Sabres Need To Shuffle In And Shuffle Out Picks Before Deadline

Buffalo has seven unrestricted free agents who could be moved before the March 7th trade deadline

The Buffalo Sabres are in a precarious position with a season on the brink of disaster after going winless in a month, and a frustrated fanbase questioning the decisions made by ownership and management team led by GM Kevyn Adams. The Sabres will be hard-pressed to turn anything into a positive, but the mandate of Adams or whoever succeeds him is to salvage something out of the remaining 48 games and find some new life and direction for the 55-year-old franchise.

The Sabres have over $6 million in cap space, a stockpile of well-regarded prospects, a slew of draft picks, and a number of players with expiring contracts that can be moved as rentals before the March 7th trade deadline. Management's challenge is to add players who can help provide depth and support to the club’s core group.

Focusing on the players with expiring contracts, the Sabres have seven pending unrestricted free agents on their roster; wingers Jordan Greenway, Jason Zucker, and Nicolas Aube-Kubel, defensemen Henri Jokiharju, Jacob Bryson, and Dennis Gilbert, and goalie James Reimer. The club may want to keep some of these players in the fold and could offer them extensions, but if they do not or cannot, they have to be moved out for future assets.

Greenway is having surgery on a mid-body injury suffered in November. Although the club did not specify the length of recovery, the likely target for his return could be after the NHL’s 4 Nation Face-Off in mid-February. Zucker is a veteran with some leadership skills and has been a pleasant surprise with 22 points, which contending teams would be looking for and willing to swap a high draft pick for. Jokiharju has been in and out of the lineup for most of the season and might garner a conditional pick because he is a right-handed defenseman, while the others would get a mid-round pick.

A boatload of draft picks that will take three or more seasons to get to the NHL does not help the Sabres. If they are unable to swap out any of their core group in hockey deals, their task is to move out rental players for picks and then find teams looking to clear cap space and deal those picks for players.

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