pegula's impact upon darcy regier (already)

terry pegula is inching ever closer to becoming the new owner of the buffalo sabres...speculation is that the deal could be done sometime around the trade deadline, a date that is inching ever closer for gm darcy regier, who's in his usual pre-deadline, diplomatic role...for the most part...

there are times when the words that come out of our mouths are not necessarily ours...the conversation is in familiar territory, we frame words in a way that stays true to the tone that we've used over the years--a tone and a structure that has remained constant over the years because the environment we're in and the people around us are constants as well...

yet sometimes words enter into our vernacular that we'd never really used before simply because it's something that's stuck in our head from a previous conversation with someone outside of our constant...this someone says things we may or may not have heard before, but the words, now delivered with an aura of power and respectability surrounding them, carry significant weight and are etched into our subconscious...
 

we've heard "regier-speak" for the last three-plus years all within the friendly confines of the constant that has been the sabres for those years...on many occasions, we could cut and paste an interview from one of those years and seamlessly fit them into another interview from another year...

on january 28th, espn's pierre lebrun had an article on the upcoming trade deadline and one of his interviewees was regier...this was the day before pegula, apparently, impressed the comish and the nhl board of governors executive committee at a meeting the next morning...pegula and the league seem to be ready for the sale...and it seems as if regier is starting to feel pegula's impact...

here's the first quote from regier in the lebrun article:

"Most of us have players that we would make available even right now for a trade, either because they're underperforming and/or overpaid," Buffalo Sabres GM Darcy Regier told us this week. "But it's impossible right now to get an agreement on values. We're all hoping that we're going to be able to just charge a cost without taking anything back, and that's not reality. So I think, yes, we're all sitting around to the last day or two again [before the trade deadline]."

that paragraph opens up with regier lumping his players into a pool with other teams' players who are "underperforming and/or overpaid"...the rest falls into more traditional "regier-speak" centering around--"yes, we're looking into trades," "it's a tough market," "salary for salary," "player values," "getting a feel for the market," etc, but i don't think i've ever heard him explicitly lump his players into the category of "underperforming and/or overpaid" players...

the second quote goes like this:

"We're getting a lot of pop out of our young kids," Regier said. "Older players that we all believed in when we signed them aren't performing at the levels that they're capable of, or maybe we misjudged it. In some part, I think we could be selling veterans if we can sell them because we like what we see in our youth. I think it's going to be really interesting."

maaaayyyybe, at various times regier would say something to the effect that his players could be performing better, but i can't really recall a time when he implied that he (and his staff) made a mistake or "misjudged" a player they'd brought on board...maaaayyyybe in the past he'd mention the possibility of moving veterans, but i can never recall him using the word--"selling" in reference to moving them...even if he'd slipped those words by, i'm pretty sure i've never heard the complete train of thought laid out like he did in the proceeding quote...

lumping his players into the"underperforming and/or over paid" category?...admitting that they may have "misjudged" certain players?..."selling" vets?...

i do not know for a fact that darcy regier has sat down with owner-in-waiting, terry pegula, and/or any of his inner circle, but it's probably safe to assume that he has, likely more than once...and i'm pretty sure that pegula's veiw of the present and vision of the future (near-term) is firmly etched into regier's brain as well...and ya gotta believe that pegula has had a definite impact on regier, especially because it looks as if the ownership change will be completed mid-season...

the hints are there...

and if pegula is getting regier to admit to things--like he's fallible--that's a good thing...