The Sabres are terrible — and terribly fascinating
PITTSBURGH — So far, the 2014-15 season as played at Consol Energy Center has been pretty boring.
The home team is good, but a string of playoff meltdowns has turned October through March into an 82-game preseason. There’s an undercurrent of “none of this matters” that flows throughout the building, and it’s not an invalid sentiment to hold.
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On Saturday, though, what could well turn out to be one of the worst teams in recent history came to town. The Buffalo Sabres might’ve disappointed themselves and their fans, but through a sheer scale of terribility — they are so, so bad — their 5-0 loss to the Penguins shouldn’t have disappointed anyone else.
All you can ask as a hockey fan — or as part of the media — is that something interesting happens, and the Sabres, by dint of an almost preternatural inability to touch the puck, let alone score goals, qualify as such. They have two wins in 12 games, somehow, but this feels like the early stages of a six-month long car crash.
They’ve been shut out five times and, before Saturday, had controlled just 36.1 percent of all shots at even strength. That’s not just more than 20 points below the league-leading Minnesota Wild; by at least one measure, their October was the worst puck-possession month since the NHL started tracking shot totals in 1987-88. Sidney Crosby, in his time on Earth, has never seen a team as bad in that department.
Results are in and it was even worse than projected. pic.twitter.com/fFO3EVCbrz
— Travis Yost (@TravisHeHateMe) November 1, 2014
And, of course, you need the puck to score goals. Players like Brian Gionta, who signed a three-year contract worth $4.25 million annually in the offseason, and Matt Moulson (five years, $25 million) haven’t done that at all. Three — Tyler Ennis, Zemgus Girgensens and Marcus Foligno — have managed it more than once. As a team, they have 13. Ducks winger Corey Perry has 10 himself. Their opponents have 30.
“We show up in one game, we don’t show up in the next,” defenseman Mike Weber said, “We show up in spurts, we show up in shifts, we show up in a period here, a period there. It’s a continued frustration from years previous that for whatever reason, we can’t get out of our game.”
With due respect to Weber, they haven’t shown up all that much. Against Pittsburgh, they tested Marc-Andre Fleury 12 times at even-strength and 18 times overall, and were shut out for the fifth time.
There’s Marc-Andre Fleury, already thinking about Christmas presents. #Pens pic.twitter.com/ITYYaFN4VY
— Wes Crosby (@OtherNHLCrosby) November 1, 2014
It seemed like less, largely because they opened with a three-shot period that, somehow, included two minutes on the power play. At 5-on-5, they managed two unblocked attempts in the first 20 minutes. Two.
Halfway through the game, they were on pace for a second 10-shot disaster in less than a week. They managed to avoid that, though.
And, hey, they took 30 of the game’s 79 even-strength attempts at even-strength. That’s a little better than 37 percent. Improvement!
Their biggest problem against Pittsburgh was a penalty kill that allowed three goals on five opportunities. The Penguins are the best team in the league with the man advantage, so it’s understandable enough, but that doesn’t change Buffalo’s reality: They’re drowning, and it’s probably not going to get any better. If anything, based on the underlying numbers and the distinct feel that the players are only now realizing how dire their situation is, it’ll get worse.
Losing every game they play is in the franchise’s best interest, because that, if nothing else, guarantees them Jack Eichel, a pretty solid door prize in the Connor McDavid Derby. Watching this bear itself out in real time is almost surreal. On Saturday — and in the 11 games that came before it — they were having serious trouble exiting their zone, let alone sustaining pressure in their opponent’s.
“We’re not a team that should be dumping the puck in and swinging by guys and we’re not a team that should get the puck dumped in on us and it should be easy for their forwards to pick it up and wheel and make plays,” Weber said.
“Every man has to pick it up, intensity-wise. Be nasty. We have to be a team that if we’re going to go down, we’re going to go down swinging.”
Words like intensity and compete and confidence pop up when there aren’t any real answers. They might apply here, though, because the Sabres are even uglier than they should be. Lack of talent is the ultimate problem, but they’re not doing themselves any favors.
“With our confidence factor right now, if we get down two goals, it doesn’t seem like we have the will to battle back,” coach Ted Nolan said. “When you don’t work and you don’t fight and you don’t compete and you don’t battle, that’s what’s going to happen.”
It sucks for guys like Weber and Gionta and goalie Jonas Enroth, who, understandably enough, were the only signs of life — other than a tumbleweed, maybe — in a cleared-out locker room. It certainly sucks for Nolan, who’s tasked with motivating and preparing a group of players that was assembled to fail and somehow has metastisized into something worse.
The coach, for what it’s worth, was asked if players need to be more accountable. He said yes.
“It’s like on the bench when it’s 1-0 — everybody puts their head down and looks for something else to do,” Nolan said. “To be accountable, you have to stand up; if we win a game, they all want to talk, but when you lose, you want to hide.”
They might want that, but they’re not going to get it.
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