Inside the NHL: Raise your sticks to the late Paul Wieland, PR head and funny man of Aud-era Sabres

Because when you celebrate the life of the Sabres' original public relations director, you better laugh. Loudly. At him and with him. 

When they made Paul Wieland, trust me when I tell you they threw away the mold. 

Wieland was a newspaper reporter – including a stint in the late 1960s at this very publication – before taking a job at General Motors in New York City. It was ex-journalism colleague Dick Johnston, who became a Hall of Fame reporter for The News covering the first 15 years of the Sabres, who reached out to Wieland and urged him to apply for the position to come back as lead PR man for the city's new NHL franchise.

As Wieland wrote in his 2008 book, "Then Perreault said to Rico ... The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told," he originally said he wasn't interested because "my wife would kill me if I came home and suggested we move for the third time in three months."

As it turned out, of course, Wieland took the job and was one of the jacks-of-all-trades for the organization for 25 years. In the early days, he was a practice goalie. It was Wieland who snuck into the Montreal Canadiens' dressing room to measure Ken Dryden's pads and found them to have an illegal width, a fact the Sabres used to get a penalty on the Habs late in Game 5 of the 1973 playoff series.

It was Wieland who created Taro Tsujimoto, the fake Japanese player the Sabres drafted in the 11th round in 1974. And it was Wieland who turned April Fools' Day into a cottage industry, with years of fake announcements from the Sabres that often caught unsuspecting media members.

The Sabres one year were going to unveil "Sliderex," a fake plastic ice, in the Aud. A local TV anchor in the '70s even reported it exclusively on March 31, prompting Wieland to admonish him for breaking the release date. Never mind the whole thing was made up.

Wieland once announced the Sabres were going to be the new "America's Team" and even had a fake Time magazine cover. He also had a note about it from President Reagan on mock White House stationery – and famously heard from the White House that was a no-no.

In the acknowledgments to the book, Wieland thanked Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame board member John Boutet and said Boutet "spurred him on."

How did that happen? It started when Boutet read "Counsel in the Crease," a 2005 book by Sabres general counsel Robert Swados that was filled with factual errors about the early days of the Sabres.

Boutet took to Amazon – where his user name was "Taro Tsujimoto" – and wrote a review.

"I said, 'Somebody should have been here to fact check this' and I started to list a couple things, glaring things that were just wrong," Boutet said Saturday. "That's what they needed. And my last sentence was, 'Paul Wieland, where are you?' "

Two weeks later, Wieland emailed Boutet (who didn't initially believe it was the real Wieland). They talked on the phone and Wieland explained he had read Swados' book and had the same feeling and was thinking about doing a book of his own. Boutet, a lifelong Sabres fan, implored him to do it because of the stories he knew Wieland could tell.

"He goes, 'If I start writing this thing, would you be my fact-checker?' A couple weeks later, he sent me the first two chapters of the book. I couldn't believe it," Boutet said. "And we just went from there. Before you know it, the book was done. We did a CD in the back of the book and interviewed old Sabres and it was a joy."

Wieland offered to pay Boutet for his services, but Boutet declined. Wieland had a better idea for his new friend, one of the area's premier collectors of Buffalo sports memorabilia.

In the first year, the Sabres awarded engraved pewter mugs to players for various accomplishments. The first preseason goal in franchise history, by veteran Billy Inglis, was worthy of a mug but the team put the wrong year on it (1971 instead of 1970). Wieland had a new one made for Inglis but kept the original on his desk at the Aud and at home until he presented it to Boutet for his collection nearly 50 years later.

Boutet then brought Wieland to a game in the alumni suite at KeyBank Center, where he had not attended a game in years. Rick Martin and Rene Robert were there. So was Larry Playfair and several others.

"It was so cool to see him just reacting to these guys that he saw on a daily basis when he was working," Boutet said. "Just a riot, a fun time."

Wieland and former executive Fred Hunt were responsible for hiring Rick Jeanneret to do Sabres broadcasts in 1971 after his stint with the Niagara Falls Flyers. Wieland was the longtime executive producer of Sabres telecasts and was instrumental in the Sabres becoming the first team to get home games on cable. He was an intermission host, and often a color analyst with Jeanneret and Ted Darling.

Wieland also hosted a WGR Radio postgame show called "The Fourth Period" with longtime station legend Stan Roberts. One night after a 1977 game against the Atlanta Flames at the Aud, a 12-year-old me was the guest reviewing the game.

After Roberts' first question, he asked for Wieland's response to my answers: "He's doing fine," Wieland said. "Keep going."

