A failure to reap what you sow. How the Buffalo Sabres have failed to capitalize on their 2015-2016 core.
With the relocation of the Arizona Coyotes to Utah the Buffalo Sabres stand alone as the biggest joke in the NHL. The team has failed to make the playoffs the past 14 seasons and has a combined record of 424-525-126 (.453PTS%) during that time. Given the team’s 7-8-4 start to the 2025-2026 season, it seems inevitable that the drought will hit 15 seasons. They are currently tied with the NY Jets for the longest active playoff drought in North American sports, the last playoff game the Sabres played was on April 26th, 2011. To put this into perspective Rio was the number 1 movie at the box office, E.T by Katy Perry was number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and if you were born on that day you would be a freshman in high school currently.
The odd thing with Buffalo is that unlike a lot of teams that get stuck in a never ending rebuild they have actually had players that should have been capable of leading them out of the rebuild and back into the playoff hunt. The most notable examples of this are Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart, Sam Reinhart was drafted 2nd overall in 2014 and Eichel was drafted 2nd overall in 2015. Now while Edmonton definitely got the 2 best players out of these drafts with Draisaitl 3rd overall in 2014 and McDavid 1st overall in 2015 the Sabres were still quite happy with the two young players that they had drafted. They had also acquired a young highly promising center in Ryan O’Reilly who had already been very good on some bad Avalanche teams. During the 2015-2016 season Buffalo began to show some improvement, the team finished 35-36-11 which is bad in a vacuum but when you realize that they went 23-51-8 the year before it’s a pretty big step forward. Their young players in O’Reilly, Eichel, and Reinhart, led the team in scoring. It seemed like the future was bright in Buffalo, that with a few more pieces that they could turn themselves into a regular contender for the Stanley Cup, by the start of the 2021 season every single one of those players would be gone. O’Reilly lost his love for the game in Buffalo and was traded to St. Louis on July 1st, 2018 where he won the Conn Smythe and led them to their first ever Stanley Cup.
On November 4th, 2021 Jack Eichel was traded to Vegas after the Sabre’s refused to let him get the surgery his personal doctor recommended, he won the Stanley Cup with Vegas during the 2022-2023 season leading the team in scoring during both the regular season and the playoffs. Reinhart is now a two-time Stanley Cup champion with the Florida Panthers and led the team in regular season scoring during those two seasons. Since leaving Buffalo those 3 players they have combined for 4 Stanley Cups, 432 goals, and 1032 points. The sad part is these are far from the only players that Buffalo has wasted in this time span, other names include. Evander Kane, Robin Lehner, Linus Ullmark, Rasmus, Kyle Okposo, Dmitry Kulikov, Evan Rodrigues, Jake McCabe, Casey Mittelstadt, Jeff Skinner etc. They are currently wasting the talents of Dahlin and Tage Thompson among others, the sad thing is that there is no end in sight, the culture of the Sabers has been completely destroyed. Losing isn’t only acceptable at this point it’s expected. This organization needs open heart surgery, but it’s worried about leaving a scar on its chest. The only way I could see things improving is if the team is sold and even then, it would require a serious gutting of the organization.