For the 13th straight season, the Buffalo Sabres won’t play in the NHL playoffs.
Buffalo extended its league-record playoff drought when it lost 3-2 to the Dallas Stars on Tuesday night. With the regulation loss, the Sabres can now only finish the season with a maximum of 85 points. The Pittsburgh Penguins and Red Wings, two contenders for the second wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference, already have 84 points and play one another on Thursday, so one team will get to 86 points.
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The Sabres’ 13-season playoff drought is tied with the NFL’s New York Jets for the longest in professional sports. The next longest playoff drought in the NHL is the Detroit Red Wings at seven seasons.
Since the Sabres last made the playoffs, every other team in the NHL has played at least 14 playoff games, 30 teams have played at least 25 playoff games and 20 teams have played at least 50. Six franchises have played 100 or more postseason games since the Sabres played their most recent playoff game in April 2011.
Last season, the Sabres were eliminated from playoff contention after their 80th game of the season and ended up finishing just one point shy of the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference. This season, they’re eliminated after game 79 and are guaranteed to take a step back from the 91 points they had last season.
What made this season a particularly frustrating one for Sabres fans is how much promise the team showed with the youngest roster in the NHL last season. General manager Kevyn Adams didn’t make significant changes to the roster in the offseason, banking on growth from the players on the roster. He added veteran defensemen Connor Clifton and Erik Johnson, but rookie Zach Benson was the only new forward added to the roster. Johnson, along with captain Kyle Okposo, was traded for a draft pick at the trade deadline.
But even without many changes, the 2023-24 version of the Sabres looked much different than the one that scored the third-most goals in the NHL last season. The Sabres played at a 73-point pace in October, November and December, digging a massive hole from which they were unable to climb out. The Sabres were not in a playoff position at any point this season. On six different occasions, the Sabres went into a game within four points of a playoff spot and they went 0-6 in those games. As expectations rose, the Sabres were unable to meet them. Buffalo has allowed more first-period goals than any team in the NHL this season.
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How did this happen? For starters, the Sabres’ best players from last season all regressed statistically. Tage Thompson, Alex Tuch and Jeff Skinner combined for 118 goals last season. As of Tuesday night, those three have 73 goals.
Thompson had a wrist injury early in the season, while Tuch dealt with a hamstring injury and Skinner had a lower-body injury later in the season. Even when healthy, though, those three took a major step back in terms of production. The Sabres had three players produce a point per game or better last season and will have zero such players this season. Each of their top five scorers from last season will finish this season with a lower point total. The Sabres power play was top 10 in the NHL last season and sunk to 28th this season.
Sabres coach Don Granato explained during the season the team turned its attention toward fixing its play on defense after finishing last season 26th in goals against per game. That change in focus took away some of the team’s offense. The Sabres are 13th in the NHL in goals against per game as of this writing, but a lot of that is because of the stellar play of goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. Since January 1, Luukkonen is fifth in the NHL in save percentage and second in goals against average.
Luukkonen is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise disappointing season for the Sabres. Another was JJ Peterka, who is closing in on a 30-goal season in his second full year in the NHL. Luukkonen and Peterka represent two reasons for hope on a roster filled with young talent that hasn’t been able to put it together as a team. The Sabres also have the best prospect pipeline in the NHL, according to The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler.
But the Sabres will enter the offseason with a lot of questions to answer. The first will be the status of Granato, who is now the sixth-longest-tenured coach in the NHL and the longest-tenured coach who hasn’t made the playoffs. He’s been with the Sabres for more than three full seasons. Only six coaches in NHL history have coached more games without making the playoffs than Granato has.
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Granato signed a two-year contract extension before the start of the 2022-23 season and that contract hasn’t started yet.
The Sabres also have plenty of work to do on the roster. Adams will have a hard time justifying bringing back the same roster next season. Some of the change started at the deadline when Adams traded center Casey Mittelstadt to the Colorado Avalanche for defenseman Bowen Byram. But the Sabres also have four unrestricted free agents (Victor Olofsson, Tyson Jost, Zemgus Girgensons, Eric Robinson) among their forwards along with one restricted free agent at forward (Peyton Krebs), one on defense (Henri Jokiharju) and one in net (Luukkonen). That, along with more than $20 million in projected cap space, gives Adams options to shuffle the roster this summer.
The fans’ ultimate concern may be with ownership, though. Terry Pegula bought the Sabres in February of 2011 and said, “Starting today, the Buffalo Sabres’ reason for existence will be to win a Stanley Cup.” They made the playoffs that spring but haven’t made it in any of the 13 seasons since. The Sabres’ payroll has been in the bottom five of the league each of the last four seasons. And this season, the Sabres rank second to last in average attendance by capacity.
On Thursday, the Sabres will play their final home game of the regular season against the Washington Capitals. The team will be celebrating fan appreciation night. But whatever giveaways are on the docket, this season will be another one in which the Sabres aren’t giving hockey fans in Buffalo what they really want: playoff games.
(Photo: Glenn James / Getty Images)
Sabres miss playoffs for 13th straight season, tie longest active drought in pro sports
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