It became official on Tuesday, April 8. The Buffalo Sabres were officially eliminated from the NHL playoffs for the 14th straight season. Fans and pundits are once again analyzing what’s wrong and why, with everything from poor management to a lack of urgency and consistency.
There are plenty of bones to pick with the Blue and Gold. One of the most obvious is how the Sabres start off seasons on the wrong foot, accumulating missed opportunities during hockey campaigns’ early months. One of the most notorious examples was this season, when Buffalo went on a 13-game losing streak from Thanksgiving Eve until just before Christmas.
That run of consecutive squandered points killed the team's playoff chances for yet another year. 13 games represent 26 points, which if the Sabres won all those matchups instead of lost them would give them 102 points, as of this writing, rather than 76. That’s more than enough for a postseason run. Instead, Sabres’ fans must decide who else to root for in the playoffs, the 14th year in a row.
ESPN has a list of Buffalo Sabres’ seasons, all the way back to 2002-03, with every win and loss dating to the Ryan Miller era. One consistent pattern over the franchise’s 14-year playoff drought is the string of early losing streaks. This year, Buffalo lost nine of the first 16 games from the season opener on Oct. 4 until Veterans Day. That was before the 13-game losing streak from late November to late December.
In 2023-24, the Blue and Gold didn’t go on any prolonged losing streak, but failed to put together any winning streak, unable to win more than two or three contests at a time. During the 2022-23 campaign, the Sabres went back to extended strings of defeats, losing eight matchups in a row from Nov. 4-Nov. 19. In 2021-22, Buffalo lost 19 games from Oct. 14-Dec. 11.
It's also fascinating to look at how the team fared during the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons, when Buffalo went to the Conference Finals against the Carolina Hurricanes and Ottawa Senators, respectively. Buffalo's record was 7 wins and 4 losses in Oct. 2005. In 2006, the Sabres didn’t lose a game from Oct. 4 until Oct. 28 and even then, picked up a point in a shootout.
Good teams, including the pre-drought Sabres, win early and often, piling up points they can bank on later in the year, instead of chasing opponents in the standings. Like a smart pollical candidate who gets their supporters to the polls early in case there’s bad weather on Election Day, winning rosters have their playoff spots locked up by mid-season.
If the Sabres could learn how to win again consistently in October and November and not just in March and April, they might play games in May and June once more.