Read my mind - My look at the current Sabres Situation

„You say you wanna move on and you say I'm falling behind. Can you read my mind?” Like it’s said in the song by the Killers, you wanna move on, but it looks as if the Sabres fail to do so. 1-6-1 since starting the season 2-0 and there are not many signs that Buffalo will head in a different direction soon. They are trying but they are “falling behind”. 14^th spot in the Eastern Conference at the moment is not what the Sabres were hoping for and definitely not what the fans were hoping for.

No self-confidence

The biggest issue right now seems to be the self-confidence. Tyler Myers has had a tough start again and is nowhere near his Calder-Cup performance from the 09-10 season. At the moment he isn’t even close to being NHL-ready. This sounds harsh, but 1 goal in 10 games and a -7 record is hard to overlook. Myers is struggling in every aspect of the game right now. When he tries to play the body, his opponents quickly skate around him, when he tries to skate with them they go through him. Opponents pick on Myers right now as they see that he has a tough time.

So how can one of the best young defencemen in the league go from “Franchise Guy” to “Should we trade him”? If you ask me it has a lot to do with self-confidence. Over the last 10 games he tried to force things but it didn’t work. He tried to keep it simple but had trouble as well. In the past it was no problem for Myers to skate out of the own zone with a guy on his back battling him for the puck. Right now he should just try to keep it simple. Put it up the wall and out of the zone. Instead Myers and his fellow mates try to be way to fancy in their own end over and over again. Hodgson lost the puck in the own zone a couple of times this season when he tried to make a play instead of keeping it simple. Usually it ends up in a scoring chance for the opponent on which they often capitalize.

Mental Coaches

It’s not only Myers who is struggling. Stafford has not scored this year, Leopold is having his worst start to a season as a Sabre and almost everyone is guilty of making easy mistakes. That leads to one question. Is there any chance for the players to get this confidence issue fixed. Obviously I am not within the Sabres organization but in Europe it’s standard that teams have mental coaches who they could talk to. Some interpret that as weakness but the players who talked to those coaches will tell you 9 out of 10 times that it helped them a lot. Yes you have your coach and coaching stuff but they will never be able to help you with things that are going on in your mind. For Myers it is nice to have guys like Teppo Numminen and James Patrick on the coaching stuff. They have seen it all and had their bad streaks. They can give you an advice now and then, but very often in the end the problems run deeper. If a player can’t  handle the media or the fans being mad about his recent play, then it’s good to have one you can talk to beside the coaches. Again I don’t know if the Sabres have those coaches, but if not it might be something to think about.

Communication and Fundamentals?

Another obvious error in the Sabres game right now is communication. We saw it last night against the Senators. The puck goes into the left corner of the Sabres territory. Myers and Pominville are coasting torwards it and both are thinking. “He is gonna take it.” Regin, who just jumped on the ice for his shift is far away from the puck but rushes to it. He beats Myers along the wall and sets up Neil for the 4^th Senators goal. Mistakes like that are gonna burn you in the NHL. And this has not been the first time that we saw this. Over and over again the players are looking at eachother not knowing who should take the puck. If you don’t communicate out there, you will have a tough time beating anyone.

As of now the Sabres are also lacking fundamentals. They aren’t winning the battles  along the boards. Whether it's on defence or offence, they usually lose the battle. The puck goes in the corner, 2 guys  are chasing it, and usually it’s the guy in a Sabres jersey on the wrong end of the play. This is a big problem for Buffalo especially after they signed guys in order to add grit. If you add grit you are aiming more for a dump’n’chase kind of hockey and if you aren’t winning these battles, it’s not really helping your game.

Faceoffs killing them

The biggest topic right now: Faceoffs. Buffalo is dead last in the league with a success rate of roughly 40% on draws. Now there is one point we always hear when this is brought up:

“New Jersey was 29^th in the regular season and last in the postseason on faceoffs, and they still made it to the Stanley Cup Finals.”

While this is correct, they were at least able to get the stat up to 47%. And the even bigger point here is., it’s their style of playing the game. They only allowed 26.8 shots per game against last season and that was 2^nd best in the league. New Jersey is playing a defensive style of hockey. Many will say it’s boring and I agree, but they know what they are doing. They sit back and wait for the opponent in order to counter-attack them with speed. That’s not what the Sabres are good at. At least not outside of line 1 with Vanek, Hodgson and Pominville.

Last season Buffalo had 2 guys above 50% on faceoffs. Paul Gaustad and Derek Roy. Both are no longer on the team. Gaustad is winning almost 60% of his draws in Nasville, while Roy wins 50% for Dallas. And this is where I need to look at the Sabres front office. It’s something you could have seen coming. If they would have looked at those numbers, they must have ssen it. There numbers were around between April and January but still it was not addressed. I don’t know if Darcy, Lindy and their crews didn’t see it or if they thought that it is not a big problem. I doubt that they expected Ennis and Hodgson to (suddenly) win a bunch of faceoffs for them as this is not one of their strengths. Grigorenko isn’t great on faceoffs either but that’s no surprise as he just made the big step from the Juniors to the NHL. So the question is. Why was that not addressed in the off-season. Why did no one see that coming as it was so obvious.

What's ahead?

I don’t wanna finish my blog-post on such a depressing note. All the things I mentioned can be fixed. It’s nothing that makes you think that this team needs to trade 18 players to be a better team. It’s something you can work on in practice, it’s something you can fight for.  If the Sabres can work on that and get it done, playoff hockey is still possible in the area of Buffalo.