Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula flew to Montreal to meet with Sabres players, coaches and management on Monday amid the team’s 10-game winless streak. The meeting was intended to calm the waters and for Pegula to voice support for the team and its leadership, a team source told The Athletic. The Sabres canceled their previously scheduled practice and instead opted for the meeting led by ownership and general manager Kevyn Adams.
Pegula felt the meeting was necessary given the amount of noise surrounding the Sabres during this latest skid. On Sunday afternoon, Pegula was in Detroit watching his NFL team, the Buffalo Bills, earn another thrilling win. By the time that game was over, the Sabres had lost 5-3 to the Toronto Maple Leafs. While Pegula’s NFL franchise has legitimate championship aspirations, his NHL franchise could be on its way to a 14th straight season without the playoffs. After the Sabres’ latest loss to the Leafs in Toronto on Sunday, Lindy Ruff shook his head when asked about the losing streak.
“I’m almost lost for words, obviously,” Ruff said. “It’s on me to solve this. This is the toughest solve I’ve been around. It is on me to get these guys in the right place to win a hockey game. And nobody else. Just me.”
Ruff, 64, has coached the fourth most NHL games of all time. Over 1,200 of those have come with the Sabres. For him to call this the toughest solve he’s been around underscores what a dire situation the Sabres are in. He rejoined the Sabres in the spring after Pegula and Adams made the decision to fire Don Granato. Adams spoke about the players craving accountability and the need for the franchise to “raise the standard.”
But Ruff hasn’t been able to turn around a team that still has the youngest roster in the NHL. He recently tried benching JJ Peterka and Owen Power in a loss to the New York Rangers. He’s scratched players like Jack Quinn, Mattias Samuelsson and Henri Jokiharju for stretches of games. He’s also called players out publicly for their inability to pick up the intricacies of his system, noting he told Dylan Cozens and Tage Thompson if the responsibility of center was too much he would move them to wing.
None of that has helped the Sabres snap this winless streak. Before this streak, the Sabres had rebounded from a 1-4-1 start to get into a playoff position just before Thanksgiving. They were fresh off a three-game winning streak in California and had an 11-9-1 record before the winless skid began.
Three of the losses during this streak came in overtime, and four others were one-goal losses or decided by two goals after an empty-netter. The Sabres are 7-8-4 this season when they score the first goal in a game. They’ve blown a four-goal lead and multiple two-goal leads during this stretch of games. Ruff has spoken about the players lacking composure and needing to do a better job of handling pressure. The Sabres have also been without captain Rasmus Dahlin for the last six games after he left the team’s loss to the Colorado Avalanche with back spasms.
“There is nothing easy in this game,” Ruff said last week. “You have to accept that every day is going to be hard. If you’re expecting easy, we don’t succeed. There’s going to be hard things that happen in a game where you have to elevate your effort, your determination to get through. You can’t cave in to ‘Why is this so hard? Why is this happening to me?’
Five games into this winless streak, Adams held a defensive news conference in which he said he was keeping all of his options open regarding trade talks but made it clear he wasn’t going to panic.
“I’m going to go to war with these guys,” Adams said then. “I will not change. I will not back down from that. I believe in the people in our room.”
Adams also angered the fan base during that news conference when he said Buffalo was “not a destination city” for free agents. He said the team would need to win to change that because “we don’t have palm trees. We have taxes in New York. Those are real.”
The next day, the Sabres lost 5-2 to Utah in what Ruff called, “mentally one of the weakest games I’ve seen.” Fans brought inflatable palm trees into the arena and chanted, “Fire Kevyn!” throughout the third period. A few fans started chanting, “Where is Terry?”
Things didn’t get much better from there. The Sabres lost two more home games before the pair of road losses to the Washington Capitals and Leafs this weekend. Their record is 11-16-4 heading into a road game against the Canadiens on Tuesday. A loss would put the Sabres in last place in the Eastern Conference.
The Sabres have a league-record 13-season playoff drought, all of which has occurred under Pegula’s ownership. The team has never made the playoffs in a full season of his ownership. In that time, Buffalo has fired seven coaches and three general managers. Three weeks before the Pegulas fired Jason Botterill in 2020, they gave him a public vote of confidence and said they were going to stay the course.
“When we were in detailed discussions with Jason and how we felt we needed to move forward — effectively, efficiently and economically running this franchise — we felt that there were too many differences in opinion,” Pegula said then.
He then added, “I’m not going to sit here and, you know, dish on Jason Botterill, but we have a vision and we want to see our vision succeed.”
The Pegulas didn’t conduct a general manager search after firing Botterill, opting instead to hire Adams, who was the team’s vice president of business administration and had never held a hockey operations role in an NHL front office.
In the four and a half years since, the Sabres have been near the bottom of the league in payroll and Adams has been unable to build a playoff roster. He fired two coaches during that time. The team had 91 points under Granato in 2022-23 but regressed to 84 points the next season. The Sabres are now 27th in the NHL in points percentage. Pegula’s recent meeting was a sign of patience, but that tune could change if the losing continues.
“Terry is all in,” Adams said in early December. “I talk to him every day. He wants this as bad as any of us, trust me. He wants to be part of the solution. We talk about what we need to do to find success and what we need to do to help this team.”
(Photo: Nick Lachance / Toronto Star)
