Before going over some numbers, I want to discuss the merits of this comparison. We have a variety of metrics that make such a thing possible, but I want to set a few terms, first. The Sabres were the worst team last season by a mile and also the worst team I know well. Conversely, the Blackhawks were a top five team in just about every statistical category that matters, narrowly missed a second consecutive Stanley Cup final berth, and are expected to dominate their opponents again this season. If anything, the stark contrast should clarify the extent of Chicago's success and the depth of Buffalo's failings. By classifying them both in failure, I'm conflating a well-coached roster stacked with top level talent, balanced by tremendous depth, maintained by an excellent salary structure, with one that can generously be called a haphazard collection of equal parts youth, floating debris, and other teams' veteran castoffs, the remains of a toppled regime repurposed towards the growth of the current one, in the hope that this group can be cultivated into a winner. One makes minor offseason tweaks, buying low on free agents with potential upside, making swaps for cap space and developmental resources just short of the first puck drop. The other is lauded for its prospect pool and its future under the vision of a brave new general manager, things which are mentioned exclusively about a team with no lower place to occupy, just as you praise the volume of hits belonging to a player whose team never has the puck.
It's more complicated than that, of course. The obvious place to start is with the Stanley Cup, the literal embodiment of victory in the sport. The run up to the final is paved with montage after montage of Stanley cup porn. Ecstatic, exhausted players raising the trophy with a howl, shriek, or guttural scream. Black and white images flowing into the present day. Rod Brind'amour ripping the Cup out of Gary Bettman's hands. Joe Sakic handing it off to Ray Bourque like it's 2001 every year. Your name is engraved in the trophy forever and your face goes into the footage archive for the next montage. You get a huge, drunken parade, your own day with the cup, and a panegyric from all corners of the media until the next season comes around.
There's also the President's Trophy. No one will ever claim to care about winning the Presidents' Trophy. Raising a Presidents' Trophy, conference champion, or, god forbid, division champion banner, is marked by indifference at best, appreciative sadness at worst, whenever it fails to coincide with the Stanley Cup. The Presidents' Trophy is there for the best regular season team (or close enough, if they're from the Eastern conference) to ignore as they concentrate on avoiding the shame of an early exit.
Yet, rosters, of necessity, are designed for the regular season. Simply put, you have to survive 82 games of home and homes, injuries, cross-country road trips, suspensions, injuries, trade speculation, media intrigue, injuries, Pierre McGuire interviews, call-ups, and depth-depleting injuries before you even get the chance to do single combat with a conference rival. At that point, just about anything can happen, but 82 games does an excellent job of weeding out the unfortunate and the unworthy. There's much to be said about systematically putting down the opposition under these conditions.
The ascending currency of the more intricate statistical work does a great job of focusing on this contrast between the long-form gauntlet of the regular season and the sprint of the playoffs. Over a small enough sample size, you can get just about any result, like Toronto making the playoffs in the lockout-shortened 2012-'13 season. What I, personally, take away from reading the research done by people like Tyler Dellow, Eric Tulsky, Stephen Burtch, and others, is the propensity we observers of the game have towards shortening the frame of time we use to try to understand patterns that take much larger frames of time to establish themselves. We tend to focus on streaks, "hotness," and what's happening at the exact moment we're watching it happen. This is an excellent mindset for enjoying the game. You can appreciate the artistry of the players and the excitement of the game's many fluctuations. It's not so good if you're trying to understand if a player can keep scoring at the rate they are currently, if your giant teenaged winger will turn into Todd Bertuzzi or Hugh Jessiman, if your coach's strategy can win sustainably in the long run, or if your general manager was right to trade for/sign whatever player. Sample sizes necessary for certain conclusions seem large because our focus is narrow.
