Among Sabres fans, the optimism meter is reading awfully low heading into the first week of the season. The needle is buried at zero for many fans who have watched the team sputter over the course of the last decade, and as a result, we’ll likely see a KeyBank Center that’s filled to less than half capacity.
And no, that doesn’t have anything to do with Covid restrictions.
The beginning of this season offers plenty of opportunity for the blue and gold to prove that their perhaps not as bad as many in the hockey world expect them to be. Here’s the schedule through next Saturday:
Thursday: Montreal at Buffalo
Saturday: Arizona at Buffalo
Tuesday 10/19: Vancouver at Buffalo
Friday 10/22: Boston at Buffalo
Saturday 10/23: Buffalo at New Jersey
All-in-all, that’s a pretty soft schedule for the Sabres to start the season. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the games ahead beginning with the defending Eastern Conference Champions, the Montreal Canadiens whom the Sabres will see Thursday night.
These Montreal Canadiens are not your typical reigning conference champions due to the myriad of off-season departures that have changed the team chemistry to a large degree. Carey Price, the Canadiens’ 2020-2021 MVP is unavailable to start the season, as is hulking minute-eating defenseman Shea Weber. Those two subtractions alone would be a huge problem for most teams but it gets worse for the bleu, blanc et rouge as they also lost Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Tomas Tatar, Phillip Danault and Corey Perry.
The Sabres should be able to hang with this depleted Montreal squad if their season is going to be anything but an abject disaster. If the score reads 5-1 Montreal after the final whistle blows then you’ll know that this will indeed be a very long season.
From there, the Sabres will take on the team that is widely presumed to be a key player in the Shane Wright Sweepstakes: the Arizona Coyotes. Old friend Carter Hutton is holding down the fort in goal and players who were really good in 2011 fill out a large part of their top-six: Phil “the thrill” Kessel, Andrew Ladd and Loui Eriksson. The Flyers paid the Coyotes to retire Shayne Gostisbehere to the desert, Oliver Ekman-Larsson is gone, and Alex Galchenyuk is back. This team is likely to be absolutely brutal (yes, yes, the Sabres are assumed to be equally bad) so this is another game that needs to look at least competitive for fans to feel any kind of optimistic bump.
Next up will be the Vancouver Canucks and their young, exciting roster led by Elias Petterson and Quinn Hughes. Despite having a somewhat flawed defensive group with an overpaid Tyler Myers and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, the Canucks are still a talented team up front and are easily the best team among these three mentioned. Ekman-Larsson is not the same player he was a few years ago, so the young Sabres forwards will have opportunities to generate chances against the ‘Nucks.
The Boston Bruins have been a trendy pick to decline for a few years now. The loss of Zdeno Chara a couple years back, along with the continual aging of some of their proven players like Brad Marchand (33 years old) and Patrice Bergeron (36 years old) resulted in some pundits predicting their demise. Every year they come out and prove those narratives wrong. Losing David Kreijci to semi-retirement and a job in Europe will undoubtedly hurt the Bruins, but they’ll still be a bona fide threat as they always are. There is too much proven talent – along with a proven track record of success – to assume the Sabres will be able to hang with Boston.
After that it will be Buffalo at Tennessee which figures to be a marquee matchup especially with Buffalo coming off a big win Kansas City. The boys from Western New York have a chance to put a stranglehold on the number one seed… wait…
I’m being told this is the wrong sport. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Lastly, the Sabres will head to New Jersey for a matchup with Lindy Ruff’s squad. The Devils are still rebuilding but they’re certainly trending in the right direction with key young players led by first overall pick Jack Hughes. They also selected Jack’s brother, Luke, in the 2021 NHL draft although the younger Hughes will join Sabres prospects Owen Power and Erik Portillo at Michigan where that team figures to compete for a national championship. The Devils have question marks in goal with Jonathan Bernier and Mack Black in goal, even if they do have nice pieces on offense and defense. The Sabres will be able to get their goals if they can generate sufficient chances on whomever plays in goal for Lindy’s guys.
Put plainly: the Sabres will need to put up a 2-2-1 record over those first five games if they’re to delay the talk about being a historically bad team. Surprising the Canadiens in game one would go a long way to making that happen. The Sabres can’t afford to give Montreal too much respect as the reigning Eastern Winner as this team is not the same team they were last season. Getting another win against the Coyotes who figure to be just as bad as the Sabres this season can get the Sabres to fake .500 with losses to Boston and Vancouver and an overtime loss to New Jersey.
Fake .500 won’t sell any tickets for the Sabres but it would be a solid moral victory for a young Sabres squad that needs to avoid getting their teeth kicked in early if they’re going to keep any kind of confidence moving forward. Time will tell if they can make it happen.
Buffalo Sabres Blogger • 
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