“There’s a lot of things you learn about yourself in a year.” – Marcus Foligno
Marcus Foligno was expected to come in to this season and contribute to the Sabres both offensively and physically. Now that we’ve seen the season to completion, it’s debatable how much Foligno offered this season of either.
At the season ending locker clean out day, Foligno uttered this quote, speaking mostly to his own personal growth and realizations in his first full (albeit short) NHL season. Hopefully he learned quite a bit this season about what it takes to play at the highest level for an entire season, in terms of conditioning, effort, expectations, and production.
However, this quote can be applied to many of the other players on the Sabres roster.
What did Tyler Myers learn about himself this year? Hopefully he learned that money sometimes changes things, especially the expectations coming in to your fourth season. Maybe he learned that he needs to train a bit harder in the offseason if he wants to be successful.
Clearly, Darcy Regier learned this year that the team he had constructed to compete for a playoff spot was not good enough to do so. He immediately demonstrated his new wisdom by fully committing to a complete team rebuild, going from one that just hopes to make the playoffs to one that might struggle for a few years, but will ultimately be able to seriously compete for the Stanley Cup.
Let’s hope that younger players like Mark Pysyk, Mike Weber, Brian Flynn, and Mikhail Grigorenko learned what it takes to succeed at the highest level. All four of these guys are going to be very important to the immediate future of the Buffalo Sabres, and what they do this summer will have a big impact on where next year’s team finishes.
There’s much we can earn about ourselves, each other, and our favorite teams and players over a single season. What else do you hope the Sabres players and organization learned about themselves or each other this season?