Sabres preview: Don Granato's drive to build a winner; No, they're not tanking

Another long workday had just ended when Don Granato sat on the edge of his seat in a KeyBank Center office adjacent to the Buffalo Sabres’ dressing room.

Wearing a Sabres hooded sweatshirt and royal-framed glasses, Granato completed meetings with his coaching staff following a nine-round shootout preseason loss in Pittsburgh the previous night. His players, like most across the league, weren’t yet in regular-season game shape and there were mistakes to correct from the night before.

Let's make this clear right from the opening faceoff.

The Sabres are not tanking. It's reasonable to expect them to be terrible but they're not trying to lose. They're going to be overmatched most nights but you're going to see effort. Based on what we saw at the end of last season, you stand a chance to see some entertainment through patches of games, too, because coach Don Granato believes bad and boring is just death. Props to him.

Casey Mittelstadt didn’t have to respond to a recent question from a reporter for everyone to know exactly how he felt about the pundits predicting the Buffalo Sabres to finish in last place.

The 22-year-old bristled at the notion. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head before providing media and fans a glimpse at the mindset inside the Sabres’ dressing room at KeyBank Center.

Here are NHL season predictions by Buffalo News reporters Mike Harrington and Lance Lysowski.

Mike Harrington

For many Buffalo Sabres fans, this season is about the prospects.

There are beacons of hope on the club’s NHL roster, led by Casey Mittelstadt, Rasmus Dahlin, Dylan Cozens and Henri Jokiharju. But the young core is unlikely to snap the 10-year playoff drought until the next wave of talented young players reaches Buffalo.

Somewhere during the seemingly never-ending drive from Buffalo to Rochester in December 2019, Casey Mittelstadt was speaking to his father, Tom, about the difficult news that he was joining the Amerks after 114 games with the Sabres.

Tom, the patriarch of the hockey family, didn’t mince words with his then-21-year-old son.

Winning back-to-back Stanley Cups is never easy. The Tampa Bay Lightning have done it through two of the most mentally grueling playoff runs in NHL history.

They survived the 2020 playoff bubbles of Toronto and Edmonton to beat the Dallas Stars in the Cup final and won again in July, ultimately prevailing in the Covid season over a Montreal team that somehow got there and pushed the series to Game 6.

For now, the Buffalo Sabres' 23-man roster for their opening-night game Thursday appears set and it won't include impressive rookie winger JJ Peterka.

Peterka, a 19-year-old drafted in the second round in October 2020, was assigned to the Rochester Americans following practice Monday. He had three goals and four points in five preseason games after spending last season with EHC Red Bull Munchen of Germany's DEL.

Behind the scenes of the Pittsburgh Penguins back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017, then-General Manager Jim Rutherford and his staff used analytics to pinpoint which players to add to a roster led by elite centermen Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.

The man in charge of the Penguins’ foray into the data revolution: Sam Ventura, co-founder of the now-defunct hockey analytics website War-On-Ice.com. Ventura, who grew up in the Pittsburgh area, joined the Penguins in 2015 as a consultant and, in 2017, was elevated to a full-time role as director of analytics and hockey research.

The identity of the Buffalo Sabres became more evident with every shift Saturday inside KeyBank Center.

Quick breakout passes allowed the Sabres to carry the puck with speed through the neutral zone, long possessions tired out the Detroit Red Wings and coach Don Granato’s players made the job easier for their goalie, Craig Anderson, who made 18 saves to cap the team’s six-game preseason schedule. 

There has been some movement in Jack Eichel's situation in the last couple of weeks and the ex-Sabres captain's switch of agents to Pat Brisson has certainly helped.

One of the league's most prominent agents is having regular dialogue with Sabres GM Kevyn Adams on the Eichel front and the sense you get is that fences are being mended in what had been a toxic situation.

Forwards Kyle Okposo and Zemgus Girgensons are the senior members of the Buffalo Sabres and have combined to play 795 games in blue and gold. To coach Don Granato, that matters when you put a young roster on the ice.

So Granato had huge praise for the pair Tuesday when he announced they would serve as his club's alternate captains for the 2021-22 season.