Playing the ‘Bad Guys’

With the Sabres making huge splashes in the first moments of the free agency period, there was a lot of commotion about the amounts of money that Terry and Co. were tossing at guys like Christian Ehrhoff and Ville Leino. Fans of other teams laughed at our spending and they also didn’t understand how we could be so excited about ten year or six year deals. I can tell you why.

Ever since Terry has brought this whole idea of ‘spend, spend, spend’ to the team, we fans have a reason to be excited. In the days of Golisano and Co., there was hardly ever a time where the fans could get pumped during the offseason. We would maybe sign a few players every summer but the fans generally had a ‘meh’ attitude about it. ‘Black Sunday’ as we like to call it around these parts was a low point in my time as a Sabres fan in the offseason as well. Losing both of your captains in one day because you didn’t want to put forth the money? Yeah, pretty brutal. Especially since the Sabres retained Thomas Vanek with that 7-year deal and paying him way too much money.

Hearing the news about us possibly getting Regehr when that first came up, I was shocked. It was a week before Free Agency Day and the Sabres were already doing things. How was that possible? Pegula Power, that’s how it was possible. To think that a player would waive his No Trade Clause to come to our team, the place where Hockey Heaven is now a slogan. This was the first step to seeing the changes in the way this team would be run from now on. He eventually did waive that No Trade Clause to come here after Terry and his wife visited him in his summer home.
The second incident and what made other team’s fans go apeshit (to put it bluntly) about what we had been doing? The Christian Ehrhoff signing.

Getting his negotiating rights for practically nothing was crazy enough but then signing him to a 10-year, $40 million contract really made the heads turn. People were claiming that we couldn’t get away with that contract because of his cap hit only being $4 million. For the record, Vanek has a cap hit of about $7 million so it’s a big difference. Now we’re the bad guys because we’re doing what the CBA is trying to protect the league from – another lockout. The contract may seem stupid now but again, I got excited seeing that the Sabres were really trying to make a push to getting better people on this team.

Then Ville Leino was signed the day of free agency. Not having much time to prove himself but getting a huge pay raise, we signed him for 6 years, and for $27 million total. The Sabres passed on Richards in order to get him. I still wonder if this is the center that the Sabres were looking for, even though he’s played winger for most of his NHL career. With Connolly being a Maple Leaf now, this means that Leino is probably the second center behind Roy and you can interchange though two. Perhaps this is a sign of us really overpaying for someone but again, the Sabres even doing this much with having guys signed so quickly when the Free Agency period started is not like them at all. They also had a lot of prospects signed for the Amerks and got a deal done with Gerbe and Weber. A lot has happened this summer already.

Ironically as I was typing up this post, I got in an argument with a Rangers fan over the Sabres overpaying everyone so far and of course I retorted back that it was ironic a Rangers fan was telling me this. Let me just say, we may be the bad guys but ‘you hate us because you ain’t us’. Sabres fans have the right to be excited for what’s going on with this team. There is actually a hope that this year may just be the year. We have an owner who cares about the team just as much as the fans, and saying that he will do what it takes to get the pieces we need? I’ll drink that Kool Aid a little more, thank you very much.