In Philadelphia, late on 26 April 2011, the Buffalo Sabres lost a Game 7 to the Flyers and went home for the summer. Lindy Ruff was behind the bench. It was an ordinary first round exit, the kind that happens to eight teams every spring, and nobody in the building thought they were watching anything except a series ending.
It was the last playoff game the franchise played for fourteen seasons.
On Saturday, when the Rangers beat Detroit in regulation, Buffalo clinched a place in this year’s postseason and ended the longest playoff drought in the history of the National Hockey League. Five thousand four hundred and fifty eight days had passed.
What a drought of that length actually is
It is worth resisting the instinct to describe this as bad luck that went on too long, because fourteen years is not variance.
Sixteen of thirty two teams make the playoffs in this league. A coin flip, repeated fourteen times, produces a run of fourteen consecutive failures roughly once in sixteen thousand attempts. A franchise that was merely average would have qualified seven or eight times over that stretch by accident.
And Buffalo was not merely unlucky at the margin. Across those fourteen seasons the club never once finished higher than nineteenth in the league. That is not a team missing narrowly. It is a team that was, in most of those years, not in the conversation by February.
So the drought is a description of something structural, and the interesting question is what.
What it turned out to mean
Three things, and they compound.
The first is the draft trap, which is the cruellest feature of a league built to help bad teams. Finishing low brings high picks, high picks bring young players, and young players take years to become good. A team that keeps finishing low keeps accumulating prospects and keeps being young, and being young is itself a reason to finish low. The mechanism designed to end a rebuild can extend one indefinitely if the team never gets far enough up the table to stop drafting at the top.
The second is that instability is expensive in a way that does not show on a balance sheet. Over a long drought a franchise cycles through coaches and general managers, and each arrival brings a philosophy, and each philosophy takes three years to evaluate and is usually abandoned after two. Players developed for one system are then asked to play another. The clock resets, repeatedly, and the resets are not additive: four half rebuilds are worth considerably less than one completed one.
The third is the part nobody can put a number on, which is what fourteen years does to a place. A child who was ten when that Game 7 ended is twenty five now and has never seen their team play a playoff game. The building stayed full for a lot of those years, which is the remarkable part, and the loyalty was real and largely unrewarded.
The company it kept
Buffalo’s was the longest run in this league’s history and it was not the longest in North American sport. That distinction belongs to the New York Jets, who have not qualified since 2010 and whose drought continues.
The comparison is instructive because the two franchises are in different leagues with different structures. Hockey admits half its teams to the postseason; American football admits fourteen of thirty two. A drought of this length in a league with a generous playoff field is a harder thing to achieve than the same drought in a stingy one, which is another way of saying the arithmetic above understates it.
What ended it
Not a single signing and not a trade, on the available evidence, which is the unsatisfying answer that is usually the correct one.
What appears to have happened is that the accumulated young players stopped being young at approximately the same time, and a coaching approach survived long enough to be learned rather than merely installed. That is the ordinary way these things end. It looks like nothing for several seasons and then it looks like a team.
It is also why the celebration this week has a slightly wary quality to it. Clinching a place is not winning anything, the first round is a coin flip by design, and Buffalo is in the field rather than favored in it.
The banner
There will not be one, and that is the correct outcome. Teams do not hang banners for qualifying.
What there will be, in October, is a schedule with home dates on it that were not guaranteed to matter in March, and a building full of people who have been going anyway. The scoreboard will show the same standings it shows every year, and Buffalo will be somewhere in the top half of them, which for fourteen years it was not.
Fourteen years is long enough that the equipment has changed twice, the league has added teams, the salary cap has roughly doubled, and the rules on what a goaltender may do with the puck behind his own net have been rewritten. A supporter who fell asleep after that Game 7 in Philadelphia and woke up on Saturday would need the game explained to them before the result.
The arena is the same arena, on the same street, with the same seats bolted to the same concrete. It has had more than one name since.
