BUFFALO — The question everyone asks about how the Buffalo Sabres made it to the playoffs and how they went from the basement to the penthouse is “How?” Apart from the usual answer being, “We’re still figuring that out,” the actual answer is much less cheeky and far more boring.
The Sabres made it a point to eliminate the emotional roller coaster that comes from playing a long schedule. Stacking up a couple wins in past seasons would lead to premature satisfaction that everything was going well and they couldn’t be touched. The converse applied when losses followed each other in growing numbers and attitudes and emotions would sour. That caused ruts to become canyons and they weren’t able to traverse those paths well.
Ups and downs happen regardless but minimizing how they affected the group was necessary. Taking things one day at a time proved to be the path for success.
“I think it comes from just a lot of focus on being able to put things behind you quickly and just be mature about those moments coming ahead of you, I think,” Sabres forward Beck Malenstyn said. “It’s really easy and, not just in hockey but in anything, to look too far ahead and start planning a bigger goal and you just constantly feel like you’re chasing something.
“When you’re viewing things like that, I think this has allowed us to be very focused on short-term goals which I think has allowed us to really dive into smaller areas of our game, too. Little adjustments and things like that, and I think that’s been a huge, huge factor to howe we’ve been able to just kind of continue to put that next day, next game mindset in front of us, just working on the small things to improve every day.”
Taking sports through the lens of how people handle their own lives and jobs could seem a bit silly to do. After all, sports are sports and meant for fun and entertainment. But hockey has the kind of blue collar mentality woven into it and boiling down the process of preparing for games and taking the schedule in such a deliberate manner helped keep the Sabres from both getting too high on their own accomplishments but also to keep them from the kind of “here we go again” line of thinking if losses happened.
Being able to adopt that approach and to stick with it takes work all the same, however. That’s where the routine of hockey life can help make it stick. The daily preparation for games and practices has a schedule of sorts and as long as things are going well, sticking to the plan gets a lot easier.
“We talk about it a lot, Lindy talks about it a lot,” Sabres forward Jordan Greenway said. “It’s hard, for sure. When you find yourself in high-pressure situations, you’ve got to find a way to get to that mindset. It gets too difficult if you don’t. I think sometimes it starts to become more natural when you find yourself in those positions. It’s really the only way to find your way out of, not even out of a bad situation, even in a good situation.”
There’s a kind of tranquility or peace of mind that comes with approaching such a volatile and violent game like hockey like this. It’s a brand of emotional alchemy that comes out of this. Boiling down the scorching highs and lows like this isn’t scientific nor is it magic, but it has elements of both involved.
The beauty of this kind of approach is that it comes in even handier in the postseason. As much as the emotions and expectations run the gamut in the regular season, they do the same in the postseason only they’re powered by rocket fuel. Staying level in that kind of chaos is necessary.
“It’s important no matter what time of the year it is to learn from your last game and then move on, whether it’s positive of negative,” Sabres defenseman Bo Byram said. “Obviously, that’s really important when you’re in a playoff series playing a team possibly seven games in a row. Learning from what they’re doing, what you’re doing that’s not working and rolling that into your next game.”
Byram was part of the Colorado Avalanche team that won the Stanley Cup in 2022 and although he was still quite young and new to the league then, those kinds of lessons are easy to take home when they’re followed up by success. Similarly, Malenstyn was part of the Hershey Bears Calder Cup team in 2023.
Winning it all in the NHL or the AHL requires a lot of the same discipline and staying focused on what is immediately ahead of you as opposed to taking on the entirety of what may lie ahead helps narrow the scope. The road to doing that is already difficult enough without adding to it by taking on more than a player or a team can handle in a single moment.
“Anytime you’re in those series, you have to be able to turn the page quickly because you know, whether you came on the right side or the wrong side of the game, you’re going to get that team’s best the next night,” Malenstyn said. “Especially after a loss, being able to turn that page quickly, maybe assess the few little things that you need to chance and adjust is really just a game of chess. You’re playing the same team multiple nights in a row. Everybody’s so good, they deserve to be there for a reason and any little advantage that you can find makes a huge difference in a playoff series.”