Ted Nolan is right for the Sabres' rebuild

“We are very happy to get this deal done and have Ted Nolan as our permanent head coach going forward,” General Manager Tim Murray said in a statement. “Teddy has proven time and again that he is an exceptional leader, motivator and teacher. He is exactly what we need in a head coach for our hockey team, and we’re confident in his ability to guide our players and turn this team around.”

There you have it.

The interim coach that departed hockey ops president Pat LaFontaine brought in, was retained by the GM he brought in yesterday as Ted Nolan takes the reigns of the Sabres for the next three years.

"He's my guy," said Murray.

But...


Is Ted Nolan right for the Sabres' rebuild? was the question Matthew Coller posed a mere hours after the formal announcement. He then tried to answer the question through, what else, statistics.

Coller, who has done yeoman's work following the Rochester Americans, busted out a Fenwick chart but was still baffled because advanced statistics can't chart heart, grit, effort and other intangibles that Nolan's known for bringing out in a player.

"You could compare effort, hustle, heart, grit." wrote Coller. "But...how can you do that?"

Exactly.

Nolan can and does see all those intangibles up close on a daily basis.

On GR's Schopp and the Bulldog yesterday, Nolan talked about his role and how they will rebuild the Sabres, "Everything starts with the foundation," he said. "If you don't have a strong foundation, it's going to crack and fall down in a short time."

And what will said foundation be?

"This summer we're going to lay the groundwork," he continued, "and get the players that are coming back here in the best shape of their lives. We're going to make training camp extremely tough. We want to make sure we have tough players."

Not only is it a physical toughness he's referring to, but a mental toughness as well. We need to remember how soft this team was for the last seven years. How they crumbled at the first sign of adversity.

Nolan told the story of a university student hockey player saying that the game was 75% mentally tough and 35% physically tough. After a quick mathematics note Nolan said, "Your [physical] conditioning level can only take you so far. It's your mental toughness and who you are."

There will be very few players left from the Darcy Regier-era moving forward. That soft group has been dispersed throughout the league, like chaff thrown into the wind.

Which is one of the reasons Nolan was brought on board.

But the other, more important aspect of his being retained might be to mold the youngins moving forward.

"We have to have a certain kind of character to win that championship," he said during the Schopp interview.

And Nolan points to the molding the youngins. "We have guys like [Rasmus] Ristolainen, who just turned 20 yrs. old. We have [Zemgus] Girgensons who's a baby himself and Marcus Foligno who's not that much older. We have some really young players here that have to get some really good strength in the summertime.

The thing we want to do this summer is change the attitude, change the culture."

GM Tim Murray has been saying all along that he wants people who want to be here. In regards to players, some like Drew Stafford, Tyler Ennis and Tyler Myers have shown that they want to be here (or somewhere in the NHL) while Ville Leino and to an extent Christian Ehrhoff look as if they could care less.

One would think that attitudes like Leino's and Ehrhoff's would be a determent to the new foundation and that they'll be moved to make room for players who want to be there.

Are Nolan and Murray on the same page when it comes to the types of players they want? "Do we like the same players? I think we do," said Murray at the presser. "We have players here that were drafted or signed before he and I both got here. Some of them are NHL players and we're going to go forward with those guys."

The Sabres have been stripped down to virtually nothing over the last two seasons. All of their top-end talent is gone. Most of their scoring is gone. Most of their vets are gone.

This is where Nolan comes in. He will be a key figure in defining the Buffalo Sabres from this point forward.

"There's some good young talent in the organization that I certainly had nothing to do with," said Murray. "[Nolan's] had something to do with [them] because he's had his hands on them for 5 to 20 games. So he has had an impact on those guys."

Nolan's basic philosophy is based upon his First Nations' childhood, one that included living without electricity or running water.

"We are who we are because of the upbringing we all receive," he said. "One thing about myself growing up, we were never given a whole lot, that didn't stop us from trying our best on a daily basis, no matter what your circumstances are. Here, it doesn't matter whether we're in last place or in first place, you gotta go to work and bring your best effort.

No one's going to feel sorry for you. Life's tough. We want to make sure we have people on our team who are tough."

To answer Matthew's question, Murray and Nolan are on the same page when it comes to the players they want. Everybody knows what Nolan brings to the table and Sabres fans can look forward to a hard-working team.

Is Nolan the right guy?

Absolutely.

For the foreseeable future, Nolan will be doing what he's always done, getting his players to play their hardest for all the right reasons. That will be the support for the talent that should be headed their way the next two drafts and off seasons.

That's about as good a foundation as Sabres' fans could ask for.



Nolan/Murray presser

Bill Hoppe on the players reaction to the extension