.

Ted Nolan might be getting pretty close to everything he possibly can out of this club, and screaming at guys in practice and shuffling them in and out of the lineup isn't really fair at some point. Work with what you have, sure, but what Tim Murray has done here is put together a club — obviously with this kind of losing in mind — that is going to get it either Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel, plus whoever next year's No. 1 or 2 overall is, and maybe another high pick beyond that. Losing is what you have to expect, and when you're set up to lose, you often lose ugly.

This is, by the way, not meant as a remonstration to the tactic: Stocking up on picks and prospects is the moral obligation of a GM whose team was as deep in the toilet as the Sabres were when Murray took over. For every “No one ever got anywhere by tanking” argument, there's two Stanley Cups each for the Kings and Blackhawks over the last five years. Murray winkingly overpaid for a few veterans, Moulson included, this summer to get the team to the cap floor and make it look like he was trying to field a competitive team, but when your best addition is local old man Brian Gionta, and you even had to overpay for him to come home, then you're doing a pretty solid job of ensuring a high pick.

So when the Sabres keep losing, which they're absolutely going to do for the remaining 71 games on their schedule after last night, please understand that all the hemming and hawing from coaches and players — who eternally play to preserve their livelihoods — runs counter to what the Sabres front office have been, are, and will be trying to do.

This may not be good for fans to watch, media to cover, or the team's boots on the ground to play through in these 82-game slogs, but executives know it's good for at least one thing. It's the one thing you can be sure the Sabres are really playing for every night: The Future.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.