Wieland kept tabs on me when he learned in the mid-'80s I had shown up at The News to be a high school sports clerk. He congratulated me when I was hired as a full-timer. One night in 1991, the paper needed a sub at a Sabres game and sent me over to the Aud. Wieland saw my name on his list and cracked, "We're letting anybody in now I see." 

In his later years, Wieland regularly would correspond with me about college basketball. He was pleased to no end to see St. Bonaventure get out of its doldrums with '70s hero Jim Baron in charge. He also had to grudgingly accept the times when Canisius was doing well, and even beating his beloved Bonnies in the Reilly Center. 

"You got us again," he memorably emailed your humble Canisius grad correspondent after one Griffs win in Olean in the early 2000s. If you're waiting for a punchline, there is none. That was the entire email he sent me.

Like most folks in the Southern Tier, Wieland was shaken to his core by the 2003 St. Bonaventure scandal, that he properly laid at the feet of deposed university president Robert Wickenheiser. 

He wrote a book on it called "The Father ... The Son... and the Sweet Sixteen: A college's basketball disaster." Sent me a copy in the mail in 2011 and told me to let him know if I had any questions. This was a story I covered voluminously at the time, and I still learned a tremendous amount from Wieland's book.

Wieland loved college athletics and the college atmosphere, but didn't have much good to say about the business end of either. They were necessary evils. He loved journalism and teaching, did it well into his early 80s. The outpouring of grief – as well as adulation and happy memories – from former Bona students on social media the last few days was striking. 

I would hear from Wieland much more about basketball than the Sabres. But I would hear about hockey, too. Wieland would wonder how we could continue to churn out stories on a terrible team. His disdain for former team president Larry Quinn and, later, for the tanking Pegulas made me part of a few priceless rants about hockey. They were hilarious.

"The amount of people that he helped and he touched is amazing. It was far beyond hockey. He just didn't know hockey people," Boutet said. "He helped students, 18-year-olds, start to determine their future. It's really a nice story of life."

Wieland, who was 84, is survived by his wife, Betsy, and three daughters. A celebration of his life is expected next month. Let the laughter and the stories roll.

Hope Sabres' remote charade is over

Here's hoping Saturday's Sabres game in San Jose is a historic one. Not for anything happening on the ice. But for what's happening in the broadcast booth.

The visiting side of SAP Center will be empty, with Dan Dunleavy and Rob Ray calling the game from Buffalo. The Sabres' MSG crew has done the majority of road games on site this year after two years riddled by pandemic restrictions and financial decisions. But some games this year, including this California trip, were done remotely.

The rest of the season, with all games in the Eastern time zone, will be done on site and that's a good thing. The Sabres need to do every game next year live, the standard that most teams have now returned to.

The quality of remote broadcasts can drop precipitously for a variety of factors, many out of control of the MSG crew. While Tuesday's game in Los Angeles was not too bad, Thursday's telecast out of Anaheim was quite uneven. At one point, the audio of a Tage Thompson shot pinging the goalpost was clearly heard before we ever saw him shooting the puck. XM Radio listeners complained they heard no hockey/arena sounds at all during parts of the game behind Dunleavy's call.

Dunleavy and Ray, who work dressing rooms and news conferences during morning skates to collect information they can't get when they are not on the road, are left in an often-impossible spot to call the game. Many times, they have no idea who a penalty is on because they can't see behind the play since they are not in the building. They can miss injuries, players leaving for the dressing room, and when a goalie is pulled for an extra attacker and leaving his net empty.

It's a terrible look for the Sabres and MSG. It needs to stop next season. Another item for new COO John Roth to put on his burgeoning to-do list.

Around the boards

• Ryan O'Reilly to Toronto? Fair enough. We'll see him here Tuesday night when the Leafs are in town. He can be a solid role player for Toronto, a key faceoff guy for the postseason. We'll see how much he has left. Leafs GM Kyle Dubas doesn't have much left in the way of draft capital, with no first-round pick this year and no second-rounders for the next three years.

Probably doesn't matter. Dubas knows he's toast unless he gets deep in the playoffs this year so he went for it. Fair enough.

• The trade deadline is such overkill in the NHL, a made-for-Canadian TV creation with only a few real impactful moves made but dozens talked about that never happen. And it overvalues players immensely. Seriously now, since when did acquiring Columbus' Vladislav Gavrikov become the key to some team's playoff hopes? But it's all about filling TV time and web click rates. It's absurd.

• The season is over for Williamsville native Andrew Poturalski at Seattle's Coachella Valley team of the AHL. Poturalski, who led the AHL in points last year and won a Calder Cup with Chicago, had surgery last week on a lower-body injury suffered Jan. 26 and will be out four to six months.

Poturalski had 11 goals, a team-high 31 assists and was third on the Firebirds with 42 points this season while playing for former Sabres and Penguins coach Dan Bylsma.