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With a 15-and-a-half year tenure as head coach of the Buffalo Sabres, the inevitable ending was more likely than not going to come down to three words: It was time.

And frankly, it was time for the Buffalo Sabres to part ways with Lindy Ruff. The rise of 2009-2011 had fallen off in the results corner. The locker room was in a not-so-rumored state of impasse, there were looming contract expirations around the corner, and guys just simply don’t get to stay to be part of a third rebuild in the NHL.

We have revisited that 2011 team a couple of times in the past (2009-2011 impact players, 2009-2011 underlyings, 2011 Playoff Run), so with the old coach being the new coach, let’s look at what happened the next two seasons with the information that was not publicly available to us at the time.

The Chopper

Do you also remember where you were when you learned about the Robyn Regehr trade? The Ehrhoff sign and trade? July 1, 2011? Of course you do. We’ll get to the third of those later, but the two big statements in the first offseason of Terry Pegula’s ownerships were on the blue line. Of the 8 defensemen to play in the 2011 playoff series against the Flyers, Regehr and Ehrhoff were replacing the minutes of Chris Butler (who was third on the team in that series in time on ice with 109:21 before being the main piece sent to Calgary in that trade) and Mike Weber, who started the 2011-12 season as the team’s seventh D. After the signing of Shaone Morrisonn hadn’t panned out in the previous season with him not making the team out of camp this season and playing a full 65 games in Rochester before heading overseas to continue his career in the KHL.

The Sabres were moving blue line offense for blue line defense with this move and of course bringing on the reputation of some back-end snarl with a decade of experience and two more seasons on his late-20s contract which would align him with other members of the Sabres core in their looming unrestricted free agency a few years into the decade — albeit maybe some inflated offensive production leading to two straight 15 assist seasons for the Flames.

As for Ehrhoff, he averaged 22:27 of ice time per game for the Western Conference champion Vancouver Canucks in their playoff run on the way to his first dip into unrestricted free agency. After Jordan Leopold led the 2011 Sabres in ice time on the backend, Ehrhoff would be primed to match that ice time on the top pair and potentially help the 30 year old get improved results with his offensive production after some tough luck in 2011.

Of course, the Sabres did strike out on Brad Richards once UFA started, which would have been another big boost to the 6th best GF/60 5v5 offense in 10-11, especially as the team dropped to 14th in 11-12.

Realistically, the framework of the second plan had potential. If there was another center to keep that plan on the wing, maybe there would have been better results out of the gate, but perhaps in hindsight there was more than one instance of that on the roster, and perhaps that other one was corrected later on in the season:

Rose-Colored First Five, Rocky But Steady Where It Counts First Fifteen

After the almost perfect trip to Europe to open the season, the Sabres had a 4-1-0 record through 5 games, but the underlying numbers at 5v5 didn’t reflect those results, with their only positive CF% and xGF% coming in the one game they lost, a 4-3 loss to the Hurricanes where Buffalo gave up two short handed goals and a powerplay goal in the final two minutes to one Jeff Skinner.

A 3-0 win in Sunrise followed by a 3-0 loss in Tampa Bay were the first two games where the underlyings matched the results on the scoreboard. Over their next 8 games, they would be outplayed at 5-on-5 in 6 of them (albeit some score effects in a 5-1 win over the Senators on November 11), but through 15 games, the team had themselves a 10-5 record.

There isn’t anything blanket to rule as a generalization about this opening stretch, but the goaltending did have a mostly good first month of games. The play was more “up and down” to start November, but especially in that opening 6 game stretch did they get a good amount of saves compared to the expectation.

But as you can see above and probably remember, there was about to be a major roadblock between the pipes.

All Sorts of Uncomfortable

We’ll probably never get the full excerpt of what happened in the short and long term following The Incident, but the 6-2 loss in the Bruins ended up being their worst performance of the season to that point and the sign of what was to come. The four game win streak that was snapped that night would be the last time the Sabres would win back-to-back-games until the All-Star Break, sprinkling in 4 three game losing streaks and a five game losing streak along the way. Their 5v5 xGF% never made it back over 50% despite reaching 49.5 during that Senators game before collapsing to 48.4% in Boston, bottoming out at 45.7 cumulatively on January 31. While the offense struggled in this stretch, they never dropped below that 50% threshold before bouncing back in the final months of the season.

With a lot of people talking about the defense with Ruff’s return to the organization for 2024-25, it may have very well been the defense that plagued the 2011-12 Sabres and signaled the finish line being closer than expected for that team’s core. And that started with the initial move of the offseason:

While Butler spent most of his career hovering around replacement level, Robyn Regehr’s from Calgary to Buffalo was drastic enough that a replacement level defenseman would have been of value for this Sabres group, especially when that physical edge was still considered by most pundits to be drastically missing from that group following the Bruins games in November.

