By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

Matt Moulson – Signed by the Sabres in 2014

There are few success stories among the Sabres’ major free agent signings over the years. This one didn’t work out very well at all.

Matt Moulson came out of Cornell to sign as a free agent with Los Angeles in 2006, and moved to the New York Islanders in 2009. There he was put on a line with young center John Tavares, and simply thrived. The left winger scored 30 goals in his first three years with New York, and a short season stopped him from doing it again in 2013. In October of that year, Moulson was dealt to the Sabres for Thomas Vanek, and a few months later was shipped to Minnesota as part of a package.

But Moulson’s story in Buffalo wasn’t over. He signed a five-year, $25 million contract in 2014. The forward had 41 points in his first season back, and never reached those numbers again. Moulson hit bottom in 2017-18, when he scored no points in 14 games. The Sabres put him on waivers and loaned him to AHL teams for most of the next two years, he worked off the rest of his contract.

Here’s a look back at his career from 2019:

(Follow Budd on Twitter @WDX2BB)

Budd Bailey

Budd Bailey has been involved in almost every aspect of the local sports scene for the last 40 years. He worked for WEBR Radio, the Buffalo Sabres' public relations department and The Buffalo News during that time. In that time he covered virtually every aspect of the area's sports world, from high schools to the Bills and Sabres and everything in between. Along the way, Budd served as a play-by-play announcer for the Bisons, an analyst for the Stallions, and a talk-show host. He won the National Lacrosse League's Tom Borrelli Award as the media personality of the year in 2011, and was a finalist for that same award in 2017. Budd's seventh and eighth books, one on the Transcontinental Railroad and the other about Ichiro Suzuki, are scheduled to be released in the fall.

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