Highlights from Sabres development camp

Watching practices is one thing, but the annual 3-on-3 tournament showed off plenty skill from Buffalo's young prospects.

A couple of confessions here.

First one: Should’ve had this one done sooner for you all, but I admit it’s summertime and focus can sometimes wane. The lure of sunshine, family, and friends is strong when both are in short supply during the season. We’ll get our act together while we’ve got a lot of time to kill until Rasmus Dahlin signs his eight-year extension and then even more time to kill until training camp.

The second, and more important, confession now.

Watching Sabres development camp practices and drills isn’t going to tell you a lot about the players. The 3-on-3 tournament gives us just a taste of what the players can and cannot do, but it’s just a handful of frames in the feature film of their careers.

Ideally what you see there are the elite players doing the kinds of things you expect them to do and generally outclass the majority of their peers. Those kinds of expectations are easy enough to meet and they were in Buffalo last week.

What’s fun about a development camp is you get to see all of these players at this particular time in their careers. They’re varying degrees of raw and while some are well-polished others are not and that’s OK. There’s also seeing how the players have grown up year-to-year. Noticing the players that are closer to being NHL-sized is easy to do, particularly if you’ve seen them in previous years.

I took some notes on what I watched and what I gathered from talking with a handful of the prospects during the week and, keep in mind, observations like this are a snapshot in time and not indicative of the rest of their careers.