With a new NHL season on the horizon, there is a sense of hope and an opportunity for a fresh start for clubs throughout the league. For the Buffalo Sabres, there are positives that provide some optimism for the coming campaign.
For the final twenty games of the 2024-25 slate, players show signs of grasping head coach Lindy Ruff’s system and the way he wanted them to play. However, keep this in mind. March and April hockey for non-contending teams is a lot like its September baseball counterpart. When you are in the playoff hunt, it means a lot. When you’re not, it’s rather meaningless.
It gets tiresome to play spoiler every year. Moreover, there’s rarely a positive carryover effect to finishing well after falling out of the race early.
The Sabres need a better start and middle of the season in 2025-26. They need to make the post-Olympic segment meaningful. Playing for Draft lottery odds year after year is tiresome “motivation”.
Promise… and pressure for the Sabres
Buffalo’s hope for significant improvement is rooted in the roster building on its finish last spring, a strong commitment to team defense and the arrival of a veteran goaltender in Alex Lyon to provide help between the pipes.
The Sabres have talent . There is a chance that the club franchise could overachieve and move the franchise in the right direction this season.
However, the pressure at all levels of the organization is significant.
Over several seasons, many of Buffalo’s best players have grown weary of the failed seasons and have requested to be moved. In these instances Sabres management was forced to negotiate trades from a position of weakness, limiting the team’s compensation in return.
In addition home game attendance has continued to decline at Key Bank Center.
Any discussion surrounding the Sabres throughout the league inevitably comes back to the record setting postseason absence.
“It’s a concern at the league level,” said Sportsnet insider Chris Johnston. “It’s gone on so long where they have been kind of mired in whatever we want to call this, as mediocrity or something worse than that.”
“It’s not good for the league as a whole quite honestly. To have a team where the fans have shown over alot of years that’s a real hockey city and you’re eroding some of that passion and that interest level.”
Johnston made the comments in an appearance on Hockey Hot Stove’s Off The Post podcast.
The years of losing have reached a point of urgency even in league circles.
The 2025-2026 season must hold a return to competitive relevance for the Sabres or major organizational changes will lie ahead.
Follow Dave on X: @DaveNHL
On Facebook: Dave.Reichert.98
