By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

No. 16: March 23, 1999 – The Sabres trade Mike Wilson to Florida for Rhett Warrener and a 1999 fifth-round draft choice (Ryan Miller).

One time a Sabre scout went up to Ontario to see a junior defenseman named Mike Wilson play. “Why can’t we ever get guys like that?” the scout asked after the game, for Wilson was a dominating presence. It took a while – Buffalo had to trade for his rights down the road – but Wilson eventually became a Sabre.

The defenseman was a regular on the 1997 team that won a division title, but by the spring of 1999 there was a feeling that he wasn’t going to live up to his potential. Perhaps some other team had an interest in trying to help him do that. Florida was that team, and agreed to trade Rhett Warrener and a draft pick to the Sabres for Wilson. There were no complaints about this swap in Buffalo from the start. Wilson spent most of the rest of his career playing in the minors or overseas. Warrener was a great fit for the Sabres, a rugged defenseman for four-plus years here who helped the team reach the NHL Finals in 1999.

However, it was the low draft choice that made this something special. Buffalo took a chance on a goaltender named Ryan Miller in the fifth round. He soon became one of the nation’s top college goalies at Michigan State. Once Miller joined the Sabres, he was part of some very good teams in the 2000s and ranked as one of the best goalies in the world.

(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.

2 Comments

Jon

These Buffalo’s biggest trades posts are great and I want to read them all. But it would be great if your webmaster could put some internal links on each post that connected them to the previous post Trade #17 and the next post trade #15 so I could move from one to the next easily. It would make navigation so much easier and generate a lot more page views on the whole series.

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Budd Bailey

Hi, Jon. Glad you are enjoying this. It was a fun series to write back in 2019, but it would be a lot of work to link it as you wish. I have a better plan. Go to the authors’ page and look my name up. Then go to page 39 of my stories (you should be able to figure out how to find it in the URL), and you’ll see the series start with the No. 1 trade. You can go from there. Hope this helps. — Budd

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