Taking this back to regular season and playoff formats, the NHL avoids the variance of 1, 3, or 5 game playoff series by having 7. At the same time, it's conceivable to me that if you took 16 random teams for a playoff pool and were to simulate the results multiple times, assuming you had a way of doing this that would adequately represent the similarities and differences in teams, you would wind up with a wide range of results. This is nothing more than a hunch, but one based on seeing a lot of good teams leave the playoffs early, or bad teams have excellent 20 game runs in the season. There's a tension between the excitement of the playoffs and our emotional attachment to the Stanley Cup and the results of the post-season's lesser ability to distinguish between teams' quality.
There's much more to say about this, but I should probably leave it here for now. What I'm trying to build towards is that our language and notions about success in the NHL are intricately layered and very often self-contradictory. That's part of the reason it's so compelling. The San Jose Sharks are the paradigmatic case in the meeting of conflicting notions. A perpetually excellent team cruises through the regular season on the backs of its star players, who are then shamed by nearly everyone as they sink, once again, well before they were expected to. That's the recent history of the Sharks. Their performance inspires much of the confusion I mention above. More on this for another time.
Essentially, by comparing the Sabres abject misery and the Blackhawks circumstantial near-miss, I want to make note of our way of thinking about failure and success, beyond just describing it.
Chicago and Buffalo, Statistically
Taken from here
The Sabres and Blackhawks are as far apart as two teams can get. Chicago's CF% of 55.5 is as spectacular as Buffalo's 43.0 is miserable. Of the ways to illustrate these numbers, I'd like to give my eyeball-centric impressions of the Sabres' defensive zone play. Imagine a team who views their own blue line not as a stripe of paint on the ice, but sees the foot of an invisible wall. Imagine a team for whom the side boards carom pucks into the slot and onto the waiting sticks of their opponents. Imagine a team desperate enough for the first overall draft pick that they'd dress John Scott as a defenseman multiple times. This is the team I watched more than 80 times over six and a half months. It offended every sensibility I had as a person who loves hockey. This is mirrored in the fact that 36.4% of the Sabres' even strength draws were in their own end and just over 28% in their opponents'. The Blackhawks' breakout is Platonically excellent. Their forward corps combines high level puck skill, decision-making, and defensive acumen in a way no other roster manages from top to bottom, despite essentially not having a second line center. Their defensemen in aggregate have arguably the highest level of skill as a corps in the league. As a consequence, they led the league in SF% while Buffalo was last.
Chicago and Buffalo, Chronologically
The Blackhawks went an excellent 33-10-13 through January before finishing the season 13-11-2, slowed by injuries and Olympic fatigue. The Sabres, meanwhile...Ron Rolston made it to mid-November before his firing, leaving the team with a 4-15-1 record before he was replaced by Ted Nolan as head coach. Nolan had one month at .500 (December), followed by two a game below each, before finishing the season 3-17-2.
Chicago and Buffalo, Racism of Logo
There's not been much from within the NHL media community regarding the Blackhawks logo in the wake of the deserved furor over the Washington football team's name and image. I doubt the league or the organization will proactively handle it without some kind of scrutiny. The Sabres introduced an abominable third jersey, but nothing morally questionable outside of asking fans to buy it.
Chicago and Buffalo, Ultimately
Chicago missed a second consecutive Stanley Cup final by an Alec Martinez point shot. Brad Richards was signed to an inexpensive deal. Nick Leddy was traded to the Islanders for prospect Ville Pokka, minor league defenseman TJ Brennan (a former Sabres prospect, who won the AHL's equivalent of the Norris last season), and goaltender Anders Nilsson. The Sabres missed out on the first pick in the 2014 draft, selecting Sam Reinhart second overall. Josh Gorges balked at a trade in Toronto and wound up an alternate captain in Buffalo, joined by teammate and local boy Brian Gionta in free agency, who will captain the team as management steers them towards Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel.
