Sabres provide another lesson in not getting ahead of yourself

In late November, I went on a very good and smart radio show in Buffalo and was asked about the Sabres’ famous winning streak.

It had, if I remember correctly, just won the 10th game and were gearing up for a game in Tampa to try to stretch it to 11. We know what happened next: They lost that game, and the four after that, and a team that had so quickly risen to the top of the NHL standings was once again in Crisis Mode.

Yup, the Sabres were the best team in the league through 25 games, going 17-6-2, but they did so with unimpressive underlying numbers (about 49 percent), a weaker-than-you’d-think goal difference (plus-11), and one line doing pretty much all the heavy lifting. The hosts wondered if I was skeptical, and I confirmed that, of course I was. I explained why. It was all very cordial.

But as I found out in the wake of that call, for many people, if you said at the conclusion of those 25 games that the Sabres were not as good as the record suggested, you were being absurd. Disrespectful, even. If you said, as I’m pretty sure I did, that it was worth noting the Sabres won SEVEN of those 10 games in overtime or a shootout, that was merely a detail.

I don’t begrudge fans these kinds of feelings too much, especially if those fanbases are long-suffering. If they’re not total jerks about it — and of course, they almost always are — they’re just having a good time as their favorite team succeeds. Hard to be mad at that.

But to many in the hockey media, the idea that teams can simultaneously be who we thought they were and also go on incredible runs to start or end a season, after rejiggering the roster a bit, is still preposterous to people after all these examples of first-round flame-outs and just-missed. And every year, it seems like, “Well, they can’t possibly forget this happened, right?” And then to your ever-dimming sense of total shock, they wholly forget this happened.

After a team that always struck me as being kinda mediocre and not a legit playoff contender racked up more than a fifth of the way to the usual playoff threshold (92-94 points) in the space of 20 days, they only got to mid-January sitting ninth in the East. Which, if you told me in October they’d be there at the end of the year, I’d have figured that sounded about right.

But because they absolutely got worked by the Oilers — ninth in the West, by the way — here come the mea culpas and the wow-I-can’t-believe-its. In their last 21 games, the ones since the club hit 10 on that winning streak, the Sabres have just five regulation wins and six overall. Hear me out, but is it possible that just as they were not as good as the record suggested a month and a half ago, they’re also not as bad as they seem to be now?

Because the media opinion on this team has shifted from “Unbeatable Juggernaut” to “If They Gave Up Two Goals To Milan Lucic They Should Fold the Franchise.” That’s understandable to a degree. (And as an aside how funny is it that multiple people in the Edmonton media used the opportunity slithered out “who’s laughing now, haters?” takes about Lucic because he scored twice, running his total since the start of 2019 to 3-0-3 in seven games, all for just $6 million AAV, and only a month after once again shivving him as a definitely-not-top-six-forward-who-sucks, which is what he is and has been for a year and a half.)

With Lucic, or the Sabres, how do you get to act like you have any credibility after vacillating that hard between “they’re elite” and “they’re crap?” Fool me an infinite number of times, shame on you, I guess.

I’m not really looking to re-litigate the Islanders thing from last week, but the argument against them and the Sabres and the Canucks is pretty simple. There’s a difference between a team everyone expected to be bad posting a good record for a quarter, half, or even two-thirds of a season and that team being Actually Good. Your record isn’t always what it says you are, and we got another case in point this year with Buffalo, albeit earlier than usual, as these things go. With the Islanders, the process has been much better than anyone had reason to expect, but it’s still not good enough to support the kind of winning they’ve done.

The Sabres banked so many points in the first 25 through a big PDO that my argument was always, “They would need to really blow it now to miss the playoffs.” So far, they seem to be in the process of really, really blowing it. They have the 14th-highest winning percentage in the league, so they might have a little farther to fall, but overall, it’s gotten them all the way back to “a reasonable expectation for an improving but still flawed team.”

So my advice here is simple: Stop letting your opinion of a team be shaded by the first 20, 40, or even 60 games of the season. Apply that as liberally as you’d like to every team in the league. If someone is exceeding or failing to match expectations, maybe you need to take a closer look than the points percentage to see what’s really going on.

Just a suggestion, but if might cut down on all the hospital bills you rack up to treat your whiplash.

Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.