There are not many teams in the league right now with a deeper or more well-rounded prospect pool than the Buffalo Sabres. And they broke their fourteen-year playoff drought at the end of last season. It’s rare that a team is able to do both; whether they can keep it up is another matter entirely, as one of the functions of prospects is as bargaining chips for pieces of a Stanley Cup run. But at the moment there’s a treasure trove of potential, and Sabres fans should enjoy it.<\/p>\n
Names that drove the grade up include recently drafted defenseman Daxon Rudolph, who does nothing extraordinarily but everything very well (minus being a touch too nonchalant), and forward Konsta Helenius, who, despite being recently scratched for “not enough compete,” is in a good position to become a full-time NHLer this season. Defenseman Radim Mrtka, too, is waiting in the wings to become a valuable part of the NHL lineup, though he’ll likely require more seasoning in the AHL first.<\/p>\n
Outside of these players, there’s significant depth at nearly every position. Keep an eye on guys like Ilia Morozov and Adam Kleber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are not many teams in the league right now with a deeper or more well-rounded prospect pool…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-879686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}