The Outlander

I don’t remember my first Sabres game very well. I was three or four and my uncle, a Buffalo firefighter, had been offered four or five tickets from his neighbor for a game. Like most people when recalling memories of such a young age, it’s just a snapshot; first row right behind the net on the glass at the Aud. I remember the awe I felt at the speed, the brightness of the ice, the size of the players, the noise- especially the noise- the excitement of sharing something not just with my family but with so many strangers of all ages.

As I got older and attended more games, my grandfather went from having to briskly pull me along with him by the hand to just waiting for me to catch up to walking side by side to waiting for me to stop and let him catch up to having to taking my hand as we headed down the stairs. By the end, when he couldn’t go to games anymore, our conversations about the team were abstract, about how yes, they did have one fantastic player but that someday soon they would be back to the team we knew, the team I grew up with.

It’s 2018. My grandfather is gone and the uncle’s been estranged from the family for a decade. It only makes sense that my relationship with the Sabres has deteriorated to a point I’m unsure I can get back from.

There really is no other way to coin the 2017-2018 Buffalo Sabres except for the worst team in franchise history. Points-wise, it may only be the third worst of the 82-game era, but you don’t need to masturbate over @ineffectivemath to fully understand the scope of what just happened here. There may be those who did not expect them to challenge for a playoff spot this year- I would have said those people weren’t expecting enough from their no longer inexperienced roster. This is a league where teams go from the lottery to the playoffs on an annual basis, where Edmonton is an aberration not an excuse. Eichel was healthy, Okposo was back, the defense had been shored up, there was a slew of prospects ready to take the next step and they even brought back someone who’d actually won a bunch of playoff series’ in this city. The coach blamed for the late season car crash was gone as was the GM who’d whiffed on most of his drafts. The tank was over, it was time to demand- and frankly, expect- wins.

Five games into the season, they had one point. I’d traveled out to New York for the second game of the year against the Islanders and left my seat after the first period. I drank beer in the concourse for a period then left, embarrassed. They were 3-7-2 at Halloween and by Thanksgiving, at 5-13-4 the season was already over. The Bills played competitive games a month and a half longer than the Sabres did this season; whereas the Sabres were always what rescued us from caring about the Bills after November, the Bills rescued us from the Sabres.

The entire season from that point on was a miserable slog that only a sadist or an asshole could enjoy. During 2014-15 I purchased gamecenter and watched nearly every game, asking for it on at bars, still rooting for wins well into March before “okay, time to lock it down” took over for the last couple weeks. The two seasons after were the same thing, despite the growing pains and long stretches of uninspired mediocrity, I couldn’t not watch, it was a routine I’d been in since high school. As I said before the season started, the Sabres were to be a reprieve from the mundane slog of adulthood, through the anxieties and fear that today’s world brings on a daily basis. They were to be something to kick back with over a beer and to get excited about and perhaps, to once again enjoy watching once it became shorts and t-shirt weather again. There were rivalries that were going to reignite, rivalries to be born and this was to be a time of resurgence, to remember why we’d stuck with them so long.

Instead they exacerbated the daily horrors around us, showed us that they too would not bring solace, that our lives are indeed better without them playing such a role in it. Before this season, the longest I’d gone without watching them was studying abroad in 2004, pre-smartphone and without internet in our apartment and even then, every morning when I got to campus I’d scour the TBN website for stories of the previous night’s game, chat with my friends from home on AIM about what was going on. This year I canceled gamecenter before December, caught them when I was home visiting and sat through two periods of another blowout, this one in Washington. On February 10th I was at Cole’s and had to actually ask for the game to be put on the television; when it was, we were the only ones watching it.

The team itself is toxic. Shifts, periods, games, weeks on end of uninspired, defeated play. The coach has effectively ruined his legacy as one of the best defensemen in franchise history, doomed to be remembered as one of the most ineffective, timid and befuddled coaches in franchise history. The GM that was supposed to add the final pieces to a playoff contender is now woefully out of his depth and tasked for a rebuild, and for no other reason than “idk, it seems rash,” they’re both going to be back next year. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no cause for hope, there is no silver lining.

The problem is larger and runs deeper than I think anyone at Seymour Knox Plaza comprehends. The tank, which was really nothing more than step one of a rebuild, cutting dead weight and attempting to replenish the farm, was the correct move and that cannot be reasonably refuted, no matter how hard Bucky Gleason thinks Lee Stempniak was the missing piece. The problem was…everything else. The guys brought in were the wrong guys, the leaders were too weak the lead, the goalies were trash and 80% of the draft picks were useless. The roster ended up being a bunch of replacement-value or worse cannon fodder. The players brought in to fill holes ended up not being big enough to fill the hole, creating an even larger hole. The amount of dead cap space as well as the amount of cap space wasted on garbage players skyrocketed.

