The Sabres have three defensemen signed under contract through next year who are capable of playing at the NHL level. They hold the contractual rights to four more. I think it’s pretty fair to say that this unit is, as it’s currently constructed, unsteady. At its best last year, it was a mobile, attacking defense that played the points well. At its worst, it turned the puck over regularly and was poor in coverage inside the Sabres zone.

In key defensive situations last year, the defensemen the Sabres used most often had a very limited amount of NHL experience. Moving forward, those players will hopefully become more dependable as they gain experience. It’s hardly ideal however, to have that kind of positional uncertainty heading into a new season.

In the past, the Sabres plan for improvement was to develop players within the organization, not so much in the acquisition of a player that could help long-term. If Golisano and Quinn still owned the team, I’d probably predict the Sabres to start next year with the same defense. Maybe they sign one additional veteran to a small, one-year contract, but nothing really substantial. Now that Pegula is in place, I’m not so sure.

This is still a Darcy Regier managed team and so I assume internal player development will continue to be heavily emphasized but it doesn’t have to be the exclusive means of improvement anymore. Management can, if it sees fit, shift the risk from an player development standpoint to a financial one. What the Sabres need is a defensemen who can consistently play big minutes, block shots, kill penalties, clear the front of the net, and be strong away from the puck. If the Sabres were to acquire a player such as this and he played up to expectations, he would make the defense a much more balanced and reliable group. To get that type of player, the Sabres will have to absorb a lot more salary.

Aside from the obvious financial risk, the Sabres would have to sacrifice something they traditionally protect in order to make a significant roster move to the defense. This is what would make it such a unconventional move for the franchise. The Sabres would literally have to trade away a relatively inexpensive and somewhat promising young player in order to make room on the roster for a veteran with higher salary. That, to me, is a big part of what makes this all so different.

I’m curious about these things.

* * *

So the basis for the complaint as I understand it is the belief that the familiarity which exists between Sabres’ management and players has inflated the talent level of most players in the eyes of management. In doing so, the Sabres retain players for longer than they should and this is not in the team’s best interest. That is to suggest, it would have been appropriate to remove certain players from the roster for one of two reasons: (1) the player had been underachieving or (2) to alter the dynamic of the team. The most basic tenet here is the Sabres’ apparent reluctance to embrace change.

Part of me agrees with this sentiment but another part feels like this managerial behavior is purposeful and not a sign of a distorted point of view. I do believe some of the actions made or not made by the Sabres are a reflection of the management’s conservative attitude and I’m not quite sure it’s a bad thing.

Allow me to create a hypothetical situation to help explain what I mean. Let’s say for arguments sake that I’m married. Depending on how well you know me, the mere proposition of my being married at age twenty-two is hilarious to consider. Just try and get past that and focus on the big picture. So let’s assume I’m married to someone that’s smart, funny, digs sports and knows how to make a perfect carrot cake (don’t judge me). Everything in my marriage is going great. Now lets assume that after a few years of being married I’m introduced to a single woman, same age as myself, and the attraction is instantaneous and mutual. She loves sports and can also make a great carrot cake. Moreover, she’s even smarter and has an even better sense of humor than my wife. I’m excluding physical features purposefully but you should get the idea. Anyway, there will come a time when I need to decide whether or not to allow this relationship to proceed down the much maligned infidelity lane.

Here’s what I have to consider. On one hand I have my wife. She has a lot of great, great qualities. Our relationship began and has developed partly as a result of her having these qualities. We also have history. I really value our relationship. Then there’s this other woman. An argument can be made that she has even better qualities than my wife based on what I’m attracted to. The relationship could potentially one day be of even greater value than that which I currently share with my wife. We don’t have history but the physical attraction we share in each other’s presence is perhaps greater than that which I share with my wife. Partly because it’s new and the allure of possibility hangs ominously overhead; partly because I’m attracted to the qualities she shares with my wife, some of which appear to even succeed hers. So what do I do?

