I am admittedly a few days behind. Jerry Sullivan was going off about a variety of topics in his weekly radio appearance. I have regarded this hour of radio as kind of a joke where the hosts kneel and kiss the feet of the greatest sports columnist ever.
Sullivan made a few points of contention this week. The first was calling out Terry Pegula for saying the media is too hard on the Sabres. he was dead on in his criticism. The media is here to challenge the team and management. If Bucky Gleason thinks the policy on free agents is backwards or if Mike Harrington says the arena is like library, so be it. They are paid to do just that. Same goes for John Vogl asking Ryan Miller how he feels. I said it in this space before, Vogl was dead on with his question, it had to be asked. That is why I don’t have a problem with Sullivan finding fault with what Pegula said in regards to the media.
However, he made a point about the deadline that was off a bit. He seems to think that the Brad Boyes in da Hood trade would still have been made under Golisano. he challenged the thought that the Sabres wouldn’t have taken on that salary before. He used past deadlines as his barometer but he left out a vital point.
The past three deadlines were highlighted by fairly good moves. In 2008 the Sabres traded Brian Campbell because he wanted too much money, they received Steve Bernier in a salary swap. The 2009 deadline saw Mikael Tellqvist and Dominic Moore brought in as Ales Kotalik was shipped out. The 2.5M that Kotalik made was more than enough to cover Tellqvist and Moore. They also extended Tim Connolly which did add about 1.5M to the payroll.
Last year was a similar situation; Dan Paille was traded early on and Clarke MacArthur cleared a significant amount of space for acquiring Torres. Not to mention, each acquisition was not resigned by Buffalo.
This year there was no player sent out to grab a guy who added 4M to the cap this year and next. Please explain to me how the two regimes don’t have a different outlook.
