The Buffalo Sabres are a Great Team

Paul Gaustad (#28) for Buffalo tried to block a shot with his face.


To get this out of the way first: Buffalo fans, across all sports, are like Cubs and Red Sox fans rolled into one big whiny monolith. They're "cursed" and they know it; and they want YOU to know it, too.

One thing I learned from being a Cubs fan, nobody wants to hear your bellyaching about curses and bad luck. Shut up already and play the game. Thinking you are the unluckiest slob on earth is exactly the same as thinking you're the luckiest--they're both total ego trips.

Anyway, the Hurricanes beat the Sabres last night in a game 7 that had me on the edge of the couch for three hours, sweating, swearing, and near-puking. Buffalo lost 5 starters, including all 4 top defensemen, to injury during the series but still took it to the Hurricanes in games 5, 6, and 7.

You have to admire the guts on display, last night particularly. The fill-ins for Buffalo came up from the minor leagues with barely any big game experience and they played well. Some guy named Janik scored a tying goal for his first-ever NHL point--and he was just supposed to be a warm body out on the ice. The Sabres hit everything in sight, took crazy chances to try and get some offense, and in general put a scare into the Hurricanes and fans like me. Of course, if we had lost to a team that depleted (and we almost did) then I would say contract the team, burn down the building, and salt the earth.

But to say that Buffalo lost, ultimately, because of injuries is wrong. They played as well as any team in the playoffs and I'll give you two examples of the kind of things the Sabres did that no other team, healthy or not, would ever have its players do. This is by way of proving that the Hurricanes did not "beat the Rochester Americans" (Buffalo's AHL team) as many curse-mongers are saying, but beat a team that played with utter desperation and could have taken the series to 7 games with a roster of high school kids. The team dynamic made second-rate guys play above themselves for a few games and it was great to watch.

Example 1: Jay McKee, a scoring defenseman who also blocks shots, blocked a hard slapshot against Ottawa in the last round (over 2 weeks ago) and it split his shin open. He's been playing with a gashed shin ever since and he blocked, I don't know, about 3,000 shots during games 1-6 of the Sabres-Hurricanes series. After game 6, he noticed that his leg was badly infected and it turns out he has a staph infection in his leg. So, a guy whose leg is festering like it has gangrene and might fall of his body played almost an entire series and kept sticking his leg in front of 100-mph slapshots because he wanted to win that badly.

Example 2: Last night, Carolina captain Rod Brind'Amour scored what was the winning goal about midway through the 3rd period, when a shot bounced around in front of the goal and came to rest about six feet from the net. It just lay there while Carolina and Buffalo players scrummed (sp?) in front, and Brind'Amour skated over from the circle and shot it as hard as he could into the goal. The shot was about three feet high and was a screamer and a Buffalo player dove, FACE-FIRST in front of it to try to block it. If he had succeeded, the shot would have hit him in the teeth.

Bottom line, no team of "bums" or AHL retards plays like that. That amount of confidence, resilience, and recklessness is institutional--it's got to be the system that the Sabres play. I am convinced that anybody could have filled those roles for Buffalo and done just as well, but the guys who played were the best.

So quit the curse talk. It's an insult to the team and to the way they played.

And now, since I know almost nobody gives a shit about hockey, back to our regular postings about the slow political death of our country.