Those who approach important decisions with a conservative attitude would tell me not to try and replace that which has value: the relationship I have with my wife. There’s history and trust in that relationship. Stable love is not worth jeopardizing for the possibility of love with what appears to be a more desirable mate. It’s a decision based on value and risk assessment. Conserve that which has value when the alternative is just theoretical value. This mitigates the risk of loss.

Most people don’t think this way; it requires wisdom and an extra bit of mental horsepower. It’s easier to just take a peak at one’s emotional compass in a situation that involves powerful feelings. This is one reason why young people should not get married. Though relationships between people differ greatly from professional applications of this disposition — that is relationships hold personal, intrinsic value and not universal, particular value — I mention it here, now, to emphasize the practice of preservation and retention.

* * *

This seems like a good enough time as any to switch back to talking hockey management. I hope everyone was able to follow the point I was trying to make there. Some of the words floating around in your head now should be words like value, change, and conserve.

I think it’s fair to say the value in professional hockey is the player-talent as measured by production. Everyone knows that an individual’s production and quality of play changes every single year. So value changes. Every summer, management must evaluate and decide what each player’s expected production is in the following year. That’s the first step to the actual construction and consideration of a trade — the knowing-what-you-have step.

I’ll get back to the initial value determining aspect in a minute but first I want to go through the whole process. In the interest of brevity, I’ve simplified the criterion I like to think a management team would use to decided whether or not a trade is beneficial. Is the player’s value such that can be exchanged for a package that has equal or greater value currently or a high probability of having great value in the near future? Is the player’s expected production in the following year able to be replaced within the team or by the return package? Given the lack of player-for-player movement we’ve seen from the Sabres lately, the answers for quite some time have been no and no.

It’s easy to say they’re overvaluing some of their own players and this is contributing to their inability to find an agreeable exchange. In the interest of balance though, I ask, who is more likely to be objective, the group of businessmen responsible for managing this team or the fans, the majority of whom allow their emotions to govern their reactions? Are the decisions management makes a result of overvaluing their current talent or is it reflective of a different perspective, one made from a group with more at stake? In truth, no one can say for sure. It’s probably some combination of both.

It can’t always been blind luck though. They deserve some credit for hanging onto players like Tallinder and Hecht after the 2008-2009 season ended. Connolly and Stafford have been floated around in trade rumors all summer but they could have productive seasons, especially Connolly who, when healthy, is a real scoring presence. He’s not the most prolific or ideal but he’s unquestionably above average and his production would be difficult to replace. I don’t want to project what I think is in Darcy’s head but let’s be real, he knows this. Maybe the return offers were just insufficient. If Connolly is traded, who makes up the points he scored last year? Connolly’s certainly not guaranteed to score as many points as he had last year but he’s probably much more likely to do so than the player the Sabres would have asked to fill that role had the Sabres decided to move Connolly. He has value.

Players with expiring contracts present a completely different situation for management to deal with. Those decisions are based on evaluating the price set by the free agency market and the team’s current positional depth. To go back to Connolly — he’s an unrestricted free agent next summer. He’s not a building block; he’s a placeholder. Same goes for Tallinder and Lydman. Building blocks don’t typically reach unrestricted free agency except in really special situations. There are plenty of placeholders available in every position. Some fit better than others. There’s a significant difference in value between building blocks and placeholders. The players that move around every summer in the free agency period are really just a collection of placeholder types. Not to minimize their value but they’re replaceable.

* * *

The Sabres seem to be very aware of what they have. They’re careful and they’re patient. They expect progress to come from minor adjustments (Grier), from prospects turning into talented professionals (Myers), and from current professionals elevating their production (Miller). In 2006 the team was able to progress in large part due to contributions of players like Numminen, Vanek, and Briere. The 2010-2011 team as it currently stands is built having used a very similar managerial philosophy with which the post-lockout squads had been built with. Now, is this the most effective method to building a championship caliber team? That’s a different debate. Is it the best available method given the financial constraints this organization is faced with? It could be.

Conserve that which has value. It frustrates me too sometimes but I’m not willing to proclaim it misguided or illfated.

I’m not assuming for a second that either player will be easy to replace. They both logged a ton of minutes and were a big part of the Sabres exceptional penalty killing unit. But the 2009-2010 Sabres defensive unit was not a complete group. They were below average shooters and below average puck movers and no two players greater epitomized that collective stigma than Lydman and Tallinder.

