Sabres plugging away in year of expectations

Picked by some as pre-season favourite for Cup

BUFFALO• Ville Leino grabbed the pair of new skates from the trainer’s hands, dropped them to the ground and stepped on them as though he were putting out a lit cigarette. He then picked them up, bent them this way and that, dropped them back down again and stomped some more.

“Need to break them in,” he said in his thick Finnish accent.

For most of the season, the Buffalo Sabres have been trying to do the same with their new players. Like the skates, it is taking considerable time. The ninth-place team, which many picked as a favourite to win the Stanley Cup at the start of the season, entered Tuesday night’s game against the Toronto Maple Leafs still looking to break into the playoffs.

“I’d rather be right here than not be here,” said head coach Lindy Ruff. “It’s a good opportunity. It tells you a lot about your players. I like it. Under pressure, you get to see what your players can do. If your players can’t get it done, that just means you’re not good enough.”

It was not supposed to be like this. The season was not supposed to hinge on the final three games of the schedule, with another team still controlling Buffalo’s fate. The Sabres were not supposed to be a bubble team happy just to get into the playoffs.

When Terry Pegula purchased the team around this time last year, the passionate owner boisterously proclaimed, “From this point forward, the Buffalo Sabres’ reason for existence will be to win the Stanley Cup.”

And unlike previous owners, he was willing to open his wallet to get the job done. One of Pegula’s first moves was purchasing a new carpet for the team’s dressing room that was reportedly worth US$20,000. Then, of course, he bought some new players to walk on that carpet.

Christian Ehrhoff signed a 10-year contract worth US$40million; Leino, a six-year deal worth Us$27-million. Robyn Regehr, who had two years and about Us$8-million remaining on his contract, was acquired from Calgary.

The moves took the Sabres, who had been a mid-level spending team the previous two seasons, to the top of the NHL’S food chain. They probably overspent to get there. But from a fan’s perspective, that was when everything changed: Buffalo was no longer the underdog.

“Tremendous excitement,” GM Darcy Regier told the National Post last summer in explaining the feeling in the city. “And with that comes expectations, but I don’t know that you’d find anybody who wouldn’t take that deal.”

Spending Pegula’s money was both the easy and difficult part. In the past, the Sabres were a cap-challenged team that surprisingly made the conference final in 2006 and 2007, but then lost its star players to free agency. The thinking was that if they only had the money to spend, they could do some real damage.

The irony, of course, is that now that this team might miss the playoffs for the first time in three years.

Injuries, of course, have played a part. Buffalo, which headed into Monday’s game without Ehrhoff, defenceman Tyler Myers and forward Jochen Hecht, had missed 319 man-games to injuries. But aside from the up-and-down season of goaltender Ryan Miller, the big disappointment has been the performance of its big-ticketed players.

Leino, who had 19 goals and 53 points with the Philadelphia Flyers last season,

has seven goals and 24 points. Ehrhoff, who had 50 points and a plus-19 rating with the Vancouver Canucks last season, has 32 points and is minus-2. Regehr went from 17 points and a plus-2 rating with the Flames to four points and a minus-10.

“If you’re on a good team, you’re always going to have expectations,” said Leino. “It’s not like the Flyers are a pressure-free team. Maybe I was in a different role there salary-wise. That brings a little pressure.

“We’ve got a lot more talent, a lot more money spent on this team.”

As such, there will be more finger-pointing if Buffalo comes up short. The team, 14th in the East on Feb. 17, has been one of the hottest teams in the second half of the season. They are playing looser and with more confidence.

With Miller leading the way — he had a .899 save percentage before the allstar break, and a .935 save percentage since then — the feeling is they could surprise some teams if they could just sneak into the playoffs.

“That’s what happened in Philly,” Leino said. “We made the playoffs on the last game and we went all the way to the final. The next year we were the best team in the league and the playoffs didn’t go as expected. If you get hot at the right moment, it’s good, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

If not, well, Regier and Ruff have been joined at the hip since 1997. And while they have survived three ownership changes and a franchise that declared bankruptcy in 2003, they might not be able to survive coming down from this high.

“The losses hurt you, but the winning is fun,” Ruff said. “There’s no better feeling than standing there outside the door after a game when you win, especially at this time of year. The highs are high and the lows are a lot lower.”