On December 15, the Buffalo Sabres finally fired general manager Kevyn Adams, and no, there wasn't some kinky backstory. As Comrade Theisen explained, owner Terry Pegula just got kind of sick of him, or more properly, his results. When he was hired, the Sabres had already missed the Stanley Cup playoffs for 10 consecutive years, and never saw them in his five years and change in the leather chair. That he was fired on a three-game winning streak out west seemed not to matter; hope had been abandoned years ago, and attendance reflected that truth. The town only has the Bills and the Bulls, the Division 1 college team, and lost its pro women's hockey team, the Beauts, three years ago, so the Sabres stood out for not standing out, or up.
But an odd thing happened when Adams was excused from further migraines. The Sabres stopped sucking. They came home and beat Philadelphia and the New York Islanders, and other than the very occasional hiccup have won ever since. Thursday night they outlasted Montreal, 5-3, for their 15th win in 17 games.
All of which incites a series of questions. Is this the rare new-general-manager bounce we've never heard of before? Are the lads winning to honor the freshly binned leader who assembled all this previously somnolent talent? Or is it just a big dumbassed coincidence that had nothing to do with Adams leaving, his replacement Jarmo Kekalainen entering, or Pegula tearing himself away from Josh Allen for five minutes?
Whatever it is, the Sabres are a defensively obstinate, offensively intrepid, and seriously difficult team to play, especially at home, as the equally surprising Canadiens learned to their own cost. A sellout crowd of 19.070, a serious rarity in Buffalo since the pandemic, got to watch elongated Tage Thompson's hat trick and five-point night, goaltender Colten Ellis repelled the Habs' best efforts in a frantic third period, and the Sabres suddenly look very un-Sabre-y.
Put another way, they were dead last in the Eastern Conference when Adams got croaked, and as today dawned they are in a playoff spot. By the fourth law of completely inexplicable circumstance, this is either terrible news for Adams’s executive reputation, or great news for same. After all, he did assemble this team; it chose to wait until he drove off to win some games.
It wouldn't be quite so noteworthy, but as we covered above, the Sabres have been brutally bad since 2011; their no-postseason streak is the second longest in North American professional sports next to the utterly ghastly New York Jets. They have been so profoundly irrelevant for so long that this sudden burst of excellence is catching everyone who pays attention by surprise. At a time when even the Sacramento Kings are on a winning streak, the Sabres are cheating history at a prodigious rate. They haven't had a run like this in 20 years. Coincidentally, that 2005–06 team was honored Thursday night; not coincidentally, that was the last time the Sabres were noteworthy. Back then, they routinely filled their arena, and the Bills were in the middle of their own 17-year streak without playoffs. In short, Buffalo embraces suffering with an almost psychotic zeal, and thus has a deeper than normal appreciation when the sucking ends.
Those Bills teams went through five general managers and none of them were credited with the football team's turnaround in 2017. Thus, the matter of divvying up credit for this Sabres team's sudden realization that winning is actually fun is still in its early stages. There are games to play, postseasons to reach, and years to master the craft before we can know whether this was Adams's work, Kekalainen's work, or just the law of big numbers coming home to roost. But nobody thought going 15-2-0 was within the realm of possibility, and this burst has given Sabres fans hope that in time this can be as good a time for them as it has been for the Bills. Not being able to win the big one is still a hell of a lot better than not having a big one to lose.
