Billboard near KeyBank Center calls on Sabres to trade Jack Eichel.

Sabres called out publicly.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 2 years ago
Billboard near KeyBank Center calls on Sabres to trade Jack Eichel.
Jeffery T. Barnes/AP

I must admit that I am more than a little surprised that we have yet to see Buffalo Sabres captain and star forward Jack Eichel traded this summer. The problems between Eichel and his team, the aforementioned Sabres, have now been well documented by multiple journalists and I've definitely gotten the sentiment that the overwhelming majority of hockey fans are on Eichel's side in this dispute.

Of course many of those fans may have selfish motivations for doing so, if the Sabres do in fact trade Eichel that means that another team will get the star centerman, and perhaps no group embodies that more than the fan base of the New York Rangers. For quite some time now there have been strong rumors linking Eichel to the Rangers but in spite of those rumors no deal has been consummated as of this writing, much to the dismay of fans in New York who are salivating at the prospect of a 1 - 2 punch of Eichel and Mika Zibanejad.

Among that group of fans are the hosts of the Blueshirts Breakaway podcast but unlike your average fans these guys have now gone out and they've actually done something about it. On Monday morning Ryan Mead, one of the aforementioned hosts, announced on social media that a billboard purchased by the Blueshirts Breakaway podcast would be going up on I-90, as close as possible to KeyBank Center, which is of course the home of the Buffalo Sabres.

The billboard, which is epic by the way, features a pretty clever pun about the neck injury that has caused the whole debacle between Eichel and the Sabres and also prominently features the #FreeJack hashtag, which is obviously calling on the Sabres to trade Eichel to the Rangers as quickly as possible.

Not only is this a tremendous marketing gimmick for their podcast, but it is also a tremendous way to poke fun at the Buffalo Sabres themselves, whom I suspect will be none too happy about this billboard going up next to their arena. Here's a look at a picture of the billboard:

And here is the original design that they wanted, one they were unable to use:

Source: