• I really like Montador’s game lately and actually the whole season, for the most part. I love that when he’s got the puck behind the Sabres’ net, he’s not afraid to skate right up the middle of the ice with it. Montador has pretty good instincts when he handles the puck. But he knows his limits too. Montador, like Grier, shoots the puck almost immediately when he has it. They both know they’re not great shooters and they also know the best technique to maximize their chances of scoring is to shoot quickly.

• Maybe Pominville needs to start doing more of that. He’s a good shooter but not a very deceptive one. He’s not fooling anyone when he winds up while skating down the wing. I feel like when Pominville was scoring all those even-strength goals three and four years ago he was getting off the shot really quickly. Of course, someone needs to start setting him up too.

• I liked Gaustad playing with Connolly tonight. I think he, Gaustad, needs to be on a scoring line. The Sabres scoring problems are the result of poor checking and a lack of opportunities, not as much an inability to finish opportunities. Gaustad can check and has shown some pretty good offensive instincts, this year especially. And how about that mid-range wrister tonight, too!

• Does anyone else notice that Semin plays pretty much just like Afinogenov, like a bat out of hell? They even skate the same way too with those quick, powerful strides. It’s interesting to think abut the country a professional player was taught hockey in and how it relates to how they actually play hockey. You can definitely tell when a forward learned hockey in Russia.

• Roy and Hecht seem to have something going. Hecht especially has been able to find Roy in front of the net the past few games. Give them both credit for that. Now if only the Sabres could get either Vanek or MacArthur to settle in with those two and they’d really have something going. I cannot be talked into Pominville and Hecht playing consistently together. Those two had enough bad games together last year for me to be against that idea forever.

• We all need to come to grips with something important: Rivet is a slow skater. That’s it. He hasn’t forgotten how to play smart defense, he’s just a slow skater… slow, slow, slow. Not sure if he’s hurt or if he’s just getting too old to play quality defense but he has dropped from arguably being the Sabres second best defensemen last year to probably being it’s fifth best this year. And it has everything to do with his foot speed. He looks like Teppo did near the end of his career — still capable of playing smart, but his quickness is way below what it needs to be to play well at this level. At least Rivet can push people around though. Teppo could never do that.

Lastly, I’d just like to say, I’m already over this game. Now we need to beat Ottawa. They have two full days off until they meet on Saturday. The Sabres should be ready to make a statement not for Kaleta, not for the fans, but for themselves. I want to see some intensity. That’s all. So please, Sabres, play hard. And you know what? You’ll win if you do because the Senators are NOT GOOD .

That only magnifies the scoring struggles this team has had on even-strength. A lot of things have been said about the top-six forwards on this team. When I watch the forwards on the Sabres play, I’ve gotten into the pattern of evaluating them based on their ability to create opportunities for themselves and for others and their ability to finish those scoring opportunities. Obviously, that’s pretty subjective. I’m not going to break down specific players right now. We’ve heard it all before.

I found this website called Puck Prospectus the other day. Basically they take common and available statistics, plug them into fancy formulas, and use the results to compare the performance of players. I usually don’t put much stock into evaluating players based on complicated formulas but one in particular jumped out at me. Puck Prospectus contends that the quality of a top-six forward can be determined based on the number of points he scores on even-strength per 60-minutes of ice time played while at even-strength. They believe the threshold between forwards considered scorers and checkers is 1.7 points per 60 minutes played. Elite level scorers usually score at a rate of about 3 points per 60-minutes played while quality scorers usually score between 2 and 3. That seems reasonable enough to me.

Naturally I wanted to see how the Sabres stacked up in that system against league averages. I calculated every player on the team, including defensemen because I was curious, so long as they played more than 15 games. Here are the results (through 12/13), they’re not very surprising.

It would appear the Sabres have only three forwards that are statistically considered top-six scorers by league standards: Jason Pominville, Derek Roy, and Thomas Vanek. Then you have Jochen Hecht who gets more playing time on even-strength than any other forward besides Derek Roy but whose production suggests he should probably be on the 4th line. I’m willing to concede that he hasn’t looked as bad this year as he did last year, for the most. But he is clearly a very inefficient scorer taking up a lot of ice time on a team that struggles to score goals. Draw your own conclusions from that.

I was going to expand on this a little more but frankly I’m tired of talking about the scorers on this team. It is a big deal though because there are going to be games where the defensemen and checkers don’t find the back of the net and we need the scorers to be a more reliable group. They’re not getting it done on the powerplay or on even-strength. Now we have some clear data to confirm our suspicion that some players on this team really do in fact severely under-produce.

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.