I don’t have any more emotions aside from those three words. On the bright side, it means I have no more anger for hockey fandom. On the down side, I have nothing else to offer on this season, the near future, or the longer term future until there is new news that goes beyond speculation. If you want more emotion, go to last night’s podcast episode.

I can’t act like I know what is going to happen with the Sabres in the next five, eleven, or twenty-three months because for four and a half years, since a few weeks after this tweet as a matter of fact, I have watched the Sabres and countless times thought, word for word, there’s no way they won’t wriggle themselves out of THIS jam, and at EVERY. SINGLE. OBSTACLE, it has somehow got weirder and, for the most part, worse.

For me, this “emotional” bottoming out took place in early 2019 when they slowly but surely lost their hold of the best record in the NHL after their 10 game win streak and dropped both out of the playoffs and finished the season with two less points than they had in the 2016-17 season. After that, what was the point? All the elation of that November and early December was great; it was a reminder that Sabres hockey could be exciting once the results change. The World’s Largest Disco paused to watch a shootout against the Red Wings for goodness sake. It’s still there, but it obviously hasn’t been there since. If they couldn’t even salvage that run, it was too gloomy for me to react more strongly.

Even after how the 2020 season progressed and then ended abruptly, what was the point of being mad? There was no room left to feel as if any connection to the franchise remained, so save emotion for more important things, ya know? Anyways, that’s enough about me for this one.

I don’t think numbers are needed for this post. These are just a lot of words to get to an important reminder – at no point since October of 2016 did it have to be this way for the Sabres organization.

Tim Murray put himself in a bind with three bad drafts, but if Bylsma’s goal for that season was 95 points, they could have made a transitional move to overcome Eichel’s beginning of the season injury in 2016-17. Ristolainen could’ve been the core piece to be traded instead of O’reilly in July 2018. Heck, they could’ve taken a better quality value than the quantity trade they did take. Housely could’ve been shown the door more quickly. They could have worked to save the 2019 luck with the next move to make them a serious playoff team. They could have gone into 2019-20 with more players than Alex Nylander being told they would not be in the organization that year. They could have kept Chris Taylor in Rochester or even had him start the 2021 season as their head coach.

I’m not going to say that any single of these moves could have prevented yesterday’s locker room cleanout from going how it did, and there certainly is no way that these are the only opportunities they had to be better, but even that pile is so big that there is no other conclusion than that they’ve (whatever scope you want “they” to be) done this to themselves because they got comfortable thinking that everything will be okay.

And yet here we are. 24+ hours removed from finding out that the organization and Jack Eichel have been at odds for months about recovering from his neck injury. And once again, it didn’t have to be this way. So once again, let’s see if they wriggle their way out of THIS jam. And if they don’t?

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

Photo Credit: Bill Wippert/NHLI via Getty Images