Team buy-in needed for Sabres to win
New faces alone won’t reverse losing culture
BUFFALO — An off-season of soul-searching led forward
Kyle Okposo to realize a roster overhaul alone wasn’t going to improve the Buffalo Sabres’ fortunes.
Okposo figured out he and other team leaders would also have to change their approach. They had to buy in mentally and physically if Buffalo stood a chance of climbing out of a rut after finishing last in for the third time in five years.
“Everybody talks about change and change and change. You hear it 100 times. But until you do, you haven’t,” Okposo said. “You have to put the work in. You can’t just show up next year and say, ‘Oh, I think it’s going to be different,’ because that’s the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
With Buffalo mired in a franchise-worst seven-year NHL playoff drought, it’s now on the players and second-year coach Phil Housley to show they’re not the same dysfunctional team, whose season was summed up by now-traded centre Ryan O’Reilly’s claim of a losing culture having crept into the locker-room.
“I’ve used those words a few time,” Okposo said, when asked if he was cautiously optimistic.
“It’s more of a fresh start, like a baptism almost.”
GM Jason Botterill shook up an underachieving roster through a series of trades. Buffalo acquired forwards Jeff Skinner, Conor Sheary, Tage Thompson, Patrik Berglund and Vladimir Sobotka, and signed goalie Carter Hutton in free agency.
That was after drafting 18-yearold Swedish defenceman Rasmus Dahlin with the No. 1 pick.
Housley took aim at addressing the team’s culture. He opened a dialogue by allowing his leaders to air differences and raise concerns through a series of frank discussions in an off-season-long cleansing session.
The challenge now is seeing how the Sabres respond once they open the season hosting Boston on Oct. 4.
Dahlin has already created a buzz with his smooth-skating and heads-up playmaking abilities. And Centre Jack Eichel, who changed his number to 9 from 15, admits a need to have a more even-keeled approach by openly showing fewer signs of frustration on the ice and in the locker-room. “The losing the last few years, I’ve never dealt with that in my life. You have to learn from it and figure out what you can do to change it,” Eichel said.
Hutton will share goaltending duties with Linus Ullmark, who makes the jump to the NHL on a full-time basis after spending most the past three seasons developing in the minors. Hutton enters his sixth season after spending the past two in
St. Louis, where he went 30-15-5.