Now do you believe?

Thomas Vanek simply walking into Mordor

A funny thing has happened to the Buffalo Sabres since Terry Pegula purchased them from Tom Golisano towards the end of February: slowly but surely, they’ve actually managed to morph into contenders.  They’re probably no one’s idea of the next Eastern Conference Champions, not with 76 points and tied with the slumping New York Rangers for seventh in the conference. But the position the Sabres are currently finding themselves in was certainly all but unthinkable to a lot of people just two months ago. And not all of the team’s sudden revival is a direct result of their new owner.

Sabres 5, Blue Jackets 0

The inimitable Bill Wippert of NHL Images does it again. Great Kaleta pic

….Because I’m not even going to try to pretend that this post qualifies as a weekly recap when the Buffalo Sabres only played one game this past week. The irony is that for a week where very little on-ice action happened for the Blue and Gold, this was still a very good week.

Sabres Week in Review November 26/The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Even with all the holiday travel I’ve been doing this week, I probably would have had to wait until it was almost Saturday to write this post. It’s been just short of a week since my last Sabres post and yet the Buffalo Sabres have only played three games counting tonight’s 3-1 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs. Because of every team in the league except poor Edmonton and Phoenix having Thanksgiving off, that doesn’t seem all that out of line compared to most other teams this week.

What is interesting is that the Sabres had four days off from their loss to Tampa Bay on November 20 to their loss to Pittsburgh on November 24. After tomorrow’s game at Montreal, they don’t play again until they face Columbus on December 3. They then get another four-day break from December 11’s home game against Pittsburgh to December 15’s home against Boston. In all three cases, the Sabres have had or will have a game the night after the game that ends these mini-vacations.

I Have to Admit it’s Getting Better, or Rangers 3, Sabres 2, Sabres 3, Capitals 2

At 6-9-3 and in fourth place in the Northeast Division, the Buffalo Sabres might still seem to be stuck in a rut. But after this past weekend’s overtime loss to the New York Rangers and overtime win over the Washington Capitals, one can no longer confuse the Sabres with the pathetic ragtag bunch that was the scorn of Western New York only two weeks ago.

Devils 2, Sabres 1

Well, here we are folks. The end of the regular season and it’s a loss. Blame it on Martin Brodeur being a future Hall of Famer. Blame it on some unfortunate penalties at the end. Blame it on the Buffalo Sabres being in a position where they needed to pull their goalie in order to clinch the No. 2 spot in the first place. Whatever the reason you choose, it doesn’t matter.

It was good to see Thomas Vanek picking up where he left off last night, scoring the Sabres’ only goal. It was good to see Patrick Lalime continuing to play well. It was great to see Patrick Kaleta back and proving why he’s arguably the toughest player on team, returning before the playoffs when he was originally supposed to miss the first round.

I could get upset about this game but that really doesn’t make sense when the Sabres are going to play a beatable first round opponent in Boston, at home, instead of having to play Montreal or Ottawa, who now have to get past Washington and Pittsburgh respectively in the first round. Sure, the Sabres may very well not have home ice in the second round this time but they didn’t have it when they were playing the Presidents’ Cup winning Ottawa Senators in 2006 either.

The past two years the Buffalo Sabres have closed the season with meaningless wins over Boston. I’ll take a loss in the final regular season game and the chance to beat Boston in the playoffs over the chance to beat Boston and not watch another hockey game until October.

Sabres 5, Senators 2

Wow. Just wow. After nine agonizing games of all types: blowouts, blown leads, OT losses, SO losses, the list goes on and on….anyhow, after nine straight losses, the Buffalo Sabres have finally knocked off the Ottawa Senators. And this wasn’t just a narrow win. The Sabres scored two goals in the first period, added two more in the second and then Derek Roy sealed the deal in the third. The penalty kill was magnificent, the power play was superb (of course it helped that the referees were frequently activating it for once), the goaltending was great.

But who am I kidding? The Sabres played great tonight but this was Thomas Vanek’s game. Vanek’s gotten a lot of grief from public and press alike this season because he hasn’t been able to keep up the goal-scoring pace he was on before he broke his jaw last season but that doesn’t mean the talent isn’t still there and apparently returning from another injury was what he needed to get going again (ironically, as with last year, Vanek had been injured against Ottawa).

