Wanna blog? Start your own hockey blog with My HockeyBuzz. Register for free today!
 

Terrible Team Still Terrible; Universe Still Indifferent

January 12, 2022, 12:30 PM ET [877 Comments]
Hank Balling
Buffalo Sabres Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
Another day, another loss and the Buffalo Sabres are still terrible. This is year of 11 of being terrible and the team shows no signs of being less terrible. Perhaps in three or five or seven years they will be less terrible, but who can say, really? It’s equally likely that they’ll still be very, very terrible.

It seems like a waste of digital ink to precisely describe what new foibles this franchise got up to in the most recent game because so many of the losses are so similar, but we’ll give it a shot. The Sabres faced the Tampa Bay Lightning on Tuesday night and were awful. They were missing many players due to Covid-19 (Tage Thompson, Peyton Krebs, Kyle Okposo and Alex Tuch) and were badly outplayed by a far superior Tampa Bay Lightning team that has won the Stanley Cup two seasons in a row.

God bless the fans who showed up to watch this one in person.

And God bless Hall-of-Fame announcer Rick Jeanneret who has continued to subject himself to this nonsense during what should be his twilight years.

There was one point in the first period where the Sabres exited their zone and Jeff Skinner was just sitting on the ice at the center dot as the camera panned toward him. That works as perfect metaphor for the past decade of this nonsense; it was pure resignation as to the situation at hand. Do the charts matter at this point? Do the stats matter? Is it worth getting off the ice when your teammates are working their way into the offensive zone? Is any of this worth reading about?

The Sabres have successfully driven this Hockeybuzz writer to the point of existential nihilism, and certainly, following this team can drive even the most ardent Sabres follower to question whether the universe has any meaning, or whether we are merely meant to suffer. Zemgus Girgensons has now been at this losing thing since 2013, which is frankly an unbelievable length of time to have to tolerate losing, so he can undoubtedly acclimatize the youngsters to the process. The message for the players in the tunnel from the locker room onto the ice may as well be the famous quote from Dante:

“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate." Translated from Italian: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Anyway, the Sabres were outshot 9-6 by the Lightning in the first period. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen made a beautiful glove save on Nikita Kucherov which was undoubtedly the highlight of the first 20 minutes from the Sabres perspective. So that was fun for a little bit and temporarily lifted the mood.

That fleeting joy was short lived.



Luukkonen left the game after the first period after sustaining a lower-body injury and Malcolm Subban, who came in relief of Luukkonen, promptly gave up a goal on the first shot he encountered. The Sabres are not allowed to have nice things.

On one hand, it’s an incredible thought that the Sabres should continue to be this bad for the next five or ten years, but it requires a leap of optimism to say that this will get any better anytime relatively soon. In any case, it’s an exercise in futility to continue watching it unfold. It was the French author and philosopher Voltaire who said, and I’m (only slightly) paraphrasing:

“I should like to know which is worse: to… have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here [and watch the Sabres]?'

That is a hard question,' said Candide.”

And so the teams kept playing. The score was soon 4-0 and then 5-0 as the Lightning poured it on in the second period. The hapless Sabres had no answers for the far superior team from Florida. What could it be – other than a cosmic joke – when the two teams from tropical Florida lead the NHL in points while ice-covered Buffalo continues to wallow in abject hockey failure? What is the Arby’s value menu other than a great deal?

The teams kept playing for a while and the Sabres lost the game while some other stuff happened.

Tune in Thursday for another edition of Sabres hockey.
Join the Discussion: » 877 Comments » Post New Comment
More from Hank Balling
» Introducing New Sabres Writer: Bradley
» That’s All, Folks!
» Tracking the Sabres: Devon Levi
» Levi Shines in Debut, Sabres Top Rangers
» Storylines To Watch As The Season Winds Down