Close your eyes and look around. What I’m about to tell you is invariably true. You know this person — you know a lot of them, in fact. They’re a part of what makes us who we are — sports fans, no, Sabres fans. They are the reason we toil and agonize, almost always in vain, for brief moments of euphoria through which we can vicariously live.
They’re your co-workers, your ex-lovers, your neighbors, the strangers you meet in places like the golf course or the bar. Over time — over the course of our lives, they tend to melt together into this faceless, nameless mold — a mass of memories and anecdotes that make up who were aren’t, that make up exactly why we are something different and how we describe ourselves.
These people, without their knowledge and often without ours, motivate us to strive for exactly what it is we want that they seemingly do not: modern glory. Modern glory, I said, not glory like an ancient conquering armor or a benevolent king, not glory like the great understandings of science or religion — no, modern glory; suburban, bite-sized, freeze-dried and ready for the drive-thru. Happiness in simple little bunches that make us imagine, real-or-not, the greatness of ourselves. The rise of our own value.
All of that through sports. Through a team like the god damned Sabres, and their god damned endless cupless streak.
The people I’m talking about are the cowardly co-workers, or the ex-lovers who never quite seem content with their own capability to achieve happiness. I’m talking about the co-worker at the desk next to you who has lots of tangible complaints about procedure but never has the confidence to raise the issue with management. Because when it gets real — where the metal meets the meat, there is too much to lose to risk real change. I’m talking about the ex-girlfriend who can never convince herself that she’s sufficiently beautiful even when she is remarkably stunning. Because when it gets real — when all the chips are down, there is too much truth in the past, too many insecurities to rely upon.
And isn’t that, after all, the way a sports fan views its team, the way we view the Sabres? Hoping, blindly, that this will be the job that turns into a career, that fulfills us, that this will be the girl that turns into the wife, that completes us, that this will be the year that our team makes it all the way, that justifies us.
In a way, we are always chasing. But sports, unlike jobs and partners and the other complications of our life, are much more in our control. If I choose to quit my job tomorrow for example, I’d soon be homeless and penniless with an uncertain future. If I choose to stop caring about my wife, I’d soon be lonely, loveless and distraught. But we choose the conditions under which we root for our sports teams. We choose when and why it is that we’re fans.
And inevitably, in sports we are at our most vulnerable soon after the final loss of the season. Think on it: There are times in the middle of a job or a relationship when you are almost certain that it is not going to work — when you hear the co-worker bark and then cower, or the significant other does or says something that you can’t reconcile. But it is never really until the end, until the passing moments after the fact, that we really come to terms with what it was that needed to be different, that didn’t give us that slice of happiness we wanted. We are then with sports, like in the rest of our lives — like when our job becomes our former job, when our girlfriend becomes our ex-girlfriend, left to pick up the pieces. We are left, essentially, to evaluate what went wrong.
It’s difficult to ascertain what went wrong with any individual sports team because the question has any number of answers. But the emotions have died a bit now, the dust has settled. And looking back at the 2010-11 Sabres, here’s what went wrong:
Hockey, more than any other sport, and a town like Buffalo more than most towns still believes in the mysticism that surrounds just trying, really, really hard. Though most of the grown-up sports world has now admitted that it is very rarely the case that players and teams lose because they don’t try hard enough, it is much easier to blame our collective failings on someone’s lack of effort rather than a collective lack of talent. This year, though, was a tale of two seasons.
The first season was most certainly the typical Buffalo sports season: An underachieving, overpaid team of “effortless” and “soft” players who kept losing in one unthinkable way after another. This was definitely the “they don’t try hard enough” kind of season in the making. The second half of the season, though, was a team of overachieving, gutsy hard-workers doing whatever it took to win. “Lunch pal” guys, and the like. Virtually the same roster, just with different results. And when they were defeated at last in 7 games by the Flyers, it was about a lack of experience and an unusual optimism for next year. A few too-proud curmudgeon’s grumbled about Brad Boyes and playoff softness, sure, but the great majority of the Buffalo sports community seemed to ignore the Jerry Sullivan collective at long last.
The truth, of course, probably lies somewhere in between. There’s reason for optimism of course, but there is also reason to look at the team with an analytical eye and remember that there was a great deal of bad that preceded the good in the same season, and what it all means.
The Sabres have been essentially the same team for the last four years or so, except that they’ve never really been the same on-the-ice product. Every year when we’ve expected the same result out of them as the previous year, they’ve come out with a totally different route to the same ultimate conclusion. For the first year Buffalo was scrappy but lacked talent, made too many mistakes and looked staggered by the loss of their captains. The next year the team seemed good enough, a playoff team for sure, and then they lost a yet unproven Ryan Miller to a disastrous late season injury and all was deemed gone. The next year the team reverted into a defensive shell, protected Miller by any means necessary, and it allowed him to play at an all-world level that boosted the Sabres into a lofty spot in the playoffs where they ran into a vicious buzz saw. They were probably not as good as their place in the standings indicated. This past year the Sabres started terribly slow in the face of high local expectations and surprising warmth from the media, before making a fantastic run from the basement to the 7th spot in the latter half of the season.
