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The Lost Weekend

At least in looking at the scores from the Sabres games this weekend, I wasn’t the only one to have a “lost weekend”. I however, have the convenient excuse of turning 40 on Saturday, while the Sabres are running out of excuses.

To give you an idea of what may have happened Saturday night/Sunday morning I’ll just relate this story…

As I was driving down Main Street in Buffalo at about 1PM Sunday afternoon (after getting out of bed around 11:30) I drove by “The Steer”, which for those of you from out of the area is a local hangout that tends to be an older crowd early and gets younger as the night goes on. That moment, at 1PM, was the first time I realized I was even there the night before. And you don’t even want to know when I figured out that “Gecko’s” was the last stop, but thank you, text messages!

So I had no clue the kind of beating the Sabres took on Saturday night, and honestly, I didn’t much care. But just like the hangover that took two days to go away, the thoughts of the Sabres are slowly making their way back to the surface of my brain. Let’s examine, shall we?

Lost four straight.
2-7-1 in their last 10.
Both those wins were in games when the opposition scored one goal.
Ottawa is one point behind them in the standings.
We suddenly seem to be short an NHL-caliber defenseman.
Aaaaaiiiyyyyy!

Time to relax a bit. Ryan Miller got a nice, relaxing weekend off. Let’s see how they respond tonight.

According to Mike Harrington, Kennedy is back in tonight instead of Ellis, and Montador will miss the game with a hip injury.

7:00 start from HSBC.

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Things would just be so much easier if we could get a regulation win against this team.

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Senators at Sabres tonight

Ottawa is 10-3-3 in Buffalo and 23-6-4 against the Sabres overall since the lockout.

I’m pretty sure there’s not much more to type after that sentence.

Kaleta’s out, so we’ll get both Ellis and Mair tonight; I’m sure Miller will be in net.

Live chat will be up and running tonight as well.

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We’d better win this before this tilt gets to a shootout. If I have to watch Crosby and Malkin torch Miller, I will get supremely pissed.

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Sabres at Penguins Tonight

The standings are getting tighter at the top (well, not at the very top, but near the top) of the Eastern Conference. As Washington starts to pull away from the pack they leave New Jersey, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Ottawa to fight for the leftovers. Buffalo stands a point behind New Jersey in third place, while Pittsburgh is two behind the Sabres and Ottawa is five back. I guess my only question is how did Buffalo end up with three games-in-hand on both Pittsburgh and Ottawa?

Pittsburgh did play yesterday afternoon, picking up a 2-1 shootout win at home against Detroit (remember when beating Detroit used to be a big deal?). That was the Penguins seventh shootout win against zero shootout losses for the season. The moral of the story? If you go into overtime against Pittsburgh, you better go balls-out for the win, because Crosby and Malkin will bury you in the shootout. But I honestly have not been impressed with Pittsburgh of late as their defense has looked soft every time I have caught them on Center Ice. Hopefully that remains the case tonight.

The Twitters are all abuzz with the fact that Tyler Myers turns 20 today, which makes Evgeni Malkin look like an old man by comparison.

Also, I suppose I should care about the deals Toronto made yesterday. And I do care, because even if Dion Phaneuf is currently incredibly overrated, he is an exciting player with a ton of potential. I just wonder how he will reach that potential in Toronto. I also care because Toronto now has who playing at forward exactly? So while it was fun to read some of the Toronto papers speculating about a “potential playoff run” I think most of us realize that Toronto is putting a few key pieces in place for 2-3 years down the road. Their biggest problem is going to be filling the pipeline from a farm system that isn’t exactly bursting with prospects, and with Tyler Bozak already up with the big club they don’t have a single player capable of playing center anywhere in the minors who can move up. I mean, look at their forward depth. More moves obviously have to come this offseason, but it’s clear the Leafs have officially signaled their intent to rebuild.

As for Giguere? Meh. He turns 33 in a couple months and has been fighting it this season. He’s clearly better than The One-Eyed Monster they had masquerading as an NHL goalie this year. Adding Giguere will surely help Gustavsson as he won’t have the weight of the “hockey universe” on his shoulder pads anymore, but let’s just say that I suddenly find the idea of playing Toronto even easier now than it has been for last couple years.

I’m a little pressed for time this morning so I just wanted to throw out that we’re having a little blogger/twitter meetup tonight at JJ’s (the bar attached to Casa di Pizza) for the game tonight. It’s a 7:00 start on Versus, meaning those of us with DirecTV can’t watch at home, so we figured why not make up an excuse to get together? Obviously, all are welcome to join us. I’m not sure where that leaves us for a live chat tonight…I’ll see what Klejdys is cooking up.

