Tank You Very Much

Is it ever OK for sports teams to lose on purpose?

I'm sure we'd all say, "Probably not". After all, there's a very real reason that gambling is strictly forbidden in baseball, and there's a very real reason one of the game's greatest players -- Shoeless Joe Jackson -- will likely never get in the Hall of Fame. It has to do with losing on purpose.

But is it OK for a team to be purposely assembled by management with the goal in mind of being bad?

Well...if you're in Buffalo, the answer is almost certainly a resounding "YES!!!"

Our NHL team in these parts, the Sabres, is virtually beloved. It's entirely possible that hockey fandom is a bigger thing here than football fandom, although I suspect that's because the Sabres had a brief period of being awesome eight or nine years ago while the Bills have been crappy for fifteen. But right now, the Sabres are awful. With one more loss, they will clinch the worst record in the NHL this season, and most fans here are fine with that.

Why?

Because the NHL Draft has not one but two astonishing prospects lined up to very likely go first and second in the first round. If the Sabres finish dead last, one of those two kids will end up playing in Buffalo. These guys (Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel) are referred to almost universally as "generational" players, the kinds of players who only tend to come along once every ten years or so. We're talking Sidney Crosby and Mario Lemieux territory here.

But why would the Sabres be interested in both of those guys if they finish dead last? Well, that's because the NHL does not do what the NFL and Major League Baseball do with their drafts. Those leagues slot their drafts strictly according to order of finish: the top pick goes to the team with the worst record, second pick to the second-worst, and so on, using various tie-breaker formulas to distinguish between teams with identical records. The NHL, instead, uses a lottery to determine the top pick, so this year (the lottery rules change next year, for some reason), the team that finishes dead last has only a 20 percent chance of picking first, that team is guaranteed to pick second if they don't get the top pick. Which means that the team finishing dead last is guaranteed one of these two amazing players, who are both the type of talent that hasn't resided in Buffalo in many moons, or maybe ever.

And the Sabres this year are bad. Really bad. Cataclysmically bad. Some sports people have determined that the Sabres are, statistically-speaking, historically bad. Ouch.

And they're this bad, this year, on purpose.

Is that wrong? Is it wrong for a sports team's management to purposely field an awful team?

Well, here's the thing: I don't think it is.

First of all, there's nothing new at all about this. In hockey terms, they call it "tanking", but a football team would likely refer to the phenomenon as "bottoming out"; you see it fairly often, when football teams whose rosters are aging and getting prohibitively expensive have a big purge of talent, resulting in a pretty bad team that has decided to go into "rebuilding mode". Rebuilding almost always involves being pretty bad for at least a year or two (or so the team hopes; NFL history is replete with rebuilding projects that failed, resulting in another rebuild three or four years after the first one). "Bottoming out" is a pretty common idea in the NFL, and in fact, in recent years a lot of local sports commentators have called for the Bills to "bottom out", so they might pick higher in the draft and maybe land on the best quarterbacks.

Meanwhile, the Sabres are definitely rebuilding. They have jettisoned virtually every high-priced player and every player who was due to become an unrestricted free agent, often in return for draft picks. This, too, is nothing new; baseball teams have been doing this for years. Over there it's commonly called "having a fire sale", when baseball teams that are pretty much out of contention start trading away players who are either going to be free agents or who command a high enough price in return that a team can use a trade to restock its minor league system with prospects. Are such teams "embracing losing", as some have accused the Sabres of doing? I find it hard to see how. Same with the football teams who have elected to enter a rebuilding process. Is it "embracing losing" to enter into a period where losing is almost certain?

And why is it that sports commentators -- columnists for the Buffalo News are notorious for this -- so often call for rebuilds, call for "blowing it up and starting over", call for "bottoming out", only to harshly criticize the team when the process of rebuilding, blowing it up and starting over, or bottoming out results in a period of losing?

Who knows, but it seems to me that there are conflicting impulses at work here. We expect the players on the ice, or the field, or the diamond, to always put out their best effort. But the problem is that sometimes the best effort of management actually involves being bad for a while. The players may expect to win each time, but management has a different job, and sometimes it means being bad for an entire year in hopes of landing a very, very good player on the other end of it.

I do bite my thumb, sir!

A player from the Ottawa Senators got into a scuffle with one of the Buffalo Sabres last night, biting his thumb in the process. Well, now! Clearly he does quarrel. Draw, gentlemen!



It's Capulets like these Ottawans that make blood in the marketplace.

Sporting Notes

Stuff from sports:

:: Every year in the various playoff periods for each sport, I'll encounter a bit of logic that always escapes me: the idea that if your team loses in the playoffs, you should root for the team that knocked your guys out, on the basis that then you could say you lost to the best, or something like that. Personally, I think that's complete poppycock. The team that beats my team deserves to suffer a defeat ten times as stunning as that which they visited upon my own long-suffering burgh. So, Go, Ducks!

