Fizzling rivalry between Leafs and Sabres has become all about the tank

It's an awkward subject for Buffalo Sabres coach Dan Bylsma to broach, given recent history that he wasn't a part of.

Buffalo has, to put it charitably, been very bad the last two seasons – quite likely the worst team of the NHL's salary-cap era. The Sabres followed up a 52-point year in 2013-14 with only 54 last season and nearly set some futility records in doing so.

(To put that in perspective, even the lowly, last-place Toronto Maple Leafs are on pace for 67 points this season.)

All that losing, as is now often the case in this league, was by design. The Sabres pulled their roster apart, turning a bad team into a terrible one in order to rebuild with high picks, which worked wonderfully in landing Sam Reinhart and Jack Eichel in the last two drafts.

Bylsma, meanwhile, was airlifted in to help them finally try to win, the same way Mike Babcock was hired in Toronto and Todd McLellan in Edmonton.

Yet all of their teams remain in the league's basement.

"Where we've come from – where we were at – is over for sure," Bylsma said. "We're not a team any longer that wants to be, needs to be, is looking at being, at the bottom. We're starting to put pieces in place where we need to prove we can win hockey games."

That road up from the basement hasn't come easy. Even after rallying to beat the Leafs 4-3 in a shootout on Monday, the Sabres are guaranteed a fifth straight playoff miss and highly unlikely to even get to 80 points in a league where it usually takes 95 to make the postseason.

Monday's win was only their sixth in the last 16 games, a slide that's been typical of their season.

The kids have been all right – with Reinhart (two assists) and Eichel (one goal) both having big nights against the Leafs and Rasmus Ristolainen logging 28 minutes on defence – but many of their veterans have underperformed. The Sabres are a team lacking adequate depth; they need more offence and more defence and aren't particularly well-stocked in the American Hockey League.

The problem in the NHL is that tearing a roster down can be easy, but building it back up is difficult, as there's often little talent available in free agency and even the brightest stars usually take time to develop. The Sabres are also coming from so far back that even a 20-point improvement in the standings doesn't get them close to the postseason.

Becoming a contender is still a ways off.

But there's likely something instructive in Buffalo's struggles for Leafs management, who will be hoping their team makes similar progress next season. There's also reason in there for the rivalry to grow.

Not only did the Leafs steal Babcock away in controversial fashion last spring before the Sabres settled on Bylsma, but these teams also both went through the same scorched-earth reconstruction in roughly the same time period. The question of who "tanked" the best, and which management team put it back together correctly, will be a focal point of debate for years to come.

"[Sabres GM] Tim Murray is a real good scout and doesn't mind making a deal," said Babcock, who remains a villain of sorts among Sabres fans due to what they believe was a direct snub of their city. "[Terry] Pegula is as good an owner as you can have. Obviously getting Eichel is a real positive for their organization. He looks like he's a real player in the making. All those things set them up for success over time."

"We know that process started in September," Bylsma said of ending the rebuild talk. "That started with some of the players who we've gotten. That's [the team] we know we're still building into."

The hope in Buffalo had been that success would come quicker than this. Murray landed centre Ryan O'Reilly and netminder Robin Lehner in two nice off-season deals, and while both have played well, they haven't had enough support.

This team still has too many minutes and too many dollars allotted to veterans left over from the disaster years, which shows how tough it can be to turn over an entire roster. The good news is that Murray has cap space to work with this summer, and he can look add more "right-now" pieces if he chooses.

The Leafs aren't there yet so they'll be playing from behind.

But this is a rivalry that is desperate for the boost that climbing the standings would bring. The Sabres and Leafs haven't had good teams in the same year going way back to at least 2001, which was Dominik Hasek's last season in Buffalo and Curtis Joseph's heyday in Toronto.

Fifteen years later, the reality is there's still a long, long way to go before either team can crawl out of the abyss that they've created and get back to being a contender.

The Sabres won this night in Toronto thanks to Reinhart's shootout winner – and they have a head start – but it's anyone's guess which team starts scaring those on top first.