But he wasn't great in Anaheim for the whole time though. Fell off hard the year he was traded before he even got to Buffalo.

He wasn't really solid in Anaheim.

Fair price for Montour would have been a 2nd round pick, regardless of how late it is.

The first Montour trade with Anaheim as well as the Buffalo effect all need to be taken into account.


One decent comparable to this trade would be the Justin Schultz trade to Pittsburgh, orchestrated by our ol' buddy Pete Chiarelli.

We all know how that turned out.


I voted for the Florida Panthers.

Like if you did too!

He wasn't bad in Anaheim. If he was, he wouldn't have been traded for a first and a prospect

Yeah but he wasn't terrible. He showed potential in Anaheim before he was traded. All Im saying is that he could bounce back

Your logic isn't very sound when you consider that Griffin Reinhart, who was ruled a bust by consensus, was traded for a 1st(Barzal) and a 2nd(traded up to select Beauvillier). Name recognition is a helluva achilles' heel for NHL GMs.

Yea he was pretty bad in Anaheim



He got a 1st and a prospect because he was young and the Sabres gambled on him becoming a good player. He didn't.

Wow his value tanked in Buffalo. I thought Buffalo paid a pretty fair price for him.

I wonder if he'll rebound after leaving.

In regards to the trade a third is fair. Considering how good Florida is doing I find it kind of interesting they went for a moderate price Rd instead of a big swing with ekblad out

Oh you mean the Carlyle 2018-19 Ducks that couldn't score? And then he was sent to the aimless Sabres? I highly doubt that Niedermayer himself would have survived going from a sinking team to a drowning one.

McCabe's been good exclusively this year, and even then it's a 13 game sample size. Every other season he's been "okay", which kinda describes Jokiharju and Miller too. Dahlin is obviously much more skilled, but his numbers show he's being sheltered. I think we can concede that Ristolainen has never been a good defender. At some point we need to concede that the modern Sabres are a literal black hole in terms of chances against and take some of these stats with a salt lick. Montour's base underlying metrics don't vary wildly from the rest of the Sabres. His 48.48% CF is 5th among the 8 Sabres to play over 1000min since 2018, and he trails Jokiharju and Miller by less than 1%. Montour has the highest expected GF% of all Sabres defencemen with 1000min played since 2018. There isn't a single good defender on this team, and Montour's about average from the bunch. The transformation in Florida is going to be night-and-day: Sabres fans are going to be left - again - wondering why nobody can perform worth a damn for their club but excel elsewheres.

To use an anecdote, were Jeff Petry and Devan Dubnyk always bad players or were they just stuck on a horrible Oilers squad? Coaching, usage, and overall team strength are obviously much more important factors than a few users in this thread are letting on to.

that's true to an extent. Even with the Ducks he was incredibly overrated just like most young RHD's are.

https://twitter.com/IneffectiveMath/status/1099821510703960064?s=20

Devan Dubnyk's sv% with the Oilers:
88,9%(as a rookie)
91,6%
91,4%
92,0%
89,4%

And then he was traded for Matt Hendricks for some reason. He had one down year after his rookie campaign. He struggled with the Preds in the 2 games he played and bounced back to a 91,6% with the Yotes and going lights out with the Wild, being starting caliber until 2019.

Not really even a comparison. We're talking about a player who had a huge slump once in his career vs. one who has consistently shown he's bad. Also those Oilers, Yotes and Wild teams were never worldbeaters. Sure, they weren't as bad as the current Sabres, but it's not like Dubnyk's team made his work easy.

Analytics folks are so dumb. Of course you are going to have bad corsi numbers when you play on the Buffalo Sabres, not that that stat has any value

I mean he's a piece of s**t, but Flordia still won this trade ig

He wasn't very good on the Ducks either, but anyways

That entire Ducks team in 2018-19 was a dumpster fire that couldn't score. Carlyle ran that team into the ground: the only reason they didn't finish dead last that year was exclusively due to goaltending. You really wanna hammer home the idea that you're incapable of recognizing the context of the teams in question, don't you?