If you predicted that path four years ago, you deserve some sort of major award.
Because of this, it is almost impossible to rely on monotony as descriptive of the Sabres woes. What ailed the team three years ago certainly does not now, and, despite the best efforts of tweeters and message boards every where, change, as subtle as it may be, has impacted the look of the Sabres over time. So what went wrong? What was it that saw the team exit after the first round instead of hoisting Lord Stanley for that first time?
Offensive: There was not enough of it. Can it be remedied in one or two seasons? Yes, but probably not. Although Buffalo was in the top half offensively, their output was inconsistent at best, with long stretches of strong performances against cold teams followed by discouragingly low-scoring affairs against hot teams. Despite Ruff’s withdrawal into a more conservative game style in the last few years, the most successful teams in the league have gone scoring-heavy. Indeed, the best Sabres teams right out of the lockout were this way. Buffalo has always been a team that looks to find the “moneyball” advantages in hockey — the low-risk, high value pockets of talent that are undervalued elsewhere. Right now, that seems to come in the form of stopping the puck and puck possession. But does it win you playoff series? What the Sabres need, truthfully, are two players on an already stacked team. They don’t need a major overhaul. But what they do need is to realize that the Pominville, Stafford, Roy, Vanek collective needs to be a part of the “depth” in the conversation about playoff scoring depth. What Buffalo needs is one bonafide superstar — an 80 to 90 point per season player, and one bonafide depth scorer, another 20-goal per year guy who makes his living in the second season. The difference between Stafford and Bergenheim in the regular season is ineffectual; in the playoffs it may be the difference between two rounds. While Tyler Ennis and Nathan Gerbe are the rising stars of the organization, these two players need to be actual additions, not the gambling on potential of players already on the rosters. Additions need to be additions.
Defensive: The Sabres defensive system seems to be at the cutting edge of the league. It is a puck-possession oriented — an active in the offensive zone style that is often high risk, high reward. The high risk end has been previously protected by the Sabres high quality of defense. A new defensive corps this season saw some regression in that regard. Buffalo has a growing young superstar in Tyler Myers on the defensive side of things, and a few young defenseman who would probably make good depth guys else where. But that is not enough. What the Sabres defense needs is two more stalwart, shut down defenseman. It just so happens that we lost one or two an off-season ago and may be paying for it dearly. It is almost inconceivable to think about, but if the Sabres are really going to go all-in on the defensive side of things, if they’re going to try to win this through 2-1 games instead of 5-4 games, they need to be in it completely. You can’t do it half-heartedly. You need to be the next New Jersey Devils organizaton.
Goaltending: And that leads me to goaltending. Having seen Miller progress through six seasons as a starting NHL goaltender, I think it is fair to state that Ryan Miller can be an ingredient in your Stanley Cup winner, but he needs a defense that’s not just average, not just good, but spectacular in order to do so. Ryan Miller in front of a sub-spectacular defense loses you as many games as he wins you, distracts from the team’s goal by monopolizing the conversation, and mystifies with his ability to play lights out for several weeks in a row before falling apart when, of course, you actually need him to be lights out. I love Ryan Miller — he’s my favorite Sabre. But it is also important to recognize his limitations: As a so-called “world class” goaltender he is at times decidely ordinary. And in truth, as much as we love him because he is the most recognizable American athlete in a not-so-American sport, the timeline on Ryan Miller in Buffalo is running out faster than we may think. Six unsuccessful seasons as the center piece of an organization is heading dangerously close toward too many, especially in a city that is title starved. Ryan Miller might not have many more chances to prove himself. That is probably a good thing.
I think the most accurate anticipation for next season is to prepare for disappointment like 28 other franchises. By early October, that ambition will be back. We’ll go over the roster from a hundred different angles and convince ourselves that what we’re seeing — this time and finally — is enough to go all the way. This is the year as they say. But it almost never is, or in the Sabres case, never is, is it?
But in the end, it seems, that’s what makes us Sabres fans and it feels like we are almost always more in love with the potential than the actual product. We have always loved what players like Drew Stafford and Andrej Sekera could be as compared to what they actually are.
In the end, what makes sports great is that I’ve just written 2,000 words about a team that I love and yet I ultimately conclude will fail next year, month’s before we even have a real grasp of what they’ll look like. And unlike so many other things in your life, it’s perfectly fine to do that: it’s perfectly fine to fail your whole life at sports, to root for the wrong team at the wrong times, to be totally off-base in your predictions. To indeed never be right and yet still enjoy it. Unlike the real world, it is what makes being a Sabres fan so much fun — that we are able to be critical and optimistic and fantastically wrong, and never once responsible for the actual outcome of the games on the ice. We are merely interested bystanders, invested parties: fans.
What is wrong with the Sabres is that they aren’t playing in just a few more games. It makes the long days at the dead-end desk job and with the nagging significant other just a little longer. It makes us a little less sane, in other words, we feel a little less like we are capable of accomplishing our dreams. And makes us long for that next season even more — for a day when we are finally champions, all of us, for just a little while, anyway.
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