Both exhibit different flavors of disappointment from the 2013-14 season manifesting in wildly divergent goals for the upcoming season. The Sabres are playing a game against the balance of the actual games themselves, towards losing now to accrue enough talent to win later. The Blackhawks did the same to add the players that brought them within sight of their third championship in five seasons. Ultimately, failure in hockey is temporary, provided you make the right decisions and some luck comes your way. For the Blackhawks, that means pointing to a particular season-ending goal and the hope of turning it around immediately. For the Sabres, it's a matter of getting as many young, talented players together in the hopes that at least some will be the framework capable of supporting winning seasons. The results for Chicago this season will determine their success. The Sabres, in being virtually guaranteed to fail now, are already focusing on the draft.
It's more complicated than that, of course. The obvious place to start is with the Stanley Cup, the literal embodiment of victory in the sport. The run up to the final is paved with montage after montage of Stanley cup porn. Ecstatic, exhausted players raising the trophy with a howl, shriek, or guttural scream. Black and white images flowing into the present day. Rod Brind'amour ripping the Cup out of Gary Bettman's hands. Joe Sakic handing it off to Ray Bourque like it's 2001 every year. Your name is engraved in the trophy forever and your face goes into the footage archive for the next montage. You get a huge, drunken parade, your own day with the cup, and a panegyric from all corners of the media until the next season comes around.
There's also the President's Trophy. No one will ever claim to care about winning the Presidents' Trophy. Raising a Presidents' Trophy, conference champion, or, god forbid, division champion banner, is marked by indifference at best, appreciative sadness at worst, whenever it fails to coincide with the Stanley Cup. The Presidents' Trophy is there for the best regular season team (or close enough, if they're from the Eastern conference) to ignore as they concentrate on avoiding the shame of an early exit.
Yet, rosters, of necessity, are designed for the regular season. Simply put, you have to survive 82 games of home and homes, injuries, cross-country road trips, suspensions, injuries, trade speculation, media intrigue, injuries, Pierre McGuire interviews, call-ups, and depth-depleting injuries before you even get the chance to do single combat with a conference rival. At that point, just about anything can happen, but 82 games does an excellent job of weeding out the unfortunate and the unworthy. There's much to be said about systematically putting down the opposition under these conditions.
The ascending currency of the more intricate statistical work does a great job of focusing on this contrast between the long-form gauntlet of the regular season and the sprint of the playoffs. Over a small enough sample size, you can get just about any result, like Toronto making the playoffs in the lockout-shortened 2012-'13 season. What I, personally, take away from reading the research done by people like Tyler Dellow, Eric Tulsky, Stephen Burtch, and others, is the propensity we observers of the game have towards shortening the frame of time we use to try to understand patterns that take much larger frames of time to establish themselves. We tend to focus on streaks, "hotness," and what's happening at the exact moment we're watching it happen. This is an excellent mindset for enjoying the game. You can appreciate the artistry of the players and the excitement of the game's many fluctuations. It's not so good if you're trying to understand if a player can keep scoring at the rate they are currently, if your giant teenaged winger will turn into Todd Bertuzzi or Hugh Jessiman, if your coach's strategy can win sustainably in the long run, or if your general manager was right to trade for/sign whatever player. Sample sizes necessary for certain conclusions seem large because our focus is narrow.
Taking this back to regular season and playoff formats, the NHL avoids the variance of 1, 3, or 5 game playoff series by having 7. At the same time, it's conceivable to me that if you took 16 random teams for a playoff pool and were to simulate the results multiple times, assuming you had a way of doing this that would adequately represent the similarities and differences in teams, you would wind up with a wide range of results. This is nothing more than a hunch, but one based on seeing a lot of good teams leave the playoffs early, or bad teams have excellent 20 game runs in the season. There's a tension between the excitement of the playoffs and our emotional attachment to the Stanley Cup and the results of the post-season's lesser ability to distinguish between teams' quality.
