NHL Rumors: Will the Buffalo Sabres look to add more veteran leadership?
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Sportsnet 590 The FAN: Elliotte Friedman on the Jeff Marek Show on the Buffalo Sabres and their disappointing start to the season.

** NHLRumors.com transcription

Marek: “I know there’s some key injuries. But now you have, you know, Dylan Cousins saying, you know, I get paid to score goals and I’m not scoring goals enough. You’re starting to see a frustration. They spent a lot of money on hockey players here.

This is not going the way that the Buffalo Sabres intended to go. Attendance. I mean, you saw some of the pictures from last night. It was announced of 14,000, I think that’s very generous.

But I have a hard time believing that Kevin Adams is going to say, ‘Okay, this is just another rung on the ladder or another sequence in this path of development for these players.’ Essentially what I’m saying Friedge, I don’t see Kevin Adams sitting on his hands here and saying, ‘Oh, well, if the season gets further away, so be it. These are young players that are still developing.’

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Friedman: “Yeah, it’s disappointing. There’s no question about it. And then when it comes to the attendance, it’s, he can’t blame the fans at all. They’re great fans there. They love hockey and they’ve seen a lot of losing. So it’s not like you can take a run at them for no sensible reason.

Like it’s disappointing. There’s no question about it. I think a lot of us expected a lot better from Buffalo this year. And I think it’s a couple of things. I think, number one, it’s a reminder of how hard it is to win in this league. Even, you know, like look at Ottawa to. Like Ottawa, Buffalo, good young teams expected to take a big leap.

Now, Ottawa has got games in hand and they’ve got to take advantage of them but there’s no doubt they’re, they’re not they’re not anywhere near where we thought they were going to be.

So number one I always think of is how hard it is to win in this league. You know, number two, Buffalo’s made a lot of long-term bets here and I think they are smart bets, so it kind of limits what you can do a little bit. But, you know, the thing is, is that I kind of thought that Buffalo was going to be a team that just kept on bringing up from Rochester. You know, a couple of their young players (Isak) Rosen and (Luke) Coolidge got a chance to make their debuts last week. And I kind of thought that was going to be it. Like this new young core would take over running the team and more players from Rochester would come.

You know, I look at that now and I say it’s probably not going to be enough Jeff. And You know they tried to bring in, they have Kyle Okposo there. They have Erik Johnson there. Like these are good veterans.

I agree with you in the sense that they have to be looking at this and saying, what else do we need? And you have been all over like the (Noah) Hanifin idea, how you think he’d be perfect for them. I do wonder if they’re gonna have to look at, like a veteran defenseman or two or another veteran or two that they’re going to need to bring in there who they think they can help because I think what we’re seeing, like Ottawa, is a young team getting used to the reality of how hard it is to win.

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