Sabres not amused but fans see merits of losing
It was about eight minutes into the first period at the First Niagara Center on Thursday night, when Arizona Coyotes winger Jordan Szwarz grabbed a loose puck in the Buffalo slot and quickly snapped it past Sabres goalie Matt Hackett.
The crowd cheered noisily. And then it booed. It sounded like the crowd was disgusted with itself.
Three periods later, when Arizona’s Sam Gagner ripped a power-play shot past Hackett for the 4-3 overtime winner, the cheers rang out again. In Buffalo. For a loss.
“You know what, I’m not going to complain about the fans in this city,” said Sabres coach Ted Nolan after the game. But then later, asked about the angry reaction of some Sabres to the cheers for the Arizona goal, he allowed that “you gotta be a little disappointed, as a player.”
Defenceman Mike Weber was the most vocal of the displeased Sabres. “I don’t even know if disappointed is the word,” he said. “They score that first one and our fans are cheering. Late penalty, they cheer. They cheer when they score to win the game. I don’t even know what to say. This is extremely frustrating for us.”
Brian Gionta, the Sabres’ captain who had tied the game late in the third, was visibly annoyed, but took the high road. “We have great fans,’’ he said. He didn’t have anything more to add.
It was bound to come to this, really. Buffalo, dead last in the NHL and thus in the pole position in the race to guarantee one of the top two picks in the June entry draft, and Arizona, secondlast in the league and only five points clear of the Sabres, in the first of two games in five nights between the teams.
All season long, the tanking narrative has been a constant NHL storyline, and these two franchises embraced it the most, particularly at the trade deadline when they jettisoned assets that were perhaps a little too helpful in the short term.
The prize for the team that finishes 30th is a 20 per cent shot at selecting one of Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel first overall, but more importantly a 100 per cent shot at selecting one of the two huge talents if the lottery balls don’t fall their way. The team that finishes 29th would drop out of the top two if the lottery winner comes from above them in the standings. No McDavid or Eichel. A good player will be drafted third, but probably not a franchise-altering one.
Which is why it is all-important to finish last. It’s why a lot of Buffalo’s fans were cheering their opponents. And why they weren’t particularly shy about it.
After the hoots in support of the Coyotes’ game-winner, a group tried to get a “Let’s Go, Buffalo,” chant going as fans filed to the exits. It didn’t take.
The build up to this strangest of games, which left the Sabres six points behind the Coyotes, was part of a strange week. A Buffalo sports-radio station opened its drive-time show with a parody of Werewolves of London that included enthusiastic howling in support of the Coyotes.
There were fans wearing Sabres jerseys with McDavid’s name and No. 97 on the back at the arena, and a large banner with “PRAY FOR MCDAVID” hung on the wall in the upper bowl. The front page of the Buffalo News was dominated by a feature on Thursday headlined, “The ethics of tanking.”
Players, and coaches, did not buy the narrative for a minute.
“Who wants to finish last?” Nolan said. “Nobody wants to finish last. I never went to anything in my entire life wanting to finish last.”
“Nobody ever wants to be considered the worst,” said Coyotes forward Shane Doan. “That’s not a good feeling.”
The beauty of the tank, such as it is, is that it doesn’t require any buy-in from the players or coaches. Decisions are made above them that effectively make the team worse. Buffalo had a 14-game losing streak this season, during which time general manager Tim Murray kept the roster intact. Then he traded his starting goalie days before the deadline — and then the new starter at the deadline. Coyotes GM Don Maloney matched those efforts by moving leading scorer Keith Yandle, Antoine Vermette and Zbynek Michalek — all for prospects and picks.
Those kinds of moves certainly weren’t made to help their teams win now. Arizona came into Thursday with their leading scorer a defenceman, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Buffalo started Hackett, with his 24 career NHL games and .893 save percentage this season, in net.
The players have no interest in losing, but their bosses don’t mind it one bit.
The fans, on the evidence of Thursday, are quite conflicted about the whole thing. After the cheers in support of Arizona’s first goal, Buffalo’s Tyler Ennis tied the game two minutes later and the arena erupted. It did the same thing in the second period when Rasmus Ristolainen scored to make it 2-1 Sabres. For a moment, at least, the purity of fandom had won out.
But then Arizona scored twice quickly — with each goal met with the weird mixture of cheers and then boos of the cheers — and the game settled back into the flat malaise one would expect of a late-season game between the two worst teams.
By Friday morning, Buffalo was looking ahead to road games against Colorado and Arizona, potential losses that would all but clinch last place. And it was back to bickering about the virtues of a tank. One columnist wrote that fans who cheered for losses were “losers” who had forgotten their values. In response, a radio host yelled that he should “save his preaching for someone else.” Literally, he was yelling.
Odd times, these. Such is life in the NHL, when losing, for some, means winning.