For the first time in a month, the Buffalo Sabres won a game on Monday night.
After 13 winless games, the Sabres beat the Islanders in a decisive 7-1 victory, Buffalo's first since a Nov. 23 win over the Sharks. In the time in between, the Sabres went from a playoff spot to last in the league in points percentage before the much-needed win on Monday.
According to The Athletic's playoff predictor model, the Sabres have less than a 1 percent chance to make the playoffs. In the last 30 years, no team has gone winless in 13 straight games and made the playoffs in the same season. Since the salary cap was implemented before the 2005-06 season, there have only been 10 winless streaks of 13 games or longer.
The Sabres have three of those 10 and no other team has two. When the Sabres were seven games into this streak, veteran forward Jason Zucker noted that losing streaks happen to every team. "It's not a Buffalo Sabres thing," he said. But a streak of this length has become a Buffalo Sabres thing under Terry Pegula's ownership. All three of the Sabres' winless streaks that spanned at least 13 games have occurred since Pegula bought the team. Two of them have happened with Kevyn Adams as general manager. One in his first year on the job and the second this season, which is Adams' fifth.
The Sabres now have an 8 percent chance to land the No. 1 pick, according to The Athletic's model. Those are the fifth-best odds in the NHL. They are projected to get 75 points in that model, the same total they had in 2021-22.
Buffalo's season is all but over, and the team has looked broken. The win against the Islanders provided some reminders of the Sabres' young talent, though. Jiri Kulich scored twice and had an assist. Zach Benson and Jack Quinn both scored.
But the damage done by this streak is significant. The confidence of key young players has disappeared. Dylan Cozens and Quinn are unlikely to match their career-high point totals. Kulich and Benson are too inexperienced to provide more than the occasional glimpses of offensive production they've shown. Last season, the Sabres didn't have a single player hit 60 points. Alex Tuch and Tage Thompson are the only two on pace to eclipse that total this season.
Adams never addressed the team's scoring drop-off from last season. He bought out Jeff Skinner, let Victor Olofsson walk in free agency and added five forwards to the bottom six. Zucker has since elevated to occasional top-six minutes and is fourth on the team with 23 points. But that hasn't been enough to boost the Sabres' offense.
Adams thought young players on the roster would improve their production. He also thought replacing Don Granato with Lindy Ruff would bring structure and accountability to a young locker room that was "craving" both things. But the team has been one of the worst passing teams in the NHL, consistently mismanages the puck, makes routine mistakes in defensive zone coverage and still doesn't handle the front of the net well enough in either zone. Buffalo is an undisciplined team, consistently taking untimely penalties. The power play and penalty kill are both struggling. The Sabres haven't protected leads well, either. It's hard to find a single area in which the Sabres are better than they were a season ago.
Ruff hasn't had the answers for how to consistently motivate this group of players. He's tried scratching players like Quinn, Mattias Samuelsson and Henri Jokiharju. He benched JJ Peterka and Owen Power for stretches of a game. He called out Cozens and Thompson in a news conference for their inability to grasp the defensive responsibility of playing center in his system. But in recent days, he's also leaned into softer messaging. He thought the Sabres "deserved better" than the 3-1 losing result they got against the Bruins on Saturday. He pointed out a missed call in his postgame news conference after the team got waxed 6-1 by the Montreal Canadiens. He knew the psyche of his team was delicate given the winless streak and seemed to be hesitant to dish out more public criticism than the players could handle.
Not all of that is Ruff's fault, of course. This roster is one built by Adams. The team has gotten worse as a result of Adams' offseason moves. The roster is still the youngest in the NHL. Despite Adams' defiance in the face of questions about Buffalo's youth, it's hard to ignore how much it is hurting the team. This is a multi-year problem that isn't just a product of the team's inability to lure free agents. It was a choice by Adams to not block the young players' path to ice time. In the 2022 and 2023 offseasons, Adams added the following free agents: goalie Eric Comrie and defensemen Ilya Lyubushkin, Connor Clifton and Erik Johnson. In that time, he claimed Tyson Jost on waivers and traded for Jordan Greenway, Riley Stillman, Eric Robinson and Bowen Byram. Byram played a top-four role on defense but cost the Sabres center Casey Mittelstadt, who was playing top-six minutes up front. Greenway has been a valuable addition but slots best as a third-liner.
Doing so little to the roster during that two-year stretch made it so that players like Peterka, Quinn, Benson, Power and Cozens were in major roles with little veteran support around them. Adams banked on these players improving and has ended up with a collection of talented players who are either underachieving or not developing at the rate the team expected. In the process of collecting talent, Adams failed to assemble a team built to win at the NHL level.
The Sabres' culture was in disarray before Adams arrived, but it isn't in a much better place today than it was the day Adams took over. Players haven't consistently responded to Ruff. They haven't responded to other leaders, either. The day after Adams' news conference earlier this month, the team lost 5-2 to Utah. The day after Pegula spoke to the team, the Sabres lost 6-1 to Montreal.
It's fair to place plenty of blame on the players. Some have gotten long-term contracts and failed to live up to them. Others haven't developed as quickly as the team would have hoped. Almost all of them are guilty of simple mistakes within games that have led to the team's conference-worst record.
But this is also a reflection of leadership. Pegula said he wanted to be "effective, efficient and economic" in 2020 when he hired Adams and gutted the scouting staff. The team hasn't spent close to the salary cap since. In five years as general manager, Adams has let players like Sam Reinhart, Jack Eichel and Linus Ullmark out the door and failed to build a competitive team while all of those players have enjoyed individual and team success. And Ruff is the latest coach who hasn't been able to squeeze enough wins out of a roster Adams has built.
Adams and Ruff called this a "win now" team. As they hit the holiday break, the Sabres are more likely to get the No. 1 pick than they are to make the playoffs. It's hard to spin that as anything other than a collective failure from ownership straight on down.