Late in the third period, Danny Briere charged down the center of the ice. As the Washington Capitals defensemen collapsed on him, Briere dished to Thomas Vanek, streaking up the left wing, and Vanek blasted a 45-foot slap-shot past Maxime Daigneault to tie the game up at two.
As overtime began in HSBC Arena in Buffalo on the night of September 17, Briere, the Buffalo Sabres co-captain, and Vanek, the All-Star rookie, were sent out on the ice.
Briere wound up, and shot the puck—which Vanek deftly deflected into the net with his stick. “The Buffalo Sabres win!” wailed legendary Sabres play-by-play announcer Rick Jeanerette. “They beat the Washington Capitals 34 seconds into overtime.”
Buffalo Sabres fans have been waiting a long time to hear those kinds of words.
The 15-month break from hockey in the National Hockey League is finally over. The NHL owners and the NHL Players Association have finally come to a collective bargaining agreement, introducing a salary cap that links player salaries to league revenues.
Most importantly, to the hockey fans of Buffalo, this means that the Sabres are back. The boys have finally put on the pads, and are playing preseason games in the National Hockey League.
The powers that be in the NHL have also changed the rules and started a new era of hockey that is being called the “New NHL.” These rule changes mean things like tag-up offsides is back, the blue-line is farther out, and the two-line pass is now only a memory.
The Sabres are trying to shake off the rust and figure out who is going to play in this new NHL. They also have some new players you may not have heard of like Thomas Vanek, a 22-year-old Austrian, who just might become the first Sabres first round draft choice since Pierre Turgeon to score 20 goals—and a vigorous three-way battle for the starting goalie position.
Saturday, September 17, 2005, was the Buffalo Sabres home-opener at HSBC Arena. The announced attendance to see the game was 17, 057, a pretty impressive number for a preseason game. The fans may have come to see the Sabres, or to see the “new NHL.”
But everyone in attendance was treated to an exciting performance by the Sabres new left winger, Thomas Vanek.
Even though this is Vanek’s first year with the Sabres, many Buffalo area hockey fans are already familiar with this 22-year-old hockey player. Vanek, a rookie from Graz, Austria, by way of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has already had a few impressive performances at HSBC Arena.
In 2003, Vanek scored the game-winning goals in the final two games of the NCAA National Championship title for the Golden Gophers of the University of Minnesota, during the Frozen Four here at HSBC Arena. In 2004, Vanek had a two-goal performance at HSBC arena with the Rochester Amerks, the Sabres’ American Hockey League farm team.
In the Sabres’ preseason home opener, Vanek continued this trend with another impressive performance at HSBC Arena. Vanek, whose game has been described by some sportswriters as positively electrifying, forced overtime when he blasted a one-timer past Daigneault late in the third period after a Briere setup.
Vanek then ended the sudden-death overtime with a goal, just 34 seconds in, when he tapped a dribbler past the Capitals goalie. Vanek was set up again by a shot from Daniel Briere.
“I just tried to hustle to the puck,” Vanek said later. “It was (Briere’s) goal, I just held my stick there and it hit it perfectly.”
When asked about Vanek, his line-mate, Briere said, “He’s a game-breaker. He can find the net, he can score goals. He knows how to put himself in good position to score, and you can’t teach that.”
As if his game performance wasn’t enough, Vanek scored the only goal during the mandatory preseason post-game shoot-out. Vanek’s shoot-out goal was described by Tim Graham in the Buffalo News as, “a sweet move by tracing an imaginary circle around the puck before firing it past a helpless Daigneault.”
It’s easy to be high on Vanek after watching his performances in Buffalo, but fans have to remind themselves this game was only an exhibition: Vanek has yet to play in a regular season NHL game. In the post-game interview, Briere qualified his glowing remarks about Vanek by saying, “They didn’t have a big lineup on the other side. … It’s one good step, he played extremely well, but we can’t get too excited. I mean, this game doesn’t mean much.”
Still, Vanek is only 22 years old, and has plenty of time to convert his raw talent into NHL skill. In the post-game press conference the Sabre’s head coach, Lindy Ruff had this to say about Vanek’s potential: ”I still think there is another gear there. He’s a big-time goal-scorer that can come through for you, but I’d like him to dominate more than that, and I think that once he gets adjusted to the NHL game, he will.”
Besides a new winger, the Buffalo Sabres have a problem that no other team in the NHL is dealing with right now. The Sabres have a three-way battle for the starting goalie position, with no obvious front-runner. The battle is between Martin Biron from Lac St. Charles, Quebec; Mika Noronen from Tampere, Finland; and Ryan Miller from East Lansing, Michigan. These three goalies are all from different countries, and all want the starting goalie job for the Buffalo Sabres.
