Lawrence Pilut is a former Sabres defenseman who is now playing in the KHL. He had been with the Buffalo Sabres, but spent the majority of his time either in the press box or in Rochester. The Sabres were attempting to keep him under contract. I’m trying to figure out why his signing elsewhere has me so upset.
Pilut was not a particularly impactful player on the team. It’s kind of hard to be when the Sabres are in a perpetual state of disappointment. If you have enough impactful players eventually you are gonna win something. It’s probably safe to say the Sabres have two of them, with Jack Eichel being a positive influence on their chances to win and Rasmus Ristolainen being a negative. You might be able to make a case for a few others but, again, the Sabres are a bottom third team. Who really out here is making that kind of difference. Pilut didn’t. So why should I care?
Over the course of the past six months, my personal relationship with the idea of the Buffalo Sabres has become a very complicated thing. I wrote at the beginning of the season about the hope for a new beginning with them. New beginnings turn into old endings. Even on the steps of the apocalypse the Sabres have managed to instill familiar feelings of despair. It stinks, honestly. It isn’t so much that the team’s performance degraded over time so much as how hard you had to work to manufacture hope. The games won at the beginning of the year were not dominant displays of power. There were gaps. Those gaps never closed. Losses poured through. Here lay the decay of our collective experience. All of us are left frustrated, embarrassed, and angered. See you in four months.
Become a Patron!This process, by which I mean the process of everything the team and franchise has become since the beginning of last decade, has been exhausting. Good thing we decided to do a whole podcast series about it! A consequence of that exhaustion is that, man, I do not have the energy or the brain power to deeply understand how bad the Sabres are in raw numbers or data. I am very willing to take the work and word of others in that regard. I do not want to study the analytics of the Sabres weaknesses, through no fault of the analytics themselves. There is a requirement for me to understand how the team got here in a historical sense given the nature of what Ryan and I do. I’ll do my best in that department.
I have come to the realization that the problems of the Sabres lay beyond the ability of math alone to solve in the here and now, and that saps you! The application of that math toward the future seems suspect to me. I don’t believe the Sabres are good enough in the brain department to overcome their faults, and there are no indications of that changing anytime soon, so frankly who cares about math? What are the blue and red bar graphs gonna tell me about why a stupid person does a stupid thing? I’m Peter Venkman slapping the calculator out of the hands of Egon Spangler after they see the phantom librarian.
I do not have the skill set to determine exactly WHY Pilut didn’t pan out here in terms of specific functions of analytics, but I do have the skill set to determine the impact of mismanagement. You do enough podcasts about the Buffalo Bills and you get the hang of the thing. It’s through the understanding of that mismanagement that brings me a little bit of understanding regarding my own feelings on the matter. I felt like Pilut represented something the Sabres were once able to do back when people actually loved them, which was to find a player others had passed on and develop that player to make an impact. Other teams might have seen Pilut but decided he wasn’t good enough, or they didn’t have the space to develop him, or they thought there were better options elsewhere. The Sabres, though, would take him and let him hit his maximum potential. He’d contribute to something, become an impact player. It’s the thing that happens when you turn around a losing team; you start having players that were unproductive or unknown before start making a difference.
I was chasing that feeling of 2005 again. Players like Briere, Pominville, Dumont, Vanek, Campbell, Miller and Afinogenov all hitting their stride at the right time to send the Sabers into the stratosphere. It’s that failure to launch that had been plaguing the team for the past 10 years that places you in such a state of depression over them. It wasn’t like the Sabres weren’t trying to find players. It wasn’t like the Sabres hadn’t found players! But for every Jokiharju, there is a Montour, Miller, and McCabe. But we have definite information on Jokiharju. He played nearly all season. A lot of the disappointment I’m feeling with Pilut is that I never got to find out about him! He played only 14 frigging games! All of the while there are players that I definitely know are bad already.
Watching the Sabres is to know something. You know the players you are watching are, by and large, not good. It is also to not know something. It’s that feeling that all sports fans of bad teams have. Are the players who are not on the ice any good, and when will we find out? So to watch the Sabres continually play bad players who we all know are bad players is a frustrating thing. To know that the Sabres have painted themselves into this corner through bad contracts makes it worse. To think that the Sabres are deliberately choosing to play the players they do because they think they are better than they are is what drives frustration into anger. It’s this last thing in particular. Here is Pilut, who is by no means perfect but appears to do something – getting out of his own zone – better than nearly everyone else on the team and instead I am watching Ristolainen play 30 minutes a night. Pilut can’t replace Ristolainen one-for-one but maybe, like Ristolainen can play 15 average minutes instead of 30 bad minutes and those extra minutes can be given to someone not as bad. There. I’m mad about the Sabres again.
If I find out Pilut is good and can grow, it’s gonna be with another team. That sucks! The Sabres deny me specific kinds of hope because of their mismanagement. A great atmosphere and good time? Absolutely not. Big signings in the off-season? Get lost. Dynamic hockey and edge of your seat excitement? I’m better off huffing the chemicals under my sink. No, I can’t even get the “Wow I’ve been surprised by this player I didn’t know about he’s kind of good!” I can be sure the Sabres will somehow, through a combination of all of their flaws, be unable to deliver even this simple joy of the underdog.
We aren’t even supposed to be the underdog! If I wanted to root for an underdog again I’d go break John Rigas out of prison. The Pegulas were supposed to wipe away all of this. They were supposed to have limitless resources and deliver on sustained winning. Now we are being told that the franchise has to be conserved as if it were a wetland next to a fracking well. The fact that I even have to care about Pilut in this regard at all shows how badly the Pegulas have done all of us.
Regardless, Pilut is gone. Maybe he was good. We won’t find out. God bless him.