Buffalo Sabres Have Mastered The Heart-Attack Approach To Hockey
It’s becoming apparent that the Buffalo Sabres will be sending weak-hearted fans to an early grave in 2016-17!
Three in a row, folks.
That’s the number of one-goal games that the Buffalo Sabres have treated fans to this preseason. Three games. Two OT wins. One loss. All decided by exactly one goal.
Sharpen your swords? More like charge your defibrillators.
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Close games should not be a surprise to Sabres fans; this team did lose 11 games in OT last season, plus (by my count) another 28 games that were decided by just one goal last season.
Add up all of Buffalo’s one-goal wins, regulation losses, and OT losses from 2015-16, and what do you have? 39 one-goal affairs last season – almost half of their games!
Egad!
Feel free to go back and double-check my counting – you won’t hurt my feelings if you want to subject yourself to that stress!
And by the looks of it, Sabres fans are in for many, many, MANY more close games in 2016-17.
On the one hand, being able to say that almost half of the games they played were decided by just a single goal is something for the Buffalo Sabres to be proud of, even if it amounts to a moral victory. Even with a roster that had more holes than a hunk of Swiss cheese, the Sabres found themselves entering the third period with a chance to win a game 39 times. A few fortuitous bounces of the puck . . . a lucky break here and there . . . and who knows what the Sabres’ record could have been?
The flip side to the argument, of course, is that the Buffalo Sabres were a team that could not close out games last season. Of those 39 one-goal games, 23 wound up as either a regulation or an overtime loss. So yeah, the Sabres were in those games, but for whatever reason, they lost close games more often than they won them. It doesn’t take a college degree to figure out that good teams – playoff teams – make a habit out of finding a way to win close games, something the Sabres have yet to figure out.
Next: Derek Grant Is Making The Preseason Interesting, Indeed
Buffalo Sabres fans might be tempted to look at last season’s impressive collection of one-goal contests and feel like Kyle Okposo alone is good enough to flip a handful of those close losses into close wins. Throw a healthy Tyler Ennis into the equation, and maybe Buffalo winds up closer to 23-16 in one-goal games, rather than 16-23. The preseason success could very well be a sign that the Sabres will wind up on the positive end of many close contests in 2016-17. And I could win the lottery tomorrow! Regardless, fans are going to need a handful of Tums, a refrigerator stocked with beer, and 911 on speed-dial this season. The Cardiac Kids rule the 716!