:: I continue to be amazed at all the media hand-wringing over the Bills' decision to allow Nate Clements to leave without even making an attempt to re-sign him. Look, Clements is a good player, no doubt about it, and his departure does leave a hole in the secondary. But there were too many games where his presence created a hole in the secondary, the Bills would have been crazy to commit that much money to the position of cornerback, and it all boils down to the harsh reality that the Bills weren't going to get any better by keeping him. When the choice is a guy leaving now or a guy leaving later, I'd always take the guy leaving now. I'm a big "Get it over with and move on" person.

:: For all the metaphorical ill-wishing I tend to direct on this blog toward the NFL franchise from New England, I hope it's clear that I confine my ill-wishes to just the field of play. I want those players to live happy lives off the field, and just go 0-16 on it. I certainly wouldn't ever wish anything like this upon them. Condolences to his family, friends, and teammates.

Let the gnashing of teeth begin

A couple of hours ago, the Buffalo Sabres went down to defeat against the Ottawa Senators, thus ending their season one series short of the Stanley Cup Finals -- just where their season ended last year. I'll leave the post-mortems for those who know more about hockey than I; I know that there are some salary cap issues looming over the team, but I don't know if those issues are of the "let a few guys go whom we'd love to keep" variety or of the "break up the team and start rebuilding" variety. My instinct is that it's more the former than the latter, but again, I don't really know.

I do know this: if the Sabres are able to keep most of this year's nucleus together, then they'll probably enter next season as one of the favored contenders again. My sense of things -- and this is from listening to people who know what they're talking about, rather than any keen analysis on my part -- is that the team's approach to hockey doesn't really require a massive amount of tinkering. Last year, the team was done in by injuries. This year, the team was apparently done in by poor play when they could least afford it.

And if they're favored contenders again next year, then I think that Lindy Ruff should plaster the Sabres' locker room with photos like this:



All the hard work this year, and that's what it came to: Watching another team that worked just as hard celebrate on the Sabres' own ice.

Oh, well -- now the mood will be different in Buffalo, which is a shame. I've really liked the mood around here lately. I hope that if the Sabres are still awesome next year, and if they do better in the playoffs, that mood can come back. It's been fun living in the city where the best team played. That's fleeting, you know; when you're the best team, someone else always catches up to you. You just hope they do it after you've won a championship or two, not before.

The road back

It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Why quote this monologue of Samwise Gamgee's from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers? Well:



One down. Three to go.

I know, there's no chance it can happen. But there is a chance, isn't there? Sure there is.

And if that bit of movie dialog seems a bit overblown for something so prosaic as a hockey game, howzabout this:

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.

Those first three games? The castles that sank into the swamp.

OK, I'm stretching here. But still: one win is in, and the Sabres have home ice for two of the remaining three that they have to win.

(BTW, I was listening to Mike Schopp and the Bulldog this afternoon -- for you non-Buffalo folks, those are two sports radio guys -- and Bulldog made the point that the only real hope he was clinging to was the admitted stretch that the Boston Red Sox pulled off a comeback from a 3-0 deficit in the American League Championship Series in 2004. Schopp rejected this, on the basis that hockey is completely different from baseball in that the key matchups pretty much stay the same from one hockey game to the next, where in baseball, in the next game you always have a new pitcher for the next game; and therefore, series momentum means far more in hockey than it does in baseball.

But if that's the case, shouldn't baseball have seen more than one example of a team coming back from a 3-0 series deficit in its hundred-plus year history? Prior to the Sox doing it in 2004, there were only two instances of teams coming back from such a deficit in a best-of-seven series in all of pro sports. Those two were in...hockey.)

Take heart, Buffalo!

I have to admit that a split of the first two games would not have shocked me. But going down 0-2 in the first two games does surprise me. Wow. So the Sabres are facing the biggest test of these playoffs yet.

I remember reading an article toward the end of last year's football season that predicted that the Colts would win the Super Bowl, despite the fact that at that point they were heading for the third seed in the playoffs. The idea was that a bunch of times in recent years, teams in various pro sports have posted amazing records one year, taken the top seed in their sport, exited the playoffs early, and then won it all the next year despite a less productive season. So maybe there's precedent for the Sabres to come back next year and --

Oh, screw that. We want the Cup this year, right? Nobody should utter a single syllable of "Wait 'til next year" until the Sabres have taken their fourth loss in a series, and that ain't happened yet.

So how to take heart? Well, how about the 1996 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves? The Braves took Game One, 12-1. And then they took Game Two, 4-0. And then? The Yankees took the next four in a row and the World Series trophy. (Not a perfect example, as Atlanta won those first two in their own park as opposed to in Yankee Stadium, but it's still a 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven that came to nothing.)

Or last year's opening round of the NHL playoffs, when the Carolina Hurricanes (boo hiss) honked the first two games at home to Montreal before winning the next four to advance. The Hurricanes (boo hiss) went on to win the Cup, beating the Sabres on their way there.

And even if the Sabres lose Game Three to go down 0-3, well -- remember the Boston Red Sox and the 2004 ALCS!

It just isn't over, folks.

Halfway There

Win number eight: Check.

