Breaking down 05-06 as a series of best of 7s

[Stoner]

OK, here's a (probably) totally meaningless stat born out of too much time on my hands and too much Sabres Fever on my brain. :)

 

Bear with me. If you start with game 1 of the season and consider that the first game of a best of seven series, the Sabres to date have played 12 series. (You figure it just like a regular series -- once you win or lose a fourth game, the series ends. So each series is not necessarily seven games long. Am I overexplaining this?) The Sabres are 9-3, with two of the losses coming early in the year and the third in mid-January.

 

To illustrate how incredibly consistent the Sabres have been and how few and far between the losses have been, two of the series losses came in the seventh game -- at home to Ottawa on November 2 (no reason to mention the score) and at home to Phoenix on January 12, a shootout loss. By the way, with the win over Toronto the other night, the Sabres are now up one game to nothing in their next fictional series.

 

It's much tougher to look at this stat in previous years because of ties, but by comparison, in 98-99, the Sabres won five series, lost two and had five others go undecided because of ties. That year, the Sabres won four of those series early in the season. So a team that didn't appear to be consistent enough to have success in the playoffs proved everyone wrong. Let's hope the 05-06 Sabres don't do the opposite!

 

Come to think of it, in lieu of breaking down the season in 10-game segments the way coaches usually do, breaking it down into imagined playoff series might be an interesting way of keeping teams motivated. And when you bomb out onto the ice after a boring 3-1 win over Columbus on a Tuesday night in January, you'll make everyone wonder what the hell you're smoking.