The Buffalo Sabres may not have finally won that Stanley Cup, or returned to the Eastern Conference Finals for the third straight year, or even accomplished the most modest goal in professional sports -- qualifying for the National Hockey League playoffs.
Give them credit for this much, though: Despite an absence of the usual factors in the downfall of a franchise -- sudden aging, a wave of debilitating long-term injuries, locusts -- the Sabres managed to pull off the most spectacular fall from grace in Western New York's sporting history.
A year ago, the Sabres and their fans were busy looking past their first-round sparring partner, the New York Islanders, and whoever else they might face in the Eastern Conference. Nobody gets overconfident faster than the residents of the local sporting world, be they fans or media types, and last year's Sabres provided every reason for doing so.
They were hockey's best team during the regular season and entered the playoffs oozing the experience earned the spring before, when only a pox on their defensive corps prevented a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals.
Taking the next step seemed a logical expectation. And if they fell short for a second straight year, there was every reason to think they'd be back again and again, given their blend of the young and the seasoned, guided by the most successful coach in Buffalo's hockey history and backstopped by one of the game's top young goalies. Roughly 52 weeks later, after surrendering their delusional hopes for another postseason run in a flaccid 3-1 loss last Thursday in Montreal, the demoralizing prospect of a hockey-free spring on the Niagara Frontier has become stark reality, with the long-range outlook at least as bleak.
Lowering expectations by co-captains Chris Drury and Daniel Briere to flee without anything approaching a fight was last summer's first order of business. And trading Brian Campbell was a not-so-subtle admission that this wasn't going to be Buffalo's year, either.
Now fans can start obsessing about the future of Ryan Miller, who set a franchise record for games played by a goalie in what could well be his final full season in Buffalo. If Larry Quinn and Darcy Regier don't strike a long-term deal with Miller by the time the 2008-09 season starts, at a price higher than they seem willing to spend for anyone, you can be pretty sure he'll be the missing piece in someone else's playoff picture a year from now.
The Sabres never really replaced Drury or Briere, in terms of either offensive creativity or leadership. One of the season's few pleasant surprises was the performance of Daniel Paille, who scored 19 goals and registered a plus-minus that ranked second among the team's regulars at plus-9. He's a restricted free agent this summer and figures to draw some interest, given his improvement at both ends of the ice.
Clarke MacArthur, expected to fill some of the offensive void, instead managed 15 points in 37 games and spent more than half the season in Rochester.
It's not as if the Sabres are brimming with young talent, either. The Amerks, long a perennial American Hockey League power, were in last place overall with a week left in the season. After a 29-year affiliation with Buffalo, the Amerks' deal with the Sabres is not expected to be renewed in June, Quinn said at a Rochester high school last week.
The Sabres argue that ending the affiliation will help the development of their prospects, since they'll no longer have to share an AHL affiliate with the Florida Panthers, as they have the last few seasons. But their young players will no longer have the benefit of working under Amerks coach Randy Cunneyworth, who tutored many of the key players in Buffalo's recent playoff runs.
Instead of dwelling on the futile future, let us consider the grim past. Other Buffalo teams have teased the region's fanatics by approaching the pinnacle of their sports, only to sign a long-term lease in downtown Loserville. None have done it as quickly and decisively as these Sabres, though.
For the purposes of this list, we're only including local teams that came reasonably close to winning it all immediately before falling apart. This excludes O.J. Simpson and the Electric Company in the mid 1970s, the Flutie-Johnson-Phillips Bills of the late '90s and the Sabres of the 1980s, each of which enjoyed some level of success, but never threatened to win a championship.
From the President's Trophy and conference finals to home for the playoffs -- no local franchise has fallen farther and faster than these Sabres. The competition, though, is fierce:
1967 Bills: After winning the 1964 and '65 American Football League championships and coming within one game of representing the upstart organization in the first Super Bowl, Buffalo's management outsmarted itself. Head coach Joe Collier, coming off a 9-4-1 record in his first season after replacing Lou Saban, finally solved a long-running quarterback controversy by trading popular backup Daryle Lamonica, along with wide receiver Glen Bass, to Oakland for quarterback Tom Flores and wideout Art Powell.
