Career Underachievers

I have been thinking, thinking, thinking all day about the Sabres and how much they suck. (What a great way to start off a post, eh?)

The only break in that came when I had to take a bio test at 11:00, which thankfully my prof made much easier than it needed it be.

All of last season, I sounded like a recording, because whenever someone brought up how terrible the Sabres were, I said that the problem was as simple as a lack of leadership combined with the fact that the Sabres were slightly the youngest team in the league last year. Most young players are inconsistent, and for all of their talk about how there was plenty of leadership to go around in the locker room, it was painfully obvious by their play on the ice that it was all a farce. This was reinforced in the minds of all when they elected Craig Rivet, someone who had yet to play one game with the team, as their captain. Suddenly I could no longer laugh at teams that name the newly acquired their leaders.

Before Craig Rivet was named captain but after he was acquired, I said that the Sabres would make the playoffs as the sixth seed and be eliminated in the second round. I still expected somebody to step up and take control of the locker room. I also expected the team to have grown out of some of their inconsistency. I still looked forward to a good deal of it, but not to the extent that was there last season. That did not change after Rivet was named captain.

I was wrong to expect either thing.

Their dramatically better play at the start of the season, for the first four games to be exact, proved to me that I was correct in my assessment of the team's problem this year. Where I erred was expecting more out of the same group of individuals, when their leader is taken away.

It is not wrong to say that the Sabres are a good team. In fact, it is accurate. They are. They can be deadly and exacting and punishing, when they see fit. It is, however, wrong to expect that of them. They do not have the work ethic or the sense of responsibility to play well on their own. Call the problem youth, call it immaturity, call it laziness. Give it any name you so desire; its label is pure semantics. I tend to label it youth.

With Rivet in the lineup, the team played as a cohesive unit. They blocked shots and kept shooters to the outside to help Miller; they kept opposing teams out of the crease to help themselves stay ahead; they were willing to drop the gloves to help each other. They played excellent team defense. They were physical. They were tireless. They played hockey. That is something they did not, for even one game, do last year. There were times when they were a little more physical, when they seemed to actually be able to see teammates out of the corners of their eyes out there on the ice, but the way they played out of the gate this year is something that I never once saw last season, even when they were at their best.

Since Rivet has been out, they have rapidly regressed to the same. exact. team as last year. They do not care about each other on the ice. They disregard what others are doing. They do not make an effort to backcheck. When their sticks break, they do not go out of their way to block shots, knowing that that is all they can do; instead, they stand idly and watch plays develop around them, skating perhaps three feet in each direction so that they can have the appearance of being involved. They take nothing seriously and become arrogant. They do not work.

This team, without a leader, has absolutely nothing of what it takes to win a single thing. They cannot make the playoffs. They are proud of nothing, enthusiastic without a reason, and confident before games are played.

It is this instability, this complete dependence on one player, that has me worried. I do not fault the team, exactly; I do fault in the sense that it is them out on the ice playing like complete and utter crap, but I do recognize that it is, more likely than not, their pure youth that causes it. That is by no means an excuse. Rather, it is a problem that needs to be acknowledged by the team so that they can work to overcome it. The problem is, they will never acknowledge it, because they are too busy partying on the weekends and reading about themselves in the media to look in the mirror. And that is what scares me. None of these things are problems on their own; they are simply symptoms of the real problem, and that is themselves.

Are other teams similar to the Sabres? Of course. Not all of them are as youthful, either. Ottawa, for example, has a terrible problem with playing absolutely horrendously whenever Alfredsson is injured. Are they still a good team? Of course they are (at least, they were before the All-Star break last season).

I am just uncomfortable with the complete vulnerability of this team. If they happen to make the playoffs, all a team has to do is make a knee-on-knee collision with Rivet look completely incidental... and they are finished.

It is nice to be proven right about the cause of the Sabres' ills, but I really am not enjoying it, this time. One player... One person... They cannot afford to be that dependent on Rivet.

I suppose it just does not make sense to me how one team can be incredibly consistent and excellent, but when one person is taken out of the lineup, they disintegrate and become this inconsistent, terrified, arrogant mess. I know why, and it makes perfect sense. But it just should not happen that way, to me. The frustration of knowing that the team plays incredibly well under a leader and watching that fall apart as soon as that leader is taken away is like having a perpetual fire in the heart. It's not fun when it's your team that has itself as its toughest opponent.