It’s been way too long since I last posted but even if I had kept up with this blog more over the past two months, I doubt I could have kept up with everything that’s happened to the Buffalo Sabres. Ironically enough, the team whose first half of the season was marked by predictability and mediocrity has whizzed through the last two months of the season as one of the league’s best teams. Moreover, they’ve dominated in games where no one expected it and found ways to come back in games where they’d normally be out of the game before the second period intermission. It’s been surprises all the way.
Yeah, we all suspected that Jonas Enroth was a better goalie than Patrick Lalime but good enough to win all of his first three games in shootouts? Good enough to post a key shutout of the Rangers, hold his own long enough to secure the team a point against Washington AND beat Carolina in OT in a must-win game? Good enough to have his very mask ripped off in the middle of play and still make an amazing save? I don’t think so.
Likewise, as a standout at Boston College, where he led his team to the national title, was named Most Outstanding Player of the Frozen Four and was a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award, Nathan Gerbe was expected to be a pretty good player and had certainly played well in Portland. But 16 goals, including a spectacular spin-o-rama shot that sent the Sabres’ home finale against Philly into overtime, clinching the Sabres’ playoff spot and paving the way for Thomas Vanek’s game winner? I don’t know.
We all knew how talented a goalie Ryan Miller is but with everyone talking about how much better he was last year than this year, did we really expect him to just waltz right back in and replace Enroth before the third period against Philly after missing five games?
We knew Drew Stafford had talent. After all, he was a first round pick and he’d had some occasional stretches of good play, notably leading up to and during the 2007 playoffs. But after the horrible season he had last year, did anybody really expect him to score 30 goals and become the type of player who could beat you down the ice and score on you single-handedly almost at will?
We knew Terry Pegula had a reputation as a committed hockey fan and that Darcy Regier probably was hampered by the restrictions of being the team’s GM under three cost-conscious owners in the Rigas Family, the NHL and Tom Golisano. But that Pegula was willing to accompany the team on extended road trips or that Regier would pull off as savy a move as trading for Brad Boyes without even giving up any actual players, prospects or first round picks? That probably caught some people off guard as well.
I don’t know how far the Sabres can go in the playoffs this year. Philadelphia’s a really good team, so is Washington, so is Boston and so are the other five teams who made or will make the postseason besides Buffalo. But with the new players and old players in new roles the Sabres have added this year as well as Pegula’s full commitment to spending whatever’s necessary to bring a Stanley Cup to Buffalo, the one thing we CAN expect for sure is that it’s going to be good.