If it seemed like a fairly even deal at the time, it didn't quite work out that way. Lamonica threw an AFL-best 30 touchdown passes while leading the Raiders to Super Bowl II and spent the rest of his career turning Oakland into one of football's glamour franchises. Flores threw nine interceptions and zero touchdown passes as a member of the Bills, returning to Oakland to coach the Raiders to Super Bowl championships after the 1980 and '83 seasons.
Nor did Jack Kemp flourish with his longtime nemesis gone. With their aging quarterback surrounded by old, slow running backs and receivers and operating behind a creaky offensive line, the Bills plummeted to 4-10, the franchise's worst record to date.
A year later, Buffalo fell even further, to 1-12-1. Over the span from 1967 to '72, the Bills were 13-55-2, losing at least 10 games each year at a time when there were only 14 games on the schedule.
Still, the one-year drop-off by the current Sabres is even more dramatic. The Bills' decline actually started in '66, when they needed a late-season winning streak against weak teams to win their division, then got blown out 31-7 -- at home, no less -- in the AFL title game.
1978-79 Sabres: After taking the Philadelphia Flyers to six games in the 1975 Stanley Cup Finals, a series remembered almost as fondly as a victory by an unnerving number of people more than 30 years later, winning it all seemed inevitable.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But while Buffalo piled up more than 100 points in each of the next three seasons, the Cup slipped further and further away.
After three straight second-round losses and a slow start in 1978-79, coach Marcel Pronovost and franchise architect Punch Imlach were fired in December of '78.
After a first-round playoff exit the following spring, Scotty Bowman arrived in Buffalo, fresh off four straight Cups in Montreal, signaling the beginning of the end of the French Connection Era and the arrival of a new day of unfulfilled hopes. The Sabres reached the conference finals during Bowman's first year in Buffalo, but never got any closer to the Cup before he left to resume collecting more in Pittsburgh and Detroit.
1982 Bills: After winning the AFC East in 1980 under Chuck Knox and returning to the playoffs as a wild-card a year later, the '82 Bills started off 2-0.
Then the season abruptly ended, thanks to a strike by the National Football League Players Association. Buffalo won just two of the seven games after play resumed two months later, missing the playoffs despite the temporary adoption of an expanded, 16-team tournament format.
A few weeks after the end of the season, Knox quit. After his replacement, Kay Stephenson, guided the Bills to an 8-8 record, perpetually discontented running back Joe Cribbs bolted for the United States Football League and Buffalo was headed to consecutive 2-14 seasons.
As with the Bills of the 1960s, this version's downfall was a gradual decline, rather than a swift plunge. 1994 Bills: After four straight Super Bowls, the ravages of time and the early days of free agency finally knocked Buffalo from the top of the AFC.
After starting 3-1, Buffalo couldn't put together back-to-back wins for the rest of the year. Jim Kelly went down for the season in the 14th game, with the Bills still in contention. Frank Reich proved mortal the following week, and Buffalo was eliminated in a blowout home loss to New England, led by a second-year quarterback named Drew Bledsoe. While they missed the playoffs, these Bills never really hit the depths. Kelly came back to reach the playoffs in each of the next two seasons before his retirement.
2002 Sabres: After the 1999 No-Goal Finals, Buffalo returned to the postseason each of the next two springs, getting bounced by Philadelphia in the first round in 2000 and eliminated in the conference semifinals by Pittsburgh a year later. The teams of the Rigas era were overachievers who depended on a basic strategy, riding Dominik Hasek as far as he could take them. When he forced a trade after the '01 season, which captain Michael Peca sat out in a contract dispute before being traded, the Sabres settled into the NHL's dark underbelly, where they remained until after the lockout. And to where they have returned for the foreseeable future.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 8 2008 |