Fair trade, Panthers get a good offensive Dman who should benefit from not suffering the Buffalo effect and Sabres get a pick for a player who was going to leave as soon as they played their last game

Weird that you keep bringing that year up, since he was by far the worst of their 3 good top-4 dmen that year. By that I mean, Manson has always been average at best and gets big minutes only because he's big and physical. Anyway, Montour was by far the worst of the group of Lindholm, Fowler and Montour in most metrics. Don't get me wrong, the two weren't great, they were actually quite bad, but Montour was even worse.

> Oh you mean the Carlyle 2018-19 Ducks that couldn't score? And then he was sent to the aimless Sabres? I highly doubt that Niedermayer himself would have survived going from a sinking team to a drowning one.

You said his bad numbers were due to the "Buffalo effect." Is it the "Anaheim effect" too now? The guy has played 281 games under different coaches and teams. Sometimes players just aren't good.

> McCabe's been good exclusively this year, and even then it's a 13 game sample size.

McCabe hasn't just been exclusively good this year. He was good last year and solid the year before too.

> Montour's base underlying metrics don't vary wildly from the rest of the Sabres.

Yea they're pretty similar to Bogosian & Risto who are also black holes. Risto at least has value on the PP though. Montour doesn't offer you anything on special teams.

> The transformation in Florida is going to be night-and-day: Sabres fans are going to be left - again - wondering why nobody can perform worth a damn for their club but excel elsewheres.

This is said about like every player that leaves Buffalo. They're just gonna magically get better on a different team. Most of these players are just bad. Bogosian was still bad when he left. Vesey was still bad when he left. They didn't transform on better teams.

> To use an anecdote, were Jeff Petry and Devan Dubnyk always bad players or were they just stuck on a horrible Oilers squad? Coaching, usage, and overall team strength are obviously much more important factors than a few users in this thread are letting on to.

He's been with multiple coaches & teams. He's been bad on all of them.

People get fooled by points.

Everyone in the hockey media thinks Buffalo players are all gonna have huge bounce backs once they're out oof Buffalo. Not gonna happen. The main reason Buffalo was/is so bad is that they have bad players.

I wish I could respond to all of the comments.
"The transformation in Florida is going to be night-and-day."
You said is best and here are the facts to support your point of view:

During the 26 games under Krueger, Montour had 1 goal, 6 assists and was - 14.
During the 11 games under Donato, Montour had 4 goals, 3 assists and was +1.
The 20 games Montour played after being traded from the Ducks to the Sabres he had more goals, more points and lowest +/- of all of the Sabres.
Given proper playing time I suspect he will average close to a half a point a game in Florida while chipping in 4 or 5 goals.
As usual Adams was fleeced, but this was obviously the best offer, curtesy of Ralph Krueger "Soccer Genius".
Now that the league has seen for what he will settle, I doubt the Sabres will get a 2nd for Hall.

Buffalo should never have fired Housley, but considering how the season ended, I guess the team had no choice.

EDIT for comparisons, the same stats for balance of the defense
Bryson 0-3- +1
Dahlin 2-4- -8
Jokiharju 2-2- -1
Miller 0-2- -3
Ristolainen 1-4- +1
So as I said for the last 11 games playing for a REAL NHL coach he has been the Sabres BEST defenseman.

Just his transformation from Soccer coach to Hockey coach has been night and day.

see a lot of people going with the.....it's the rest of the team not him argument....
if we do that for every player on BUF than we never get to a point where anyone actually takes responsibility for being that bad.
Truth is, He's part of how a team ended up that bad. It's not everyone but him.
BUF won for getting something out of nothing.

Not someone I think Florida should've spent cap on.

Also don't know why people are discounting his performance in Buffalo. Being bad on a bad team doesn't mean you're good. Maybe the reduced minutes and better assignments will let Q get something meaningful out of him, but his track record isn't great even from an individual standpoint.

Fair deal: A rental with question marks for a 3rd in a weak/strange draft year.

Brandon Montour, reportedly acquired by FLA, has been one of the league's worst defencemen in the past three seasons. His production has been decent but his underlying numbers have been brutal at both ends since before the Sabres traded for him. #FlaPanthers pic.twitter.com/hZRGNOHWbY

— JFresh (@JFreshHockey) April 10, 2021

Look at this entire thread. The point of advanced analytics is to take the team out of picture and focus on the player. Please stop pretending that you know everything