Time to play armchair Darcy!

These predictions are based partly on what i'd like to happen and partly on what previous history suggests will happen.

Coaching:  Keep Lindy Ruff.  There are a few reasons for this.  First, he works well with the rest of management, and i don't see a total turnover when winning a division and losing to a team that is poor matchup.  He's shown time and time again that he can outcoach other teams.  Most importantly, if we fire him, someone else in the East with crappy coaching(or the devils) will hire him and he'll dominate us for about a decade and win stanley cups.  Being as TEAM CANADA puts him right below Yzerman's best friend Mike Babcock in terms of coaching skill, he can't be that bad.  I like him mainly because he has shown that unlike many coaches, he can completely change his coaching style to fit his team.  We could shuffle the rest of the coaching staff around, but i wouldn't know enough about those things to have an opinion.

The Sabres only won the division this year because of their consistancy (which i attribute to coaching.)  Their overall talent isn't much better than any of the other members of the division but all those teams had two or more lengthy suckage streaks (whereas we just had one ten-game stretch.)  It's not like we are in a market that demands a stanley cup every year so i'm satisfied with an average of 1.5 playoff series a year, as long as we are competitive in all of them.  Sure, I'd like to win stanley cups every year, but I don't see that happening.

Goal & Defense:  Looks like we are either going to sign and promote Jhonas Enroth or a get a stopgap (Garon?) as a backup, resign Henrik Tallinder and add Mike Weber (His statline is very good and he's comparable to Toni Lydman in skill set) on defense.  I don't see Craig Rivet being offloaded so he'll have to be #5 defensemen this year with the two-headed Chris Butler/Andrej Sekera defense hydra.

Forwards: Add Tyler Ennis, (please?) resign Patrick Kaleta, Matt Ellis, Tim Kennedy, Cody McCormick (as the replacement mair), Mike Grier(unless he retires, in which case sign him as a coach (or scout, or anything)) as well as a random other free agent forward.  (so we can have one NHL free agent i suppose) 

That'd give us 2 goalies, 7 D, 14 forwards, with stafford on a short leash to a trade which would drop us to 13 forwards.
Most those resigns (except tallinder(~3) and possibly Grier(~1.5)) will be in the <1 million range, and we have $13,497,143 of cap, so that actually leaves us 1-2 million to sign a random free agent.

Trades: I don't see roy/pommenville to be tradable until 2012, as the free agent market is overrated in general and also not very deep this year.  We're either going to get a much worse player or a salary anchor if we trade them this year, and we don't have the cap to deal with either of those this year.  I really think Tim Connolly was just tired, it's been four years since he's played anything close to a full season, and he's probably fatigued from all the games he played, though he'd never admit it.  The only trade plan i might accept is trading pommenville for picks and prospects and signing Poni from the penguins who couldn't possibly afford to resign him.  Free agent centers don't exist and are signed to rediculous contracts (see Matt Stajan, as well as however many billion dollars some team gives Patrick Marleau) and therefore our only hope in the center department is Luke Adam.  Ennis can definatly replace Roy, but not until next year at least.

Montador probably deserves a short extension, but it'll probably be a boring offseason being as we have too many NHL-level prospects, and no reason to sign older free agents when we have similiarly skilled young players.

Our larger players are still 1-2 years down the road, sadly (unless you want Mark Mancari), so we'll just have to deal with our team being as short as the Montreal Canadians next year.

 This leaves:

Vanek-Roy-Kennedy

Hecht-Connolly-Pommenville

Grier-Ennis-Free Agent (or Stafford until he is traded or stops sucking)

Kaleta-Gaustad-Ellis

Myers-Tallinder

Montador-Weber

Rivet - Butler/Sekera

Extras: McCormick, whichever of Butler/Sekera isn't playing

The reason i don't write more fanposts is that they quickly turn in to comprehensive essays.