There's much more to say about this, but I should probably leave it here for now. What I'm trying to build towards is that our language and notions about success in the NHL are intricately layered and very often self-contradictory. That's part of the reason it's so compelling. The San Jose Sharks are the paradigmatic case in the meeting of conflicting notions. A perpetually excellent team cruises through the regular season on the backs of its star players, who are then shamed by nearly everyone as they sink, once again, well before they were expected to. That's the recent history of the Sharks. Their performance inspires much of the confusion I mention above. More on this for another time.
Essentially, by comparing the Sabres abject misery and the Blackhawks circumstantial near-miss, I want to make note of our way of thinking about failure and success, beyond just describing it.
Chicago and Buffalo, Statistically
Taken from here
The Sabres and Blackhawks are as far apart as two teams can get. Chicago's CF% of 55.5 is as spectacular as Buffalo's 43.0 is miserable. Of the ways to illustrate these numbers, I'd like to give my eyeball-centric impressions of the Sabres' defensive zone play. Imagine a team who views their own blue line not as a stripe of paint on the ice, but sees the foot of an invisible wall. Imagine a team for whom the side boards carom pucks into the slot and onto the waiting sticks of their opponents. Imagine a team desperate enough for the first overall draft pick that they'd dress John Scott as a defenseman multiple times. This is the team I watched more than 80 times over six and a half months. It offended every sensibility I had as a person who loves hockey. This is mirrored in the fact that 36.4% of the Sabres' even strength draws were in their own end and just over 28% in their opponents'. The Blackhawks' breakout is Platonically excellent. Their forward corps combines high level puck skill, decision-making, and defensive acumen in a way no other roster manages from top to bottom, despite essentially not having a second line center. Their defensemen in aggregate have arguably the highest level of skill as a corps in the league. As a consequence, they led the league in SF% while Buffalo was last.
Chicago and Buffalo, Chronologically
The Blackhawks went an excellent 33-10-13 through January before finishing the season 13-11-2, slowed by injuries and Olympic fatigue. The Sabres, meanwhile...Ron Rolston made it to mid-November before his firing, leaving the team with a 4-15-1 record before he was replaced by Ted Nolan as head coach. Nolan had one month at .500 (December), followed by two a game below each, before finishing the season 3-17-2.
Chicago and Buffalo, Racism of Logo
There's not been much from within the NHL media community regarding the Blackhawks logo in the wake of the deserved furor over the Washington football team's name and image. I doubt the league or the organization will proactively handle it without some kind of scrutiny. The Sabres introduced an abominable third jersey, but nothing morally questionable outside of asking fans to buy it.
Chicago and Buffalo, Ultimately
Chicago missed a second consecutive Stanley Cup final by an Alec Martinez point shot. Brad Richards was signed to an inexpensive deal. Nick Leddy was traded to the Islanders for prospect Ville Pokka, minor league defenseman TJ Brennan (a former Sabres prospect, who won the AHL's equivalent of the Norris last season), and goaltender Anders Nilsson. The Sabres missed out on the first pick in the 2014 draft, selecting Sam Reinhart second overall. Josh Gorges balked at a trade in Toronto and wound up an alternate captain in Buffalo, joined by teammate and local boy Brian Gionta in free agency, who will captain the team as management steers them towards Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel.
Both exhibit different flavors of disappointment from the 2013-14 season manifesting in wildly divergent goals for the upcoming season. The Sabres are playing a game against the balance of the actual games themselves, towards losing now to accrue enough talent to win later. The Blackhawks did the same to add the players that brought them within sight of their third championship in five seasons. Ultimately, failure in hockey is temporary, provided you make the right decisions and some luck comes your way. For the Blackhawks, that means pointing to a particular season-ending goal and the hope of turning it around immediately. For the Sabres, it's a matter of getting as many young, talented players together in the hopes that at least some will be the framework capable of supporting winning seasons. The results for Chicago this season will determine their success. The Sabres, in being virtually guaranteed to fail now, are already focusing on the draft.
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