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The Buffalo Sabres have gotten out to a mediocre start to their season, putting up a 5-4-3 record in their first dozen games of the year. But on Tuesday, the Sabres squared off against the Utah Mammoth – the same team Buffalo pulled off a blockbuster trade with this past summer when they sent star winger J.J. Peterka to Salt Lake City in exchange for winger Josh Doan and defenseman Michael Kesselring.

Peterka – who signed a five-year contract extension that pays him $7.7-million per season – has come out of the gate strongly, posting four goals and 10 points in 12 games. That’s a pace that would see Peterka posting 27 goals and 68 points. That would virtually match the 23-year-old’s career highs of 28 goals and 68 points. And that’s offense that the offense-challenged Sabres could use right about now.

But rather than doing a straight-up discussion of which team won the Peterka trade – as we’re fairly certain most people would say the Mammoth won it – we’d ask Sabres fans one simple question: which roster would you rather have right now, Buffalo’s or Utah’s?

From this writer’s perspective, 100 times out of 100, we’d choose Utah’s lineup over Buffalo’s. And it isn’t just that the Mammoth haven had a terrific start to the season – putting together an 8-4-0 mark that has them in third place in the highly-competitive Central Division – that has us choosing Utah’s group over Buffalo’s. It’s that the Mammoth’s core collection of talent is deeper, with more upside, than that of the Sabres.

Indeed, much of Utah’s core is younger than 30 years old. And most of the Mammoth’s core is 27 years old or younger. Now, this is not to say Buffalo doesn’t have its share of dynamic youngsters. But be real here – if you were offered a team that had Clayton Keller, Logan Cooley, Dylan Guenther, Nick Schmaltz and Peterka, would you turn it down in favor of a team with Tage Thompson, Jason Zucker, Josh Norris and Ryan McLeod on it? To ask the question is to answer it – you’d pick the first team every time.

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In fairness, Buffalo does have a stronger defense corps than Utah. But the difference between the two teams on ‘D’ is smaller than the difference between the two teams on offense. And that means the Mammoth have the better squad overall.

The final metric that separates the Sabres from Utah is the salary cap management of the teams. Buffalo is a poorer team than the Mammoth, and the Sabres have only $1.56 million in cap space. Utah, on the other hand, has approximately $5.3-million in space – a number that would balloon to $20.7 million by this year’s trade deadline. Mammoth GM Bill Armstrong has painstakingly put together a team that can win now and win consistently, and he deserves credit for it.

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Utah and Buffalo square off twice in the next eight days, so the comparisons between the two teams will be flying for the next week or so. But people will be revisiting the Peterka trade for many years to come, and with those comparisons will come the same debate: Who ya got – the Sabres or Mammoth? 

And the answer won’t be what Buffalo fans want to hear. 

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