I'm going to do it again. The Sabres have almost perfectly followed the Kings rebuilding model. It's scary how similar they are. Let's just start with the timeline. The Kings hired Lombardi and truly began their rebuild at the 07 draft.
2007-Hickey (4th overall)
2008-Doughty (2nd overall
2009-BSchenn (5th overall)
Now let's compare to Buffalo..
2013-Ristolainen (8th overall)
2014-Reinhart (2nd overall)
2015-?????
In 2009 the Kings on the back of a young Kopitar,Brown,Quick,Simmonds,Doughty,etc.. played their way to the #5 pick in the Tavares/Hedman draft. Two elite players. Sound familiar?
If you dig deeper it gets even scarier how similar they are. The Kings focused on the back end. They developed their D-men. To start the rebuild they had drafted 4 D-men in the top 60 of the 07-08 drafts.
Hickey
Doughty
Teubert
Voynov
In addition to those 4 D-men, they had Jack Johnson. A young veteran D-man. Let's look at Buffalo.
Ristolainen
Zadorov
Pysyk
McCabe
And our Jack Johnson, is Myers.
Finally, let's look at the players we had BEFORE we announced the rebuild:
Girgensons,Ennis,Myers,Grigorenko,Pysyk,McCabe and Armia.
The kings..
Kopitar,Brown,Bernier,Lewis,Johnson,Quick,Purcell,etc..
Maybe this last one is just me being a complete homer and a child. But the best part of this? The Kings best center is a young man drafted in the early teens from an obscure nation. Kopitar--->Girgensons
The only true difference is the goaltending. We don't have the stable of young goalies that the Kings had.