For the third and final section of the “Murrayverse” exercise, we’ll close things out by establishing RFA extensions and setting the opening night lineup. After that, we’ll take a look at the cap ramifications moving forward and re-assess the status of the Sabres’ farm system.

Since Murray moved Johan Larsson’s rights to Anaheim as part of the Sami Vatanen trade, he now has $11.2 million to extend four players (Robin Lehner, Marcus Foligno, Zemgus Girgensons, and Evan Rodrigues).

We won’t really speculate on how these negotiations would have gone under Murray. The four-year, $2.96 million AAV contract Foligno signed with the Minnesota Wild in our actual reality is probably close to what Murray would have offered. The same goes for Girgensons’ two-year, $1.6 million AAV extension, and Rodrigues’ one-year, $650,000 contract.

The real wild card here is what Murray would have done with Lehner. During the free-agent period, we projected the addition of a veteran backup based on the assumption Murray was aware of Lehner’s declining mental state. This would indicate a short-term arrangement.

Conversely, Murray spent a first-round pick to acquire Lehner two years prior and there is a chance he still saw him as a bonafide franchise netminder. Either way, Lehner’s camp probably would have opted for a short-term deal that would get their client out of WNY as quickly as possible. For that reason, we’ll stick with the one-year, $4 million agreement he signed under Jason Botterill.

After all the RFA signings are complete, Murray has about $2 million in 2017-18 cap space remaining. That gives him roughly $28 million in space for 2018-19, the first year of Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart’s respective new contracts.

Now that the dust has settled, Murray can sit down and negotiate extensions for the two main pieces of his future core. The eight-year, $10 million AAV extension Eichel signed is probably applicable here.

As for Reinhart, if memory serves, there was a rumor that he was asking for $5-5.5 million AAV for a longer term extension under Botterill. To be safe, we’ll stay on the higher side of that spectrum on a six-year deal. As Murray’s first ever draft pick for the Sabres, there is no reason to believe he wouldn’t have tried to lock Reinhart down on a longer term contract.

2017-18 Projected Results

Following a very eventful offseason, Murray is content with his roster. He added two middle-six entities at forward, and completely revamped his blue line (which features three new additions). So, what will the lines look like, and where would his new roster project in terms of standings points?

I got some help from Jayson Moser at PuckLuck to plug each player’s xWAR/60 rate into the 2016-17 machine (in Antipin’s case, we took his 2017-18 xWAR/60 since it’s his first year in the NHL). The final product landed about where I expected prior to even researching this piece.

The machine projects Murray’s fictional 2017-18 roster at about 88 points, right on the fringe of playoff contention. That season, the Eastern Conference was very strong, and the eighth-seed team qualified for the post-season with 97 points. The Florida Panthers fell just short, producing a 96-point campaign.

WAR machines are far from perfect, but they usually land close to a team’s middle range of expected outcomes. For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume Robin Lehner and Brian Elliott provide really nice results and the Sabres exceed their WAR expectations. The model also doesn’t account for anticipated growth years from young core players in Eichel and Reinhart, so that’s reason why the total could be on the more modest end of the predictive spectrum.

We’ll give them the eighth seed and assume a first-round elimination at the hands of the first-place Tampa Bay Lightning. What happens next? Now that he bought himself a little more time, what are Murray’s next moves?

Well, in the summer of 2018, he’ll have 10 forwards, and four defensemen under contract. He’ll need to add a minimum of two assets up front and likely at least one on the back end. I’m projecting those figures based on the Sabres prospect pool.

With the addition of Nicolas Hague on the back end (projected 2017 first round pick, 29^th overall), on top of whatever Murray added in rounds two-through-seven, the outlook is pretty bleak on the farm. Brendan Guhle could probably fill one of the spots, but if Antipin is a “one and done” player, there isn’t another NHL-ready defensive asset ready to make the leap.

With just over $13 million in cap space, Murray would probably have to let Evander Kane walk to free-agency. His next deal would take up nearly half of it, and the Sabres will need to have money to find a new starting goalie (or re-sign Lehner if he plays well and experiences a personal health improvement).

Nobody in the Sabres farm system is filling a role at forward, at least not competently. With the gift of hindsight, we can confidently say that Nic Baptiste, Justin Bailey, and Hudson Fasching don’t develop into NHL players.

*Alex Nylander and the rest of the Sabres’ 2016 NHL Draft Picks are not included in the above.

In fact, the only future NHL-caliber players on the Sabres’ farm are Victor Olofsson, Alex Nylander and Brandon Hagel. None of them would have been NHL-ready by the 2018-19 season, aside from maybe Nylander. In knowing that, Murray would need to find a top-six winger to replace Kane, a second-pairing defender, and a starting netminder with his cap space. Plus he’d need to have enough set aside to sign RFA William Carrier to an extension.

This is where poor drafting and development hurts an organization. Teams that experience long-term success are often very good at cycling homegrown NHL contributors. The Sabres don’t have that part of the equation here, and therefore, would likely be forced to find replacements from outside the organization.

Keeping his roster competitive while also replenishing one of the thinnest prospect pools in the NHL would not be an easy thing to do. I’m not saying it’s an insurmountable task, but there’s a possibility that, if this simulated roster did indeed qualify for the playoffs, it could have been a one-off.

Conclusion

I tried to be as realistic and logical as possible in this series, but I was probably a bit overly kind to Murray. There were a lot of tasks in front of him and he was given serious benefit of the doubt, not in terms of who he acquired, but in terms of having a comprehensive plan for every position.

I do believe that a previously unseen level of transactional aggression would have been on display from the notoriously active GM. That said, he would have needed all of that gumption and more to accomplish what he did in this simulation.

Going into this exercise, I had always felt that, given one more year, Murray probably would have made the Sabres a fringe team, but would need to sacrifice an already depleted pool of futures in order to do it. Given what we know about what players like Hanzal, Wilson, Hjalmarsson, and Vatanen actually took to obtain in the summer of 2017, I was able to mitigate the amount of future pieces he’d ultimately need to part with.

Grandiose ideas about Murray just needing one more offseason to turn this whole thing around are probably misguided. Still, there was a realistic chance here to bust the team’s then six-year playoff drought. As illustrated above however, the road to follow a successful 2017-18 campaign would be a tumultuous one.

Photo Credit: Norm Hall/NHLI via Getty Images