Last Tuesday night against the hapless Ottawa Senators, Jack Eichel made a spectacular play that’s already been lost by history. With eight minutes left in the third, Ottawa is on the power play with a 3-2 lead. Buffalo manages a change on the fly, and a Senators turnover quickly becomes Eichel skating into the Ottawa zone one-on-one against the defender. He moves into the right side of the zone and waits for Brandon Montour to make it a 2 on 1 with two Senators trailing.
Eichel then singlehandedly creates a scoring chance himself, hitting the brakes as Tomas Chabot closes on the ‘shooter’ and the backcheck arrives to help. But Eichel deftly stickhandles away from Chabot, spins around and fires a perfect backhand pass to Montour between the two Senators still on their skates.
With a wide open net, Montour completely whiffs on the shot. It goes behind the net, harmless, and play continues.
It’s not in the highlights or the condensed game and no one made a GIF of it online. It’s gone, just like the chance the Sabres had to salvage a game they didn’t deserve and would end up losing in embarrassing fashion.
Buffalo lost, 5-2, in a lot of ways last Tuesday. They allowed the worst power play in the league to go 3 for 3. Two empty net goals perhaps made it look worse than it was, but if you were watching you knew the truth. The Sabres — with 10 days off and after an All-Star Game in which Eichel was the lone team representative — looked completely unprepared to play hockey against one of the worst teams in the league. It was yet another game where the team, collectively, failed to capitalize on what’s made Eichel so special this year, with little help from those around him.
In February of 2017 I wrote a post here called The Wormhole. The Bills had just broken The Drought and it was clear the team was intent to move on from Tyrod Taylor and draft a quarterback. The Sabres were much more adrift, staring down another disappointing season and trading Evander Kane. In the post, I wrote about former Cleveland Browns head coaches meeting in a bar called Rock Bottom and the nature of losing.
It’s a near-perfect irony, except that losing is not a pit. It isn’t something you can find the bottom of and just climb out. There isn’t always a discernible end to it, and sometimes it’s not clear how to get out. But you still have to look up.
Losing isn’t a black hole, either. Black holes imply there’s no escape, only the crushing inevitability of getting caught and being stuck there forever. Losing is not like that. It’s a wormhole, and once you start there’s often no telling where it’s taking you, how long it will last, or what happens when it’s finally over.
That was nearly two years ago now, and the Bills have since drafted Josh Allen, struggled through his disastrous rookie season and made the playoffs again last year. The Sabres, meanwhile, are still stuck in the same hypothetical pit. They brought in a new GM who promptly made the worst trade of the decade, giving the St. Louis Blues the final piece to a Stanley Cup championship. They finally fired a coach clearly doing active harm to the team and left in place a general manager seemingly unable to navigate the franchise out of a self-imposed salary cap hell, letting younger, better players languish in the minor leagues while inferior talent actively hurts the franchise.
A fast start has been squandered once more, and another year of dead contracts and inaction in the front office makes fans wonder if the owners are even paying attention to what’s going on downtown. And things could certainly be better for the Bills, too, who watched a quarterback picked in their draft slot win a Super Bowl on Sunday while their pick effectively doomed them with a manic performance in Houston on Wild Card Weekend.
The pick is in…#ChiefsDraft pic.twitter.com/Mi31iLb3up
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) April 28, 2017
That both the Bills and Sabres essentially traded both the current Conn Smythe and Super Bowl MVP winners is an incredibly bleak fact my most depressing sports brain could never fathom, and yet it’s the relatively small success the Bills have forged without Mahomes that makes what’s going on at KeyBank Center look truly bleak. The frustration Sabres fans feel about their team isn’t new. That’s the problem: this malaise is the same I wrote about two years ago, the same one that set in during the tank years and never left. It’s just that the Bills aren’t stuck in the same wormhole, as mediocre as they may remain.
I still feel the same way about losing: there’s no telling when it will end when you’re been stuck in it for this long. But after another two seasons of waiting, it’s even more clear just how hopeless things are until they’re finally not. It’s not random, though, and the cost of all this failure is still very real. These Wormhole Sabres are wasting yet another year of Jack Eichel’s prime, and it’s increasingly clear the initial good vibes of the new coach can’t overcome a general manager’s miscalculations and an ownership’s indifference.
That’s the thing about just turning the game off or leaving early, or maybe not showing up at all: the good stuff still gets wasted whether you’re watching or not. Eichel’s prime continues to slip into obscurity, uncapitalized on like that scoring chance you already don’t remember. It might all be gone before we ever get to appreciate what we’re wasting each winter next to Lake Erie. All the fan support and enthusiasm that once made me think that, even if it took a while, they would finally get it right? That’s gone, a hilarious footnote in the Sabres own drought with no end.
Something new has to take its place, I suppose. The Bills ended their drought and now have a new struggle with success. The Sabres will find a way out someday, too. But right now it’s clear the period we’re still in won’t be anything fans remember fondly, if at all.