The Buffalo Sabres may not have found their man . . . but with a roster this bad, fans should be willing to give the head coach a one-season mulligan.
“Let the heads roll!”
That is the sentiment an awful lot of Buffalo Sabres fans have now that the team is 34 games into the 2017-18 season, with good reason.
The Sabres are 8-19-7, owners of the second-fewest wins in the NHL.
The team has only 23 points in the standings, once again the second-fewest in the NHL.
Buffalo has scored only 72 goals, the lowest total in the league. And the Sabres have surrendered 114 goals, fourth-most in all the NHL.
Add all those facts up and slap two pieces of bread over them, and you have what one writer over at The Hockey Writers called “a turd sandwich.”
Fans demanding that something be done about this team are 100% justified in their actions, and based on General Manager Jason Botterill’s actions early this month, the changes are a’coming. According to hockey insider Elliotte Friedman, the Sabres are willing to entertain trade talk for anyone on the roster not named Jack Eichel, so fans should not be surprised if this roster looks drastically different come next summer (or even March, if Botterill goes into fire sale mode for the trade deadline).
Fans SHOULD be surprised, however, if the Buffalo Sabres decide to flip their coaching staff for the second time in as many years. The criticisms of Phil Housely have been duly noted – he juggles his lines too much, his in-game decisions are often head-scratching to say the least, and he appears to be a tad overwhelmed in this, his first head coaching gig.
As valid as these criticisms often all, though, there is no reason to call for Housely’s head just yet. To begin with, the Buffalo Sabres are just a flat-out bad team. It is hard to think of a head coach who would be able to win many games with a roster this weak. Years of tanking, questionable trades, and less-than-successful free agent acquisitions thanks to past GMs have resulted in the roster Housely inherited. The Sabres are not strong in any area, from goaltending to defense to their stable of forwards. Any Sabres fan who can look at this roster and wonder why it is not winning many hockey games clearly needs to find a new sport to follow.
Which leads us to the criticism regarding Housley’s line juggling. Housely is trying to win with this crappy lineup, folks, but he is not finding enough consistency to keep lines together for long stretches of time. Just when you think you have one line that will actually produce, a player like Jason Pominville comes back down to earth, and the line flames out. And it’s easy to say things like “Keep Jack Eichel and Evander Kane together” – Lord knows I am guilty of this – but keeping the only two players on the team who can score together on the same line makes life easy for opposing teams.
Will Phil Housely be the coach who leads the Buffalo Sabres to playoff glory? It’s 100% impossible to answer that question right now. The front office handed Housely an AHL-caliber roster and asked him to try and perform a miracle by making the playoffs. Sabres fans are starved for the playoffs, and it’s understandable why the front office would want this team to qualify – two words: season tickets – but it’s obvious that dreams of seeing playoff hockey in Buffalo were as unrealistic as they come. Running Housely out of town because he is struggling to prove his worth with a lineup from hell accomplishes nothing, so save the harsh criticism for next year, when Housely hopefully has a roster worth a damn.