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There is absolutely nothing, nothing at all, that would make anyone watching the #Sabres play hockey in any way hopeful, excited or willing to ever repeat the experience again.
If a long-dead corpse still moving due to escaping gasses were a sports franchise, this would be it.
If a long-dead corpse still moving due to escaping gasses were a sports franchise, this would be it.
Literally. All attempts to revive the team with new talent or new coaching approaches are akin to giving electric shocks to a rotting corpse. It shakes up the maggots, but nothing more.
The Sabres are the most depressing sight in sports. They are not even adorable losers...
The Sabres are the most depressing sight in sports. They are not even adorable losers...
They are not "so bad, it's good" or "a ragtag gang of misfits." Their badness, their sheer, utter inadequacy is simply appalling. It's revolting. It makes one question the existence of truth, morals, right and wrong. It makes one doubt that there is a limit to human depravity...
The new talent, no matter how bright, immediately turns to absolute shit the second they put on the Sabres jersey. Jack Eichel, once a bright-eyed, freckled youth, has been turned into a cardboard cutout of a frozen hobo in 5 short years...
Ryan O'Reilly, the man who bleeds lava, excretes lightning and gnaws on entrails of fallen enemies for brunch, cried softly into his jock begging to be released due to, I quote, "a loss of passion for hockey." After gaining freedom, he threw a season-long berserker rave...
Taylor Hall already looks like he should retire. Eric Staal is probably Googling "Is euthanasia right for me" right now. Rasmus Dahlin, hailed as the next great blue line talent 3 years ago, only recently having reached drinking age, is a bumbling, washed-up Swedish goth...
And the endless carousel of coaches... The interchangeable, irrelevant chorus of bagpipes without an ounce of a chance. You could reanimate Anatoli Tarasov, put him on that bench, and he will be a useless, unheeded bullhorn of "rough-it-up-in-the-corners" obsolete banalities...
The Sabres' only raison d'etre, if you can call this etre, is to serve as a living, and you can't call this living, illustration of what the losing culture looks like. They are its purest, distilled form. They are to the losing culture what Walter White was to methamphetamine...
Remember when Jeff Skinner was a personification of childish joy, a sparkling, cheeky figure-skating boy who had wondered into hockey and bent it to his will through sheer power of friendship? Buffalo has turned him into a puddle of despair you want to drown newborn kittens in.
Remember Casey Mittelstadt, a USA Junior team magician with hands like quicksilver? Remember how he turned Slovaks and Canadians literally inside out, and they didn't even mind, so captivating was the skill, so overflowing the love of the game? He is literally dead now. Dead.
And this isn't just misfortune or a confluence of circumstances. The Sabres have gotten there through a combination of stupidity, knavery and evil. They embezzled money from the fanbase for an entire season, conniving to finish last. All for the chance to shit into Eichel's soul.
And this isn't just a temporary onset of horror or even a protracted run of incompetence. This has been going on for so long, it's become a way of life (which, again, you can't call life). I have a son in middle school who has never seen the Sabres win a playoff series.
The only reason this franchise hasn't been moved to Quebec yet is because the only French word that can adequately express the feelings it will elicit there is the sound of the falling blade of the guillotine.
The time has come to pull the plug on the whole vile grotesquerie. NHL only need so many cautionary tales before its designated heel becomes a drag on the image of the enterprise. The Sabres are a disgrace to the game, a disgrace to its city, a disgrace to water in its solid form
Other than that, how was the game, Mr. Malamud?
