The end finally came for Ralph Krueger on Wednesday. How it took so long doesn’t qualify as the most pertinent issue at this point.
That said, I’d love to know if the specter of Krueger, and thus the Sabres being booed by 700 front line workers on Thursday or maybe double that number on Saturday was just too much for ownership to stomach.
It wasn’t enough when the team flatlined a couple of weeks ago in back-to-back 3-0 home losses to the Philadelphia Flyers? Or the three straight 5-2 losses to the New York Islanders on Long Island right after that? 10 losses in a row, no action. 12, well that’s just too much.
Could just be a coincidence, but I suspect the fear of embarrassment from having fans who have not been allowed to see your team play in more than a year booing upon their return to KeyBank Center was just too much for Terry and Kim Pegula to handle.
So what now?
My advice would be to write checks and get out of the way.
Ownership is the constant in all of this failure. That failure has, of course, led to all of this turnover. There are an awful lot of body bags stacked up outside. My sense is that with each failure, from Pat LaFontaine all the way to Ralph Krueger, the owners have trusted the people they hire a little bit less, and with that have become more involved in hockey decisions than ever.
It’s their team, of course, so they’ll do as they see fit. It might be entry-level, trail of bread crumbs type sleuthing that makes one think that the Pegulas soured on the President of Hockey Operations idea when things unraveled so quickly with LaFontaine. That doesn’t make the model bad. It might just mean that version of the model didn’t work.
The response to each subsequent failure has landed us here. It’s true, nothing has worked. Up and coming general manager types, Stanley Cup winning coach, outside the box free-thinking motivational leader guy.
Crash, burn. Repeat.
It’s time to build this thing back up.
It’s so weird that the Buffalo Bills have become the picture of stability. That starts with Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane, of course, but there are experienced people all over both the coaching and management staffs of the Bills.
The Sabres have been operating with a skeleton crew for months. I like Kevyn Adams, personally. I don’t think we really have any idea whether or not he can be a successful NHL general manager. But I think he needs some help in order for us to find out. Let him build a staff.
Hearing him talk about a search for an assistant general manager during his media appearance Wednesday morning was a good start. Whether or not they slot someone in on top of Adams isn’t of the utmost importance to me. Having a trustworthy staff with experience is.
Terry and Kim Pegula indicated last summer when they fired Jason Botterill that they felt let down by the "hockey people" they had leaned on and hired. That doesn’t mean that having experienced hockey people running your team is a flawed model. It more likely means that you didn’t have the right people, or the right mix of people.
Teams miss on draft picks and free agents all the time. It happens. It never means that you stop picking players. You keep going until you get it right.
Let your general manager pick some new people to help him figure this mess out. Just because it didn’t work before doesn’t mean it’s a flawed approach.
It’d be awfully nice to get back to enjoying 19,070 people wildly cheering your hockey team, rather than dreading 1,900 fans booing them.