The Sabres abysmal start to the 2024-25 season is far worse than you think

There’s no way to sugarcoat this: The Buffalo Sabres are a bad hockey team that put itself in the absolute worst situation as it returns to the States. Failing to find a top-six scorer is tanking this team, but it goes beyond that, as Jason Moser of Buffalo Hockey Now was kind enough to remind us. 

In his piece, Moser spends time talking about injuries that are already starting to pile up on what should be an ultra-young season. But in many ways, it’s not. Injuries to key players like JJ Peterka, Nicolas Aube-Kubel, and Zach Benson have set the stage for the 2024-25 season to start in the same way as 2023-24.

Remember when injuries plagued the lineup early last year, and the team never recovered? The only difference was, of course, that the Sabres at least didn’t look terrible against the New York Islanders in Game 2 of the season. This year, they were awful in Games 1 and 2 against the Devils, with the LA Kings on deck, a team that is also no joke. 

Will the Sabres get it right in the month of October?

They and their fans better hope things go right because there’s a lot at stake here for general manager Kevyn Adams. It’s hard to claim that head coach Lindy Ruff has run out of talent or if the game passed him up, considering what he did with the Devils just two seasons ago, so should the Sabres hand Adams his walking papers at any point this season, it’s hard to see the same happening to Ruff. 

But if October is a downer, just be ready for perhaps the longest season of the 2020s in so many ways, and that includes the infamous 2020-21 season that saw the Blue and Gold lose 18 straight games. One reason is that we all could have anticipated bad hockey from this team at that point in time, but these days, we were supposed to see at least a halfway-relevant team. 

Should these three injuries prove to be long-term or if they continue to pile up, fate help this team. Because if we’re entering what looks like an unforgiving schedule throughout the rest of October while calling up marginal NHL or even AHL talent, the Sabres will find themselves in the Atlantic Division’s basement really quickly. At this point, none of us saw things being this bad so early in the year.