This isn’t even to speak of the collateral damage, which may be reach farther than even the pending rebuild. Why would anyone subject themselves to this product moving forward? The ancillary things Sabres Twitter complained about over the years are largely still there except now the product on the ice is even shittier. I’m willing to guarantee everyone reading this turned down tickets this season, perhaps even free tickets. It goes far beyond noise and puck stoppage gimmicks, it’s a matter the Sabres being a poor use of anyone’s time. This season I was happy to knock out a slew of shows with my fiancé, socialize more with friends when not feeling compelled to constantly check my phone. I was able to see more people when we were home because no longer was gathering tickets and taking up an evening at the arena an appealing option. Fellow lifelong fans have checked out, at the very least saying “call me when you’re good,” a call that frankly might never come.

At this point the only feeling I can muster towards the Sabres is resentment. I’ve been asked by multiple people recently if I still care about the team and the answer is grudgingly, yes. I will probably purchase gamecenter again next year, though like this year, their games will not play a factor into any other plans that may come up. I resent them wasting my time, I resent them sullying fond memories with their incompetence, I resent players who say the fans should be behind them more, players who martyr themselves because golly-gee, playing hockey just ain’t fun anymore. I resent the lip service to “the best fans in the league,” I resent Harrington articles telling me to like a shitty player like Josh Gorges and I resent fans telling me to be more of a friend than a fan over Ryan O’Reilly’s crippling case of the sadz. I resent them for acting like it’s understandable that this should be so fucking hard with Vegas, Colorado, and New Jersey hosting playoff games.

I’ve defended ownership for a while thanks to creating Penn State’s hockey program, keeping the teams in town, the canalside development, and TBN’s reckless and immediate attacks. As Harrington has always said, access is a privilege and ultimately it is up to the subject to provide that access. Demands for him to speak about the Penn State Sandusky/Paterno scandal was in remarkably bad faith given his lack of affiliation with the football program. Demands for him to speak about the tank were also in bad faith; whether the vendetta was an eagerness to tear down someone who had saved the franchise in 2011, animosity towards the existence of a female owner, or a general campaign to prove that TBN is not as impotent as they seem in local sports, I don’t know.

However, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have to speak now. What he strove to convey upon the purchase in 2011 was that he was also a lifelong fan of the team, that he was determined to bring a cup to Buffalo, that he understood the pain of losing in the playoffs and the joys the team can bring. If this is true, the performance has to not only be infuriating as an owner but embarrassing and humiliating as a fan. Millions of fans are looking to him to fix this and now not once but twice, it has been completely destroyed on his watch. He may be just as lost as I am as to the next steps but what he needs to show is that he understands that this is rock bottom; that the franchise has never been as much as a collection of incompetents and as embarrassing to the fans as it is right now. And also, what the fuck is Russ Brandon doing there?

For years I’ve written previews and postmortems here; the previews were always generally too optimistic but that’s how I’ve gone into every season, excited, hopeful. The postmortems have generally been filled with disappointment but there was always the general thought that improvement was both inevitable and reasonable to see. The kids would be older, the locker room would gel, the befuddled coach would be gone, the dead weight would get lopped off. This time? I have absolutely no idea where they go from here and no idea how they fix this. All I know is I want a lot of people gone that probably won’t be gone with the puck is dropped in October. There are exciting prospects sure but when was the last time one of those panned out as more than a third liner? This team is FILLED with bottom six scrubs. There isn’t a goalie on the roster that elicits confidence for carrying the load for a full NHL season. The backline is an Ypres field hospital. No one can design a special teams gameplan to save their life. The KBC is going to be less traveled than a wake for someone nobody particularly liked very much. The roster is immensely unlikeable and they don’t seem to care about their jobs or each other. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever again care about the Sabres as I did the first thirty years since I sat between my uncle and grandfather at the Aud or if like those two men, that’s just gone forever.

Enjoy the offseason. It’ll only get worse from there.

The Outlander

If there’s one thing about adulthood it’s that it’s interminably boring. To say this comes as a surprise would be somewhat disingenuous; after all we know from a young age that the adults around us operate on a continuous loop of work shifts, errands to procure items to satisfy our need to stay alive, television and sleep. Hell, it’s the general awareness of this looming tedium that drives people to have so much fun in college and their early twenties, the concept that what lies ahead is its own kind of death, a death of spontaneity, a death of new experiences. When that time comes- and it does, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise- it’s not just that it makes the 8-5 routine so crushingly dull, it’s that it makes your life before that tedium seem even further away, make it feel that it happened to another person.
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It’s what makes seeing Jason Pominville back on the ice so strange. Despite hanging around in a Sabres uniform until the lockout season, it’s the goal, the president’s trophy, the winter classic that I remember him from, the years where I was in school and anything was possible not just for the Sabres but for the world, for one’s future. To see him back on the ice when everything is just so static- go to work, come back from work, go to the gym, cook dinner, shower, go to bed- and not unspecified is strange. I look at him like a relic despite being only a year older than me, which probably says just as much at how I view myself as how I view him. 

It’s why sports are still needed. Not simply as a distraction- though believe me, we’ll get there- but because you don’t know what’s going to happen. All day you may discuss your thoughts on twitter, one result may be more likely than another but ultimately you don’t know what you’re going to see, which is a hell of a thing when you’re about to watch Jack Eichel play. It lends the opportunity for something