As Buffalo Sabres’ long rebuild drags on, young players trying to trust the process

EDMONTON — On a hockey landscape where tracking and analytics grow more influential and all-encompassing with each passing season, the common rebuild remains the National Hockey League’s great, unquantifiable mystery.

When do they start? When do they end? How many re-sets in between?

Where’s the quarter pole? The halfway mark? The finish line?

Nobody ever knows where those milestones are buried in the minefield of losses, setbacks and disappointments that dot a project like the one they started in Buffalo on Feb. 28, 2014, when the Sabres dealt veterans Ryan Miller and Steve Ott to St. Louis in pursuit of the draft position that would land them Connor McDavid in the 2015 draft.

(Spoiler alert: They got Jack Eichel instead.)

When that rebuild fell flat they re-set and re-set again, trading Eichel to Vegas, dealing 2013 first-round pick Rasmus Ristolainen to Philadelphia, and giving up on the No. 2 pick in the 2014 draft — Sam Reinhart, whom the Sabres selected one pick ahead of Leon Draisaitl — sending him to Florida.

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The reasons vary, but each of those prized prospects was supposed to have a name plate in the Sabres dressing room that opened its doors to an Eastern Conference playoff series one day. Or — dare to dream — a Stanley Cup Final.

Alas, there is only one number that charts the progress of a rebuild, and it arrives each season as the Tragic Number that alerts fans to the crisp, cold slap that their team will once again miss the NHL playoffs. That the project is not yet complete.

“Eleven games left,” lamented Connor Clifton to Lance Lysowski of the Buffalo News, after an 8-3 loss in Edmonton on Thursday. “We probably need 22 points to even have a chance.”

After losses in Vancouver and Edmonton this week, reality has set in once again for Sabres fans: Buffalo will miss the playoffs for the 13^th consecutive season this spring. That skid is tied for the longest in North American pro sports with the woeful New York Jets of the National Football League, and marks an NHL record in futility.

No team has ever been absent from the playoffs for this long, no rebuild has been this slow.

As all rebuilds do, this one is taking its toll on those young players whose pedigree has labelled them as keepers — and thus, will be inflicted with the lion’s share of the pain being endured by this franchise.

“You want to get out of the rebuild as fast as possible, and start getting into winning seasons. Start getting into playoff seasons. Start having a chance to win every year,” said Dylan Cozens, the promising 23-year-old centreman in his fourth season with Buffalo. “These years, they go by fast. But we can’t get impatient, because we’re still the youngest team in the league. We know we’re going to have a very bright future and we’ve got the pieces we need.

“Obviously, it sucks not to have not made the playoffs the last few years, but you’ve got to look at the bigger picture and know that what we’re doing here is going to be the right thing. It’s going to set us up for a long time of success.”

How can it not?

The Sabres had two first overall picks (Owen Power, Rasmus Dahlin) in the lineup that got crushed in Edmonton. Their roster is dotted with first-rounders like Cozens, Zach Benson and the injured Jack Quinn. Ukko-Pekka Lukkonnen, a second-rounder in 2017, has emerged as one the NHL’s top goalies in the season’s second half.

But those are the success stories, mitigated by all the Eichels and Reinharts who — for a variety of reasons — aren’t there anymore.

Whether it be at the draft table or in the Sabres defensive zone, no lesson is learned in one single instance in a rebuild. As players come, as coaches change, as the front office gets repopulated, the same painful message must be learned and re-learned before enough people have been around long enough to do things the right way.

“There’s been times this year where we’re relearning the same mistakes, and every game is worth the same amount,” Clifton said. “This time of year, when we put ourselves in that position, they’re even more important. Everyone knows that.”

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is the poster boy for rebuild survivors. The Oilers drafted him first-overall in 2011 and he had six different head coaches before he played his first playoff game in 2017.

The Oilers lost 58 more games than they won (135-193-48) in his first seasons as an NHLer, yet today he wears an ‘A’ in Edmonton as he approaches 900 NHL games played — all for the Oilers.

“I had just come into the league (at age 18), so I’m this young kid, and everything’s new. Everything’s a whirlwind and I’m just excited to be in the league,” he recalled. “The rebuild felt like me also growing up in this league. But still, it’s tough when you’re losing consistently, year after year.

“I know this Sabres team is on their way to where they want to go, but it can play on your psyche a little bit. Every hockey player is competitive and everybody just wants to win.”

Today, the Sabres are well constructed from the goal line out, with Luukkonen and four defencemen that GM Kevyn Adams can build upon. Power, Dahlin, and Mattias Samuelsson (injured) are all signed long-term, and Bowen Byram rounds out a Top four with an average age of 22.

They are promising, no question. But this D-corps is also soft and inexperienced, a sign that the rebuild is not yet complete.

“I want to be part of the solution here,” Byram said. “I’ve played in some big games, some Cup Final games (in Colorado), but at the end of the day I’m still a young guy trying to find my footing. I’m trying to help out where I can, but also trying to worry about myself, worry about my own game.

“If you look down the road, I think we’re going to have a real good D-corps for a long time. We’re all young guys, getting our foot in the door in the NHL, and it’s exciting to do it together.

“We’re just trying to build things the right way here.”

He could be talking about any rebuild.

The ones that, in the end, worked out. And the ones that never did.

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