Great Article

[BuffalOhio]

Sportsnet.ca

 

Product of their environment

May 15, 2006

 

Steve Milton

 

Nobody expected the Buffalo Sabres to be where they are in the Stanley Cup playoffs; and that is what makes the team dangerous. Hands up all those who predicted last September that the Buffalo Sabres would be in the Final Four. Uh, huh. S'pose you had the Hurricanes right there with them, eh?

 

FYI, the Liars' Club meets every second Tuesday.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, it has become clear that the Sabres were not, and are still not, any kind of flash in the pan. They may Staal on this next bit of rough road, but this is a machine built for long overland travel, not a drag strip. If they don't make it past Carolina next week, they'll challenge again next year.

 

All season the Sabres have been excused mostly as a team which got a head start on the new NHL; and they did. They had lots of young, organziation-developed talent which was not earning a lot of money; most of them played somewhere last year, and a lot of them played together in Rochester; they were fast and a bit small, because the previous economic system left them only that option; and they were able to keep the bulk of their team together, which let them hit the ground with their feet moving.

 

And, because they'd been in such playoff peril for so many years because of bad Decembers or Novembers (much of that based on goaltending slumps) they had become accustomed to playing every game as if their hair was on fire. This is a critical element of the new era: as talent has became more evenly spread and goals easier to score, there were fewer automatic wins, so sustained speed and effort became key. You can no longer nurse a first-period lead safely to bed. Talent can no longer work a period and take the rest of the night off.

 

This all fit into the Sabres' existing M.O., and when Darcy Regier and Lindy Ruff had the foresight to bring in college coaches to work on the do's and don'ts of no red line passing, and had NHL referees drop in to handle pre-season scrimmages, well they were that much quicker out of the chute.

 

But being ready for the new system is not the same as being able to sustain the mastery of it as long as the Sabres have. It is time to recognize that the Sabres are not an aberration which will automatically fall back to the rest of the pack. They are not some kind of accidental chemistry experiment which will blow up after a season.

 

What we may be looking at in the Sabres -- and in the Oilers, and in a few others who have always worked in gotta-stretch-the-resources mode -- are the New England Patriots of the NHL.

 

It's a little early yet for complete comparisons, since the Pats have a recent history every other sports franchise can only drool over. But the concept of a bunch of high-spirited, workaholic, evenly-balanced talents who can eventually be replaced by similar types with the right attitude, is one that the Patriots have perfected; and others have tried to copy.

 

If we don't think of the Sabres as talented enough to be a long-term elite team, then we need to change our long-held notion of talent, because it's outmoded.

 

J.P. Dumont may not be Daniel Alfredsson, but who would you rather have this year? Or next? In the previous era, Daniel Briere wouldn't have been the No. 1 centre on more than a couple of other teams in the league. But how about now? Ditto, right down the line. Jochen Hecht has always been under-rated by everyone, except those who see him play every day (which because of frequent injury, isn't quite often enough).

 

This is a team which had more 40 point scorers (11) than any other team in the NHL and that depth is playing an enormous, if subtle, role this post-season.

 

Which line does an opposing coach play his checkers against? When they're fully healthy, and often even when they're not, all four Sabres lines can score, and check. So when he's got the chance Lindy Ruff will often counter only the opponents' first line with a desired match-up -- usually Derek Roy, Mike Grier and Chris Drury -- then figure his team's depth can win the battles of the other three lines, no matter who plays against whom.

 

Think of that so-called checking line for a minute and you'll realize just how atypical this team's make-up is on the ice. Drury, the centre, has scored some of the biggest playoff goals in recent memory; Grier, is more of a checking-line prototype but scored the first goal of the Ottawa series just 35 seconds in, and had a huge goal in the Philly series; and Roy, the left winger, has creative offensive skills, is barely taller than a peewee and hasn't played left wing since he was an atom.

 

But because so many of the forwards on the Sabres are possessed of multiple skills sets, it works and will continue to work. And if it doesn't, the parts are replaced or rotated.

 

When Thomas Vanek let his defensive awareness lapse early in the Ottawa series he was first benched, then press-boxed even though he had the potential to score the kind of goals which could have decided the series. With Lindy Ruff spending a lot of time with Rochester coach Randy Cunneyworth during the lockout, the consistent all-round-game attributes stretch deep into the minor league system, and there were a couple of able replacements -- Jiri Novotny got the nod this time -- at the ready. That's another advantage of talent equalization: it creates competition, thereby limiting lassitude, up and down the lineup.

 

Not that the Sabres don't have their leading men.

 

Briere is clearly the pilot light of this blast furnace, but he missed more than two months of the regular season and the Sabres proceeded quite nicely without him. Ryan Miller has been brilliant. Jay McKee may have the slowest footspeed among the rearguards but was the very first NHL defender with the savvy to recognize that, being unable to ambush guys in front of the net, it would be smarter to block passes and shots before they got to the front of the net and became lethal weapons. He led the NHL in blocked shots, finishing nearly 20 per cent higher than the runner-up. Speaking of which, Drury blocked 10 shots in the Ottawa series, just four fewer than the entire Ottawa forward brigade added up!

 

And it's helped that the officials have been able to continue their commitment toward the new game. Otherwise, the Sabres forwards might not have been able to make the Senators' Big Three defencemen look so flummoxed.

 

The beauty of all this is that there is no fan base which deserves this ride more than Buffalo. Their team has never won a Cup and made the finals only twice in 36 years of existence; their team went bankrupt; the club was rumoured to be moving; they were scorched by the Brett Hull goal seven years ago; people are still emigrating from, rather than arriving in, town; the ecoomy struggles; there are seas of obsolete factories and warehouses; and every time anyone outside of town thinks of a successful Buffalo sports franchise they think of them only in grossly negative terms, as in "Wide Right!"

 

At heart, Buffalo is a blue collar city with blue collar pride and the Sabres are restoring that pride. They've retained their blue collar ethic. As McKee says, "We're humbly confident." It's an attractive combination.

 

The excitement on the shores of Lake Erie has been palpable for months. Early games were poorly-attended -- there were 4,000 or so no-shows on Thanksgiving Monday for Sydney Crosby's first appearance at the HSBC -- but once the Sabres, and the NHL, showed that they were serious, they deeply-rooted fan base re-arrived in delirious, deafening droves.

 

It's not an overnight success story because so many of the elements of it were already in place, but even if they go out this round, the Sabres are a success story. And they will last a lot longer than overnight, a lot longer than this special spring.

[sabregoats]

Awesome article

thanks

[Clayford27]

What an amazing article! And so true. Thanks for posting! :)

 

~Dianne~

[Duck Farcey Tucker]

A good read....Bonus points for, "flummoxed".

[cdexchange]

Beautiful.