Last year my first article with Sabres Noise was a dive into the Sabres heavyweights. I wrote about how scary it must be to play against a team with multiple forwards and defensemen that are 6'2+ and typically weighting around 200+ pounds. In my head at the time I felt we may have been scary to play against. At times we were! But that was a rare occasion.
If you're like me, you were probably yelling at the TV when the opposing team would poke UPL or Levi after the whistle and no one on the team would do anything about it. Ranting to friends and family saying "Why won't they use their size! Just hit him!!!" It was frustrating to watch, on top of many other things with the team.
Thankfully, Kevyn Adams heard some of our prayers, and brought us players who can really pack a punch. Not only players, he also brought us a coach who likes to make his players pack a punch too. This season we will see many punches being packed by more players than just Dahlin, Cozens, Greenway and... and... and a couple of the other guys!
This is going to help the Sabres be fun to watch again
It will be the speed and skill of modern hockey combined with the physicality and brute force of old time hockey. Can't the season start already? In the 2023-24 NHL season, the Sabres ranked 23rd out of 32 teams in hits total by team.
We had a total of 1,606 hits. Meanwhile, the Stanley Cup Champions, the Florida Panthers, led the league with a combined 2,120 hits. Buffalo was also seventh in the league in Hits Taken with a whopping 1,951. Ouch.
Lastly with Shots Blocked, the Sabres were 26th in the league with a combined total of 1,059. We weren't the worst in the league when it comes to total hits and blocks, but we certainly were far from being among the best. Let's take a look at the Recap, onto the next page
(Statistics pulled from moneypuck.com)