Eight more to go.

(You know, I remember when, in my younger and more foolish days, I thought that the Stanley Cup playoffs take forever. Now, they just seem to whip right on by. The NBA playoffs, on the other hand....)

Following hockey, the minimalist way

In our home we don't have cable, so unless the hockey games are on one of the national networks or I'm someplace that does have cable, I can't watch the games. Thus, a lot of times when the Sabres are playing an important game, my general way of following the game is to go to the individual page for that particular game and hit "refresh" every minute or so. (Yeah, the individual game pages have automatic refresh, but where's the fun in that?)

So last night I'm doing this, and I had added incentive as I was attending the 10:45 showing of Spiderman 3 with a friend from work who was actually at the game itself. And I'm hitting "refresh" all throughout, and the game is in a 0-0 tie through all the first period, all the second period, and just about all of the third period. Now, we'd already been hoping that the game would end in regulation so they'd be able to get from the arena to the Regal Cinemas in my neck o' the woods, so the prospect of a scoreless tie in regulation was a clear complication to our plans.

At about 9:30 or so, I again refreshed and saw that with about twenty seconds or so to go, the score was now 1-0. Yay, they might get out of there on time for the movie! But wait -- it wasn't 1-0 Sabres, it was 1-0 Rangers with less than twenty seconds to go. Boo! And then I hit refresh less than a minute later, and it's 1-1 with about five seconds left! Yay Sabres! But now we're going to overtime, screwing up the movie plan! Boo!

Luckily, the game ended fairly quickly in OT when Maxim Affinnegennoff (pretty sure I spelled that wrong) scored the game-winner, and then it was off to the theater, where I awaited the arrival of the friend from work and his friend who apparently drove at point five past light speed to get there while the previews were still scrolling.

Funny tales from the game, via my co-worker:

:: When the Rangers scored to take the 1-0 lead with less than twenty seconds to go, apparently a bunch of people in the row in front of him got up and made their hasty exit from the arena. Oops.

:: Apparently the Sabres run a scroll of names on their Jumbotron scoreboard during games congratulating people on birthdays, and apparently one of the names submitted -- and run -- at last night's game was "Jacques Strape". Oops. Shades of Heywood Jablome.

Anyhow, Go Sabres!

We Believe!

Thanks to Buffalo Hodgepodge for pointing out this wonderful Sports Illustrated article about Buffalo and the Sabres.

Weather was the last thing on our minds on Jan. 27, 1991. Not with paradise a mere 47 yards away in Tampa. I looked at the clock to preserve the moment: 9:37 p.m. Around town, similar scenes played out. Byron Brown, then the director of Equal Employment Opportunity for Erie County and now the mayor of Buffalo, was at a Super Bowl party at his mother-in-law's house on Blaine Avenue in Hamlin Park. Mark Hutchinson, the chef and owner of Hutch's, one of the city's most popular eateries, watched with his pals above Casa Di Pizza on the Elmwood Strip. Finally, it was Buffalo's time. Adam Lingner's snap was pure, and when the ball arrived in the hands of backup quarterback Frank Reich, I felt a tug on my hand. Our group stood up as one and screamed. Scott Norwood gave it a ride.

You know the rest. SUPER HEARTBREAK The Buffalo News declared on its front page the next day. They wept at Byron Brown's party. Hutch recalled how one of his friends kicked a table across the floor, stormed out of the restaurant, and locked himself inside his home for seven days. On Montrose Avenue, we were all numb. Barely anyone spoke a word after the kick as we headed out into the darkness, a journey that became all too familiar for Buffalonians in the 1990s.

Tell me about it. I do not doubt for one second that every year on January 27, late in the evening, if you venture out into the still of an wintry Iowa cornfield, and if you listen as hard as it's possible to listen, you'll still hear my scream of NOOOOOO!!! echoing across the icy prairie.

What began as a magic ride for an underdog last season has morphed into a collective confidence that hasn't been felt among Buffalonians since the kickoff of Super Bowl XXV against the Giants. This season the Sabres clinched their first Presidents' Trophy title and set a franchise record with 53 victories. They hold home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs.

But the euphoria surrounding this Sabres team comes from more than just the winning. It's the manner in which they have won. In a league that now rewards skating over brawn, the Sabres are the fastest team on the ice. They play with flair and panache, traits normally not associated with rust-belt Buffalo. They win games by coming from behind -- 10 times they have overcome a two-goal deficit -- which plays to a city predisposed to the underdog role.

By unanimous accounts the locker room consists of character guys. ("They are the most accountable team I have ever been around," says Buffalo News columnist Bucky Gleason. "And they don't have much to be accountable for.")

For seven consecutive months Buffalo has been the top-selling team on Shop.NHL.com. Sales of Sabres merchandise in March increased 657 percent compared with last year. In mid-December there was a 12-week waiting list for a Sabres jersey; the wait has now receded to eight weeks. All 41 home games this season were sold out (as is every playoff game), and 90 percent of the team's season-ticket holders have already renewed for next year.

Let's go Buffalo!