Sabres Were Ready All Along

Well, according to what I had on the rookie roster on Sunday and the training camp roster I pulled off their website today, the Buffalo Sabres haven't really changed anything and are going forward with what we already knew. Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with the whole thing and all, but let's have one or two changes... make me work for it at least.

Now that we're aware that we can proceed with this roster, I will.  Business as usual.

Currently, I have the Sabres sitting with two possible open spots in their forward ranks, which would make for a good battle outside of training camp, a rotating 12th forward. With Tyler Ennis almost a lock for a top six job out of training camp (thanks to his great performances late last season), there might be some players forced onto the bubble and might have a good fight on their hands in these next few weeks.

I really think that the seven defensemen and two goalies on the list should be just fine coming out of camp, I don't see too much of a challenge from anyone on defense, while the goaltending tandem know their role and that shouldn't be a complicated matter.  All of this barring injury, of course.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Derek Roy	Tyler Myers	Ryan Miller
Tim Connolly	Jordan Leopold	Patrick Lalime
Jason Pominville	Steve Montador
Thomas Vanek	Chris Butler
Jochen Hecht	Craig Rivet
Drew Stafford	Shaone Morrisonn
Tim Kennedy	Andrej Sekera
Paul Gaustad
Mike Grier
Rob Niedermayer
Patrick Kaleta
Matt Ellis
Tyler Ennis	Alex Biega	Jhonas Enroth
Nathan Gerbe	TJ Brennan	David Leggio
Luke Adam	Tim Conboy	Zane Kalemba
Rily Boychuk	Nick Crawford
Paul Byron	Corey Fienghage
Marcus Foligno	Jerome Gauthier-Leduc
Cedrik Henley	Marc-Andre Gragnani
Zack Kassian	Matt MacKenzie
Jacob Lagace	Brayden McNabb
Maxime Legault	Dennis Persson
Mark Mancari	Mark Pysyk
Dennis McCauley	Drew Schiestel
Brian Roloff	Mike Weber
Felix Schutz
Steven Shipley
Colin Stuart
Kevin Sundher
Gregg Sutch
Corey Tropp
Travis Turnbull
Derek Whitmore

The Sabres are smack-dab in the middle of the league, in terms of their salary cap hit for their Summer roster above.  The 20-man roster, plus one buyout comes in with a projected cap hit of $53.1 million, 16th in the league in that category.  That has always been a trademark of GM Darcy Regier's post-lockout teams, they are very well managed and handle the salary cap with calculated ease.  This is why he still has a job on a sometimes mediocre team.

I tend to think that the Buffalo Sabres are somewhat of an underrated team at my drafts.  Okay, maybe not so much Ryan Miller, he's a bona fide workhorse that can win a lot of games.  Rather, I look at Derek Roy, Jason Pominville and Drew Stafford and kind of think that they don't go as high as they probably should some years.  Thomas Vanek usually goes as high as he should and someone is always ready to gamble on Tim Connolly, but the other three usually turn into bargains (on good years).  This year, I'm looking at Tyler Myers to impress with a high pick and Tyler Ennis to challenge for a good spot, so maybe Buffalo won't be so underrated after all.