The Buffalo Sabres have spent the salary cap era learning the hard way that one wrong contract can linger for years. In a league where every dollar matters, a few of their biggest bets went sideways almost immediately, leaving the team to pay for production that never matched the price tag.
That history helps explain why the Sabres’ contract misfires still loom so large, even now that the roster looks very different. The organization has more value deals on the books today, along with one of the league’s best players, but the scars from the past are impossible to ignore.
Before getting to the five worst deals, there are a few notable misses that fall just short of the list. Cody Hodgson’s 6-year, $25.5 million contract deserves mention, though injuries played a major role and his career ended because of Malignant Hyperthermia.
Tyler Ennis and Thomas Vanek each gave Buffalo some production without matching their contracts, with Ennis on a 5-year, $23 million deal and Vanek on a 7-year, $50 million deal. Maxim Afinogenov also stands out after turning a huge 2005-06 season into a 3-year, $10 million deal that ultimately came up short.
The biggest mistake on the list belongs to Ville Leino, whose 6-year, $27 million contract signed in 2011 became one of the most infamous deals in NHL history. Leino arrived off a career year with the Philadelphia Flyers, where he posted 19 goals and 53 points, and Buffalo believed it had landed a top-six winger who could help push the club into contender territory.
That never happened. Leino managed just eight goals and 25 points in 71 games in Buffalo, and injuries plus poor performance limited him to 66 more games after that. The Sabres bought him out, too, and his name became a symbol of how badly that summer of 2011 unraveled for the franchise.
Christian Ehrhoff’s 10-year, $40 million contract, also signed in 2011, came with similar expectations and a similar ending. He was 28, coming off a 50-point season, and had already established himself as a steady top-four defenseman with the San Jose Sharks and Vancouver Canucks. Buffalo saw him as a long-term fixture.
Instead, Ehrhoff was merely okay. His offense dropped sharply, his defensive play did not take a step forward, and the league’s new “cap recapture penalty” added another layer of risk if he retired early. He lasted only three seasons before the Sabres bought him out, and the team wound up paying him $857,143 every year through 2027.
Kyle Okposo’s 7-year, $42 million deal in 2016 looked like a strong pickup at the time. He had just produced a 22-goal, 64-point season with the Islanders and hit unrestricted free agency with plenty of interest. Buffalo jumped in, expecting a top-six forward who could bring 25 goals and 65 points a year.
Instead, the production fell off fast. Okposo opened with a 19-goal, 45-point season in 65 games, then declined steadily from there.
From 2019-2021, he scored just 11 times over 87 games. He did settle into a useful role later on as a depth piece and veteran leader before being sent to the Florida Panthers, but that was a lot easier to appreciate once the contract had already done its damage.
Matt Moulson’s 5-year, $25 million deal from 2014 also belongs in the same painful category. He had a strange 2013-14 season split between the New York Islanders, Sabres, and Minnesota Wild, then returned to Buffalo on a long-term contract after the team paid up. The gamble backfired quickly.
Moulson dropped to 13 goals and 41 points, a steep fall from the 36-goal season he had posted just three years earlier. Things kept sliding from there, including an ugly 2015-16 campaign in which he scored eight goals and totaled 21 points in 81 games.
Over five years in Buffalo, he finished with 46 goals and 123 points in 297 games, while carrying one of the league’s toughest cap hits. It also ended up being the last stop of his NHL career.
Jeff Skinner rounds out the list with his 8-year, $72 million contract signed in 2019. At the time, it made sense enough: he was 26 and had already put together two 30-goal seasons. And to be fair, Skinner did score in Buffalo, piling up seasons of 40, 33, and 35 goals.
But the deal still went wrong for two major reasons. He became extremely one-dimensional, to the point that he was nearly unusable in the second and third seasons of the contract under Ralph Krueger.
Then came the endgame: a healthy scratch and eventually a buyout. The Sabres are now in the third year of that buyout, with $6.44 million against the cap to keep him off the roster.
That’s the common thread through Buffalo’s worst cap-era deals: the money stayed, but the value disappeared. The Sabres had to endure a long drought while those contracts dragged on, and the hope now is that the lessons from those misses help keep history from repeating itself.
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