Christian Ehrhoff and Jordan Leopold were the best Sabres defensemen on the season and registered objectively good seasons, but both of their defensive outputs also diminished.

And at the end of the day, the lack of linear growth from Tyler Myers and Marc-Andre Gragnani (who led the Sabres in TOI in the Flyers series, so it’s not a stretch to say the team internally expected better from him in 2011-12) were quite impactful not only in salvaging this season but also the upcoming outlook of future seasons. Myers fought injuries for about a third of the season, but when he was in the lineup, the drop off in his defense almost cancelled out the (albeit diminished) contributions offensively in what would be his worse season with expected results for the next half a decade.

The Reinforcements

Of course the Tyler Ennis, Marcus Foligno, Drew Stafford line’s bender once Ennis returned from injury is the memorable difference in the final months of the season. Starting with Ennis, sandwiched between a 20 goal season on 21.6 expected goals (moneypuck) in 2011 and 10 goals on 12 expected goals in 2013, Ennis had 15 goals on 8.1 expected in his 48 game sample in 2012. His only other plus shooting seasons came in 2014 (20G on 17.1 xG) and 2018 (12G on 8.8xG). While Marcus Foligno has had some more frequent shooting success in his career from heavier shot traffic in front of the net despite his defensive reputation, doubling his expected output in a 14 game sample wasn’t matched until the current decade, and his Sabres tenure hovered around expectation until being traded to Minnesota in 2017.

Interestingly, Drew Stafford finished a goal below expectation, 20G on 21.8 xG, in 2012. After goals in three straight games in the first four, Stafford only had 8 goals heading into February and scored 8 goals in March alone, fitting in with the rest of the line’s surge.

The line’s success helped to ensure that improved defensive results during the final stretch would push them to what would end up being 3 points out of the 8th seed. One of the keys to that turnaround on the blue line may have been the lesser-known return of that season’s trade deadline splash.

While Cody Hodgson struggled in his first 20 games with the Sabres after being traded from Vancouver at the 2012 trade deadline, only registering a goal and 3 assists at 5-on-5 while being on ice for only 46% of the shot attempts for and 42% of the expected goals for during his shifts, Alexander Sulzer’s entrance into the lineup with Marc-Andre Gragnani heading to Vancouver was a net positive for the aforementioned disappointing D-core. Sulzer was primarily paired with his former Canucks teammate, Christian Ehrhoff, who had otherwise spent most of his season paired with Jordan Leopold. This allowed Leopold to play more with the struggling Regehr or Myers and help offer more steady ice time for the defense. Sulzer’s on ice production in his 15 games following the trade ended up being his best for his short NHL career.

While a high-event profile for Gragnani before being traded wasn’t bad, Sulzer did the things that he was doing but better that season, and since neither party had too extended of a career in the league, the spark Sulzer provided that season was enough of an impact to point to some of the improvements the Sabres made at the end of 2012. It doesn’t really need to be looked at much more than that for this exercise (and the forward swap of that trade was certainly the bigger part in both the short and long term).

Missed by 3 Points. Now What?

Because of how well the beginning of the season went for the Sabres despite poor underlying numbers, it’s hard to point to 2 or 3 games and simply conclude “it would have been a playoff team if not for these games”. What we do know is that regardless how who played well and who didn’t in 2011-12, the offseason was simply going to be about addressing the Boston-sized elephant in the room. Specifically…

Financially, the Sabres got an extra year and a smaller cap hit in the swap of #9s, and with the understanding of some of the core being near contract expirations and Paul Gaustad being the first domino to go that spring, Steve Ott was very likely going to be a better return than a traditional sell despite a relatively underrated season for Roy after injuries plagued him the year prior.

And be honest, you also remembered Steve Ott as a defensive persona because of the grit game he played; don’t act like you didn’t (also as an Easter Egg after you subscribe to Evolving Hockey, look at Derek Roy’s player card for 2013-14).

The John Scott factor wasn’t too significant to the on-ice results. The team was 16-15-3 in games he played, so that’s not really saying anything one way or another to his value with where the team was headed at that point.

It Was, Indeed, Time

With the magic from the end of the 2012 season evaporated, the 2013 Sabres came out of the lockout and managed less than 2 expected goals for per 60 at 5-on-5, and the defense went in the opposite direction as well. While the roster build may have made things more challenging, it just wasn’t working anymore and a move had to be made. With the core on their way out, it was time to look to the future.

It’s probably unfair to treat anything that happened in 2011-12 as impactful on the 2024-25 Sabres, but it’s good to look back since this is how we got here in the first place.

What about Leino?

Yes I omitted to talk about the role that the Leino signing had on the 2011-12 season, but since we all are on the same page that the move to center hurt him, and the results matched that as well, it wasn’t really worth re-hashing in this context. That would be for one about the general manager…(so stay tuned?)

(Header Photo Credit: Marianne Helm)