Leopold should provide an improvement in both areas. But his addition should prove a regression in others. How effective Leopold is away from the puck, a strength of both Lydman and Tallinder, is a major question mark. As much as we all like to gawk over the scoring numbers, a defensemen’s greatest responsibility is to help prevent pucks from going in his own net. This is the skill that’s most commonly under-appreciated by the fans of hockey: defending away from the puck. The Sabres very well could find themselves in the position of having to depend on Ryan Miller even more next year.

I doubt if many will but I think Sabres fans can look back on the tenures of Tallinder and Lydman favorably. Despite the moments and, in Tallinder’s case, long periods of poor play, both gave the Sabres good value considering their individual cap hits. They were part of the foundation of the Sabres for many years and because of that, it feels a little strange to see them leave. They would have been smart players to invest in but I like to think the Sabres knew what they were getting with either at this juncture in their careers. They’re mid-level professionals. The future of Butler, Sekera, and Weber is still uncertain but each has at the very least a hint of promise that suggests their contribution could far exceed that of Tallinder and Lydman’s in both the short and long term. It’s always prudent to give younger players a chance to show what they’re capable of in more prominent roles.

The bottom line is of course that they have a lot of promising prospects who’s future is unknown and not enough elite professionals capable of consistently outperforming the competition, especially in the forward position. Miller is elite. Myers had an elite level season. Vanek could be elite in the right circumstances.  That’s about it though and that’s clearly not enough.

I’m not at all worried that the Sabres have not yet drastically improved their roster less than one week out from the start of the free agency period. I can’t really emphasize that enough. Elite players seldom become unrestricted free agents and if they do the competition to sign these players drives their price tags skyward, diluting the value and elevating the risk associated with the contract. The free agency period seems most ideally suited for teams that already have a few elite players to build around and who are looking to fill in a roster gap, short-term, as Anaheim did when they signed Lydman. As has historically been the case with the Sabres under Darcy Regier’s management, roster moves are most likely to come in the form of trades.

I don’t want to go as far as to say which players I think the Sabres should trade away or for whom I think they should trade for. That’s not the aim of this post.

I do want to make note however that the Sabres have a lot of room in cap space even after they presumably sign Tim Kennedy and Pat Kaleta. They’re also in the middle of a brief window in which the Sabres have a decent look at a championship in my opinion. They have a goaltender in the prime of his career that’s demonstrated an ability to elevate his play to match an exceptionally meaningful game or series of games. It’s worth the risk to flip a couple prospects in order to take on players that would improve the roster and have an impact for the next three to four years. This isn’t a call to mortgage the future competitiveness of this franchise in order to acquire a talent that ranks in the top 10 in his position. Those players are, for the most part, unavailable but a player that seems to be on the verge of having a break through season, those players can be extracted from a team for an even swap in assets.

It’s a long summer but the Sabres have some important personnel choices to make like where or from whom they plan on getting more consistent offensive production from and who they expect to shoot the puck from the point on the powerplay.

As long as Tim Connolly, Jason Pominville, Derek Roy, and Thomas Vanek are on this team, they will be amongst the group of six forwards relied upon most to score goals. Removing one of them just for the sake of doing so is not an improvement unless it’s for a player capable of matching or exceeding their production. The real question is who joins them? Hecht, Stafford, Kennedy and Ennis are all possibilities but if it’s Hecht and Stafford, how can anyone be expected to call that progress? Is Drew Stafford even in the Sabres short-term plans anymore?

Moreover, is Tyler Myers the guy the Sabres want shooting the puck on the powerplay? It’s an important question. I don’t think he’s capable of filling that role right now. He was inadequate last year. Myers is a puck carrier; he can handle it from anywhere on the ice but I’m not sure his shot is ideal for the powerplay yet. I feel similar about Sekera’s potential to lead the powerplay. Neither have a particularly quick release or a very hard shot.