Biron is the incumbent starting goalie, and says he has intentions of coming out on top this year. Biron has four years of solid NHL experience, but was unemployed during the lockout last year. Biron decided to just stay home in Buffalo and work out during the season off from hockey. Of the three, Biron is the only goalie not to play pro-hockey last year
Noronen also has time as the Sabres starting goalie and says he would like to be teams’ number one net-minder. Noronen has only about one full year of experience with the Sabres. At times Noronen has looked dazzling, and at times he has looked below average. He had a good year during the lockout when he played in his homeland of Finland for the team in Hameenlinna. Noronen looked impressive against Finnish competition, with a 2.01 goals-against-average.
Miller has only a smattering of NHL experience, which includes a handful of starts in the NHL. Last year, though, Miller tore up the AHL. He won the Baz Batien award for the league’s best goaltender, and was an AHL first-team All-Star. Miller looked dominant against his minor-league opposition and was the first AHL goalie to win 40 games in the last 40 years.
Each goalie has played well enough to deserve the job, but at times all three have looked shaky in the net during NHL games. Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff says that all three will get starts in the preseason.
With no clear front-runner, Lindy Ruff and Darcy Regier, the Sabres General Manager, have a difficult decision to make. Not only do they have to pick a starting goalie, they have to decide which two goalies make the team. That means that the odd goalie out will either be released or traded by the start of the regular season.
Being released or trades excludes Ryan Miller, who has not played three seasons or 180 games since signing his first NHL contract, and thus can still be sent down to the minor leagues without passing waivers (a player on waivers can be claimed by any team in the NHL).
Sending Miller down is unlikely, though, because he is considered the goalie of the future for the Sabres franchise. If Miller wins the job, the Sabres could have one thing most NHL teams do not: an American starting goaltender.
In Canada, hockey is an institution loved by almost everyone. But the NHL has always been the bottom rung of the four major team sports in America. Hockey has never brought in the big American dollar that NHL creators dreamed it would when they put this Canadian sport in American cities. On the contrary, many teams in the NHL lose money every year. On ESPN, the NHL has even been frequently beat in ratings by the World Series of Poker.
There are many reasons given for lack of hockey fans in the United States, but the most prolific is that Americans find hockey boring because of frequent low scoring games. Many people believe that low scoring is the same reason that soccer, the most popular sport in the world, has not gained professional popularity in the U.S. either. Therefore, the NHL commissioner, Gary Bettman, and the NHL Board of Governors have decided to make a number of rule changes to the game of hockey.
Most of the rule changes in the NHL are designed to open up the game, decrease clutching and grabbing, and increase scoring. Their goal is to make NHL hockey look a little more like the wide open games of European or Olympic hockey. The NHL has even decided that tie games, after regular overtime, will be ended in the Olympic way, with the most exciting experience in sports: a shootout. If the NHL can’t find a way to increase their fan base and make more money, then many teams will just not be able to make it financially.
After all these changes to the game of hockey, the “New NHL” looked much like the old NHL for the first two periods of the Sabres’ preseason home-opener. The only noticeable difference was an increase in penalties called by the referees.
The NHL supposedly has a new zero tolerance policy on interference, hooking, holding, and obstruction. This policy created about double the usual amount of penalties, which created 14 power-play opportunities throughout the game.
In spite of all the power-plays and the glut of four-on-four opportunities, there was only one goal scored in the first two periods. Sabres fans hoped that this performance doesn’t mark the return of the Sabres so-called “power-less play.” Matt Pettinger scored the lone early goal on the power-play during a five-on-three power-play situation for the Caps.
After two periods of the NHL as usual, the game finally started to open up. In the third period, Ales Kotalik, of the Sabres, kicked off the action with goal. The Capitals retook the lead with a goal by Bryan Muir. Later in the third period, Thomas Vanek ripped a blistering one-timer (a shot taken directly from a pass without stopping the puck) from a Daniel Briere pass to tie the game and send the game into overtime.
Vanek then won the game 34 seconds into overtime, when he tapped in a shot by Briere. Biron’s decent play, and Vanek’s goal in the shoot-out put a gift wrap on a decent Sabres performance in their home-opener.
Thus far in the preseason, the Sabres have played some pretty good hockey. They have a solid pre-season record of 3-1. Their only loss was to the Minnesota Wild, 6-3. There, the Sabres turned a 3-0 lead into a 6-3 loss with Mikka Noronen in goal.
In their latest preseason game, on September 21, the Sabres blanked the Capitals in Washington for a 4-0 win. In the game, Ryan Miller announced his presence to the NHL, stopping all 29 shots to get a shutout. And, Vanek looked impressive again, scoring another pair of goals, to bring his preseason total to four goals and two assists in three games played.
For the Buffalo Sabres, the regular season officially starts at HSBC Arena on Wednesday, October 5, 2005 against The New York Islanders. This will be the first regular season game the Sabres play in almost 18 months. Like every season, fans have high hopes for the Sabres, who have not made the playoffs since 2001. Whatever the result, each fan can rest assured that the boys are back in town and ready to play.
