Posts Tagged ‘Ryan Miller’

Thoughts on an Amazing Regular Season

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 12:23 pm

As the 2010-2011 campaign heads into it's final two games, I find it impossible to call this season anything other than the greatest regular season in recent memory, at least it has been in my nearly two-decades long run of following this team. When I say "greatest," I think you all know what I mean. This has nothing to do with wins and losses, although those certainly play a role, it has to do with the ride, with the storylines, with characters revealing themselves as something we thought they would never be, with heroic characters entering the stage at exactly the right time, the time when we needed them most. Consider the following: -The team started the season 3-9-2 and found itself not only at the bottom of the standings, but at the bottom of ESPN.com's power rankings. I remember the line after the teams position was "Oh-No-Buff-a-lo."

A New Hope

Monday, October 4th, 2010 1:01 pm

No, the Sabres have a chance to be very good this season, and they will be very good. Nathan Gerbe will be wonderful to watch, as will Ennis. Thomas Vanek is still on the roster and will surely recover from a disappointing 09-10 season. Tyler Myers will avoid a sophomore slump and will become an anchor on our power play, a position he has already adjusted to deftly in the preseason. Mike Grier will bring it every night, so get your 2010-2011 edition of the "Doin' Work Son!" shirt, and maybe get one for Niedermayer, who will be sure to be doing work all year barring injury. Ryan Miller will make show-stopping, game saving stops. There will be overtime winners, 3 goal comebacks, shootout victories. There will be a four game winning streak, just as there will certainly be a four game losing streak. They'll have a win in the 8-1 range, they'll put out a performance like the 5-0 loss to the Islanders last year. But I feel they will be very good, and should be favored, perhaps expected to win the division again, given the talent on the roster- barring the unthinkable injury scenario that I won't even mention here but is certainly in the back of every Sabres fan's mind. It'll be a long season with many storylines ahead that cannot be predicted now. There will be great Mondays after the Sabres win both games of their weekend, there's probably going to be some bad ones where they drop both (made especially terrible with a Bills embarrassment on Sundays). For now, in early October as the long season starts, we should just soak in the enjoyment of hockey being back in our lives, and that chance of something special taking place every night we watch, whether that something "special" is Gerbe scoring between his legs or Lalime letting a puck past him at five miles per hour.

The Sabres’ Inconvenient Truth

Monday, December 7th, 2009 9:31 pm

You would be certainly be forgiven for missing it, especially if you don't watch hockey with one eye cocked at the Sabres bench, but Jhonas Enroth was in Buffalo for the team's pair of games hosting Montreal and the Rangers. Of course, like 23 of the previous 26 games this season, there was little for the backup goaltender to do but fist bump his teammates at intermission and look stylish in a team wool cap. Therefore it has been all too easy to remain blissfully ignorant to the fact that there is an achillies heel to this very talented, very scrappy team that could destroy not only our pie-in-the-sky dreams of a Stanley Cup parade down Delaware Avenue, but of a playoff appearance altogether: our backup goaltending situation.