If the Sabres fail to address their two most pertinent flaws, it will be a mistake given the financial room they have to work with under the salary cap. Progress progress progress — that’s what the off-season is about. Progress in the short-term or the long-term is what every team is debating when altering their roster. For most, it’s a balancing act. For the Sabres, it’s always been that way and it understandably frustrates a lot of fans. The Sabres have some dependable players to build a championship team around now but in order to take the next step forward they must part with some players they’ve included in their long-term plans. Fortunately, it seems like they have enough depth at the amateur level where a transaction or two like this makes sense. Whether or not they’ll execute is a point of contention that separates the hopefuls from the haters.

Lately, when it comes to signing or extending premiere players between the ages of twenty-five to thirty, the trend around the league is to offer either mid-length contracts (5-6 years) or career-length contracts (12-15 years). The difference is if you sign the player to a five or six year contract you mitigate your risk. If the player under-performs, he doesn’t financially handcuff your franchise for a decade. But mid-length contracts usually occupy a greater amount of salary cap space. With a five or six year contract, a player’s salary cap number reflects his value. There’s no way of getting around it.

Conversely, career-length extensions for premiere younger players and mid-length extensions for premiere veteran players are almost always structured in a way in which the player counts against the salary cap less than his value suggests. This is done by front-loading the contract so that in the final two or sometimes three years, the player is getting paid very little actual money. By this time the player’s production is slowing and is nearing retirement. These contracts appear to be great candidates for buy-outs. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest they were designed with the intention of being bought out, though teams will never admit as much.

At first when these front-loaded contracts started popping up I thought it was a little unfair. Small market teams typically don’t have the extra money it would take to buy out players that were once stars but whose skills have since diminished. It’s almost like the wealthy teams are buying more salary cap room when they sign players to front-loaded contracts. I’ve been able to get past this sentiment though after seeing how recklessly most of the wealthy teams spend their money.

If wealthy teams want to risk their long-term competitiveness by packing their roster with expensive long-term contracts, then they should be allowed to do so. Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York (Rangers) have payrolls that are saturated with these huge contracts for players they signed in free agency that are under-performing. In the salary cap era, teams need to use some discretion with free agents. Big ticket unrestricted free agents never seem to be able to live up to their contracts with their new team. It rarely works in hockey.

Still, it is a little concerning seeing so many long-term contracts all over the league. I don’t envision the salary cap going up much in the near future but every year there is a new crop of young, talented players who are making an impact and whose payday is just around the corner. There’s no way to foresee how much a current amateur may contribute to the success of his professional team a few years down the road. For those that do eventually turn into good professionals, the day will come where their status suggests a large financial commitment. What are teams to do in this case now that they have so many big, long-term contracts? Teams can’t afford to keep everyone. What’s the future going to be like?

That’s the downside of allowing long-term contracts which, in the NHL, are guaranteed. That is to say, teams do not reserve the option to just cut an under-performing player like they can in the NFL. When you have a player who is signed to a big contract, and he starts under-performing, the team just has to ride it out. In years past, it wouldn’t be so bad because it would only be a matter of a year or two before the player’s contract expired, but now some of these contracts can be upwards of ten or more years long. Those are high risk deals and they’re everywhere.

Where this leads, I have no idea. I think it would be pretty smart for the league to try and restrict contracts to a maximum length of six years when it comes time to renegotiate the CBA. The NHL has been fortunate that most of the players with extremely long-term contracts have been performing well. Then again, a quick look at the state of the New York (Islanders), who are still paying Alexei Yashin millions every year after buying out his lucrative, long-term contract, suggests otherwise. These contracts have the potential to serious cripple a franchise. That’s obviously not what the league wants.

Further Reading:

• This is a killer article explaining why front-loaded contracts are not in the best interest, financially, for the majority of the players .

As for the Sabres, they have about 10.526 million dollars in cap space to work with on their 2009-2010 payroll (according to nhlnumbers.com ). Pat Kaleta, Drew Stafford, Clark MacArthur, Mark Mancari and Andrej Sekera are restricted free agents. If history is any indication, the Sabres will be offering contracts to all of them. In addition, the Sabres have to decide whether or not they want to consider resigning Jaroslav Spacek, Andrew Peters, or Chris Ellis. All of which are unrestricted and free to sign with another team in a couple of days.