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Sabres. Bruins. 7:30pm. The return of Marc Savard. Go Buffalo.

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Links of Interest

A couple things I stumbled upon today…

- Football Outsiders has published their NFL adjusted man games lost for the 2009 season, and your Buffalo Bills lead by a wide margin. Now I think we can all admit that it wasn’t injuries that made the Bills bad in 2009, but injuries certainly had something to do with how bad they really were.

I know everyone likes to lecture their teams by saying that injuries are not an acceptable excuse, but when you’re taking a huge number of starters off the field every week why should you not expect it to matter? The fact the Bills were in many cases playing their third (or fourth) stringer at some positions on the offensive line tells me that, yes, Dwight Freeney is going to have an easier go of it. In other words, Brad Butler may not be that great a starter, but he’s sure better than what we ended the year with.

- This is the only thing that could have possibly made losing Bobby April acceptable.

- I heard an interview on WGR with Lindy Ruff in which he called out Derek Roy. All I can say is that it’s about time. I hate when people say that someone is a “lazy” player, but they don’t get any lazier than Derek Roy. Just imagine if he cared about anything but scoring from a safe place.

- I find this both mildly entertaining and completely unsurprising. A gentleman who retired from the New Orleans Times-Picayune and his Saints beat of 20 years went to work for NewOrleans.com. The Saints eventually revoked his press credentials, citing that he now works for a “dot.com”. Even the PFWAA tried to intervene on his behalf (because he started in print, I suppose. I mean, heaven forbid he started writing things online and followed all the rules of the journalism road), but to no avail. Apparently, the Saints are as “new media” savvy as the Bills and Sabres are. Sorry, loserblogger, back to Mom’s basement for you!

- Check out the sweet introduction video for the University of Alaska Nanooks hockey team. It has every song from “JockJams” plus, they blow up the Earth. H/T to Paul Scheer.

- Finally, belated congrats to Mike Chen, who is taking over From the Rink as James Mirtle is moving on to added duties at The Globe and Mail. They’re big shoes to fill, but Mike is more than capable.

Bruins at Sabres Tonight

Marc Savard is an absolute Sabre-killer. And he returns to the ice tonight against Buffalo after missing the last eight games because of a partial MCL tear in his right knee. Boston had gone 1-6-1 and scored just 13 goals in his absence, and it is expected he will center Milan Lucic and Miro Satan while also working the pivot on the team’s No. 1 powerplay unit.

It sounds to me as if the Bruins are targeting tonight’s game as the beginning of a turnaround for their season. Something tells me that the Bruins will provide the battles tonight and it’s up to the Sabres to keep up.

As for Buffalo, injuries are not something with which they have had to contend of late. In fact, a lack of injuries, coupled with some poor defensive play, has enabled Lindy Ruff to make some adjustments along the blue line. In benching Toni Lydman and Steve Montador Wednesday night against New Jersey coach Ruff may have hurt somebody’s feelings:

Did you have any idea? Lydman: “Very surprised.”

It goes without saying but can we assume you’re unhappy about it? Lydman: “Yes. It does go without saying but I’ll say it anyway.”

You know what I say to that? Too effin’ bad. A lot of guys on this team have received far too much leeway over the past couple years, and now that the Sabres have eight healthy defensemen I think it’s a great chance to be able to send the occasional message. Did Lydman perhaps get caught in a bit off the crossfire from Montador playing insanely bad two straight games? Perhaps he did, but Lydman was no star himself of late. And while I wouldn’t want guys looking over their shoulder after every game, the fact that Chris Butler is a minus-ten tells me that maybe Sekera should be getting a little more time on the ice.

As for tonight, I have no problem if Ruff wants to keep things “as-is” after a win; I think it might be good for Montador and Lydman to stew a little bit to get some edge back.

A couple small points before we go:

- The Sabres are still just one point behind New Jersey for second in the East. Washington, with an eight-game win streak have really pulled away and are up by six on New Jersey.

- Ottawa’s eight-game win streak has moved them out of the morass of teams battling for spots 6-13 in the standings and has them trailing Buffalo by a mere five points. Buffalo has three games-in-hand however.

- Carolina trails Toronto by only one point. Edmonton is screwing up my fun by going on a 12-game losing streak lately, meaning they are sure to be the worst team in hockey, while Toronto may have to settle for just being worst in the East.

- Trade deadline and rumor sanity. Sure, Edmonton would like to move Sheldon Souray. But nobody wants his salary, so can we please stop talking about it?

It’s a 7:30 start from HSBC Arena this evening. The BfloBlog/Goose’s Roost live chat will be up and running tonight. I imagine Klejdys and either Chris or Ryan from TGR will be running the show. I have Arena duties with SonOne this evening.