One of the greatest regrets for longtime Buffalo Sabres fans is the fact they never got to witness Taro Tsujimoto scoring a flurry of goals at The Aud. It's an impossible dream, of course, because the prized Japanese forward prospect didn't actually exist.
Say the name Tsujimoto in Buffalo and you're almost guaranteed to get a chuckle. At least for now. It's a fun piece of team history, and NHL lore, but it's a story that threatens to get lost in the space-time continuum as Sabres fandom wanes amid an active 14-year playoff drought.
So, the onus rests on the shoulders of older Sabres supporters to ensure the legend of Taro never dies.
The origins of Taro Tsujimoto
Former Sabres general manager Punch Imlach, who was notoriously feisty, grew frustrated with the seemingly endless NHL draft in 1974. That year's selection process lasted an excruciating 25 rounds and 247 picks across three days.
Midway through the draft, Paul Wieland from the team's PR department developed a plan to have some fun to pass the time. He told Imlach they should create a fake player, and they agreed it was important the joke didn't get spread beyond them, per Chris Ryndak of the Sabres' official website.
"We vowed to not tell anyone that it was a joke," Wieland said in 2019, explaining the didn't even tell the ownership group about the idea. "We never told the Knoxes there was no player. They kept asking, 'Is the Japanese player coming to camp?'"
So, in Round 11 with the 183rd overall pick, the Sabres selected Tsujimoto, an alleged forward from the Japan Ice Hockey League's Tokyo Katanas. And at this point you could probably already guess the team didn't exist, either. The entire thing was a ruse.
The draft concluded and Tsujimoto was listed by the NHL and news outlets among Buffalo's 12-player class headlined by Lee Fogolin and Danny Gare.
Having fooled the entire hockey world, Imlach and Wieland decided to see how far they could take the amazing prank. They prepared as if Taro would show up for training camp, assigning him a spot in the locker room and giving him the No. 13.
In 2024, Gare told Ian Mendes and Matthew Fairburn of The Athletic even the other rookies were eagerly awaiting the arrival of their Japanese teammate.
"They were making cuts and getting ready for main camp and we hadn't seen him," Gare said. "There were a lot of discussion like, 'Where is this guy?' There were rumors he had trouble getting his immigration papers and all of that. It was a good prank, man. It was quite a thing."
Eventually, it became clear Tsujimoto was never going to show up to Buffalo. The NHL invalidated the pick and removed it from the official draft record. But a legend was born.
How the NHL folktale stood the test of time
A good joke is one thing. A prank that fools a professional sports league and your own team's ownership group is taking it to another level. Carrying it on for multiple months before finally revealing the truth is the stuff of legends.
As a result, it's no surprise the Tsujimoto story gets revisited every few years. It'll probably never be topped given how formulaic the draft process has become at the highest levels of sports.
Panini America released a trading card featuring the fictional player as part of its 2010-11 NHL set. Al Muir, the company's Hockey Brand Manager, told ESPN's Chris Olds about the decision.
"The creative team was looking to come up with something special, something really unique," Muir said at the time. "The legend of Tsujimoto is one of those great hockey stories that has been perpetuated not just in Buffalo, but around the game. It's one that gets told to this day in dressing rooms and on bar stools."
In 2019, Wieland released a book titled, Taro Lives!: Confessions of the Sabres Hoaxer, which took a look at his role in Taro's creation.
Elite Prospects even has a page for Tsujimoto, which notes the fictional 5'9'', 165-pound center would now be 70 years old.
Meanwhile, you'll still see the occasional Tsujimoto jersey at the KeyBank Center if you attend a Sabres game in downtown Buffalo.
It makes sense. Current players come and go, but Taro Tsujimoto lives on.