Vanek scored the FIRST FOUR GOALS OF THE GAME, each one more spectacular than the last and culminating in the second period penalty shot and power play goal which ended any hope Ottawa had of rallying. The man took over the game and there’s no one on the team who can do that sort of thing so well.

It would be nice if Buffalo could beat New Jersey tomorrow since it would allow the Sabres to end a great regular season on a winning note AND clinch the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference. But really what you want as a fan is for your team to have confidence going into the playoffs and that’s what this game has given the Blue and Gold. The final score might have been 5-2 but after over a year of losing to Ottawa, the ultimate tally might as well have read 9-0.

Sabres 7, Coyotes 2

Wow, just wow. Coming off of two shootout losses in the past three games and playing a day after flying all the way from the Canadian border to Arizona against the No. 5 team in the Western Conference, a collection of teams considered to be almost as head and shoulders above its Eastern counterpart as it is in the NBA is not when I expected the Buffalo Sabres to go off for 7-count ’em-7 GOALS IN A SINGLE GAME, with a final score of 7-2, more goals than the Sabres have scored in any other game so far this year.

I knew that at some point Buffalo was bound to have at least one more of these games before the Olympic Break and I knew that even an overachieving team like Phoenix and its brilliant goalie, Ilya Bryzgalov, have to have a couple games where the pucks just don’t bounce their way. It wasn’t just a case of the pucks bouncing Buffalo’s way tonight though; the pucks practically floated in their favor. Most of the Sabres’ goals went straight up over the shoulders of Bryzgalov and his replacement, Jason LaBarbera. That’s a pretty rare thing in a hockey game; usually even half-decent defense and goaltending force most teams to go straight to the net and bang the puck in and even when a player CAN shoot the puck in from a high angle, he risks having the resulting goal disqualified because of a high stick. Not tonight.

So many Sabres players performed well tonight so I can’t single out every contributor to the win but I can point out a couple of the key figures. Tyler Myers got things going less than 5:00 into the game with yet another of his precise, perfectly timed shots that keep exaggeration-happy diehard Sabres fans like myself comparing him to Bobby Orr.

After weeks and weeks of criticism for not playing as well as he did last year, Thomas Vanek first continued his recent habit of coming in for the assist at just the right time, then finally managed to bang in a goal of his own.

Jason Pominville had two excellent goals and confused the Phoenix crowd that seemed to have more Sabres fans in it than Coyotes fans into thinking he had a hat trick.

Patrick Kaleta scored again, allowing him to show off his windmill goal celebration again (by the way, I love that a player used before this season mainly as a non-goal scorer came up with the most individualistic and enthusiastic goal celebration on the entire team).

Tim Connolly didn’t score but continued his point streak as well as eradicating his previous reputation as the most injury-prone player on a team that’s had its fair share of them over the years, if not quite on the Metsian level of the Bills.

Throughout the game, the Boys in the Blue and Gold showed the toughness needed to compete against West Coast teams, not to mention rough and tumble teams in their own conference such as Philly and Ottawa.

Tomorrow night, the Sabres venture an hour west to Anaheim to take on a Ducks team far behind the Coyotes in the standings but still as physical, tough, nasty and full of similar adjectives usually used to describe David Eckstein or the Broad Street Bullies of the 1970’s as they were in 2007 when they won the Stanley Cup by giving the Ottawa Senators of their own medicine. Playing a team the night after winning a blowout is never 100% easy but as a Sabres fan, I have to feel a lot better about the Sabres’ chances after tonight’s game. Faced with recent troubles in shootouts, the Buffalo Sabres prevented it from happening again by making sure that Phoenix never got close enough to force one in the first place.

Speaking of first place, thanks to tonight’s win creating a standings tie with the Washington Capitals at 66 points apiece, the Buffalo Sabres are in first place in the Eastern Conference for the first time after the one-quarter mark since…well, the spring of 2007. Even though he’s currently off on vacation and it was Kevin Sylvester, who like Joe Buck is blessed with a resonant voice but unlike Joe Buck can show excitement without straining to raise his voice, filling in for him tonight, I couldn’t help but be reminded during this victory of what RJ said when the Sabres first shocked the post-lockout NHL by advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2006: “THESE GUYS ARE GOOD…..SCARY GOOD!”