The Sabres and the Goo Goo Dolls: two Buffalo institutions that peaked around early 1999.
Second half of an Empire State back-to-back, this time against a team that just blows all over the place. They're averaging one goal scored per game and haven't won in five tries. It's too early to do much statistical analysis but it's pretty clear that this team is going to be really bad all year long. In fact, since the Calgary Flames have indicated that they might actually give a shit, it might wind up being the Sabres who are the worst team in the league. There are some promising youngsters on the way, but it's not their time just yet. Also, their captain is Steve fucking Ott. Ryan Miller and Thomas Vanek will probably be traded as soon as someone makes a good offer.
There's an interesting contrast with last night's Islanders here. The Isles are owned by a miserly old Chinese man who sounds just like Woody Allen.
I'm serious. Even as they've turned the corner, they've been unrelentingly cheap. Last year, they traded for Tim Thomas, who, as you may remember, sat out the season because Obama lives under his bed or something, and so the Bruins suspended him for failing to report. But because the Bruins signed him to a contract after age 35, his cap hit couldn't come off their books. So the Isles acquired him with no intent for him to ever set foot in Nassau County, thereby charging his cap hit toward the salary floor without paying out any real dollars. There was even fairly open talk that they would hold his contract in abeyance, like they did with Nabokov until he showed up, thus hypothetically keeping his dead cap space on the books in perpetuity. Someone must have told them this was going to get them in trouble, though. They're cutting costs everywhere they can until Brooklyn and will still be pretty good because they have John Tavares.
Meanwhile, the Sabres were recently purchased by a billionaire who made his billions in something unseemly, I want to say fracking, maybe, given that part of the country. He loves the Sabres and loves Buffalo and loves hockey and having cashed out of his business, wants to put his filthy money back into all these things. He's upgraded their arena. He's trying to revitalize downtown Buffalo now; good luck with that one. He even dropped millions on giving Penn State a full-fledged college hockey program, where we can only hope that no children will be raped. But all the money he's put into the Sabres, going out and spending big bucks on Christian Ehrhoff and Ville Leino, has accomplished nothing. Probably because he spent big bucks on Christian Ehrhoff and Ville Leino. It's gotta suck for the salt-of-the-earthers all around Upstate/Western New York who live and die by this team. It's been rough sledding for Buffalo, ownership-wise. They had a guy go to federal prison for embezzling from his cable company, then some weird Randroid who bought the team and then didn't really care about it. So here they are thinking that they had finally broken out of the small-market hell that cost them so many great players over the years, only to find that they're now, in lamenting the giant wastes of free agent money and demanding that everyone be fired because of it, merely in large-market hell.
Q has gotten his first peckerslap from on high as Jimmy Hayes will go back to Rockford and Brandon Pirri will come up. He can't do much worse than our current bottom-six stew of meh. Go get 'em, kid.
Game's on channel 9 locally but not WGN America because Bettman is a dickhead.
Seriously, though, Steve Ott.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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