Once the Sabres sort through their free agents, I think the team’s cap number will be somewhere around 51-52 million dollars with Andrew Peters being the only one of the unrestricted players resigning with the Sabres. Considering the Sabres had a 50.6 million salary cap figure in 2008-2009 and given the current economic climate, I think it’s safe to say they will be close to that figure again in 2009-2010. So that doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for the Sabres when it comes to potentially signing an unrestricted free agent.

Given that the Sabres are not widely considered a championship caliber team, signing an average free agent doesn’t really do a whole lot for the team except cause some salary cap headaches in the future. Take Jaro, for example. I think Spacek is a decent player. He can fill a need on a contending team. You know what you’re getting with Spacek because he’s a veteran. But he made 3.3 million dollars last year and he’s probably going to command a contract that pays him somewhere around 2.5-3.0 million per season. The Sabres are foolish to pay that kind of money for an average player like Spacek but then again they continued to dish out one-year contracts for Teppo Numinen year after year. I feel that unless the UFA or potential UFA is a crucial leader or a legitimate star, he’s expendable and not a very wise player to invest in, long term.

The Sabres dirty little secret is the fact that they currently have a boat load of money committed to their best players. Heading into next year, the Sabres have seven players with salary cap numbers of 3.5 million dollars or higher. Seven!

I think it’s pretty clear that trading players is the best option for the franchise at this time. If trades are the route the Sabres take to improve their team, they can either trade players for players of equal value or trade players for draft picks with only the objective to clear cap space. Darcy Regier is one of the best in the league at trading player for player. You don’t have to take my word for it, just look at the history. I have a ton of faith in Regier in this department. But those kinds of trades have become more and more difficult to accomplish in the salary cap era.

If the Sabres should decide to just clear cap space, they fortunately have some pretty talented prospects that have the ability to fill in the void. Guys like Mike Weber and Tim Kennedy, in particular, can step in and contribute while not costing the Sabres much. If the Sabres dump salary though, it should only be done so that a target free agent can fit under the budget.

Most would agree that last years team had too much dead weight. The question is whether or not Regier is willing to move some of the veteran players for less than equal return value. Actually it’s not even a question. The Sabres, under the stewardship of Darcy Regier, have never been a team that’s known to agree to a trade in which the return is of less than equal value. The Sabres have always looked at their struggling veterans with steadfast optimism. Take Jochen Hecht, for example, who is coming off a bad year. His trade value is low. I think Regier will want to keep Hecht because odds are he’s going to have a better year than the year prior and the value they would get in return from a potential trade is too low.

It’s the same old rhetoric from the Sabres; they’ll insist that Hecht is a good player and that’s why he’s on the roster but fans don’t want to hear that. Everyone knows that by moving Hecht, they create options for bringing in players that can help the Sabres take the next step forward. The Regier is too concerned with getting value from the players they have under contract. After having a few good players leave the team during the free agency period with no value in return, that thinking seemed to have intensified. The fact that Maxim Afinogenov was on the Sabres roster in 2008-2009 is testament to that.

It’s too bad that the Sabres insist on maintaining such a conservative approach to improving their roster because they will have trouble moving in a positive direction when there are so many underachieving, expensive veterans on the roster. But more than that is the fact that those players are inhibiting the Sabres from pursuing a UFA that would add another dimension to the team. Clearly, the Sabres need more toughness and better leadership but they will not be able to add a player like that this summer unless the team decides to dump some of their players with big salary cap figures.

The Sabres should be trying to figure out who they want to go after and then take the necessary steps to make that happen. Almost everyone is expendable; the goal is making the team better. I thought Cory Sarich would have been a good fit in Buffalo when he was a free agent in the summer of ’07 and I liked Brooks Orpik as a potential signee last summer. Now, I’d be happy if the Sabres pursued Francois Beauchemin because he would make them a more balanced and competitive team.

But if I were to make a bet, I’d bet that the Sabres once again refuse to accept less than equal value for their players and consequently are unwilling to meet the financial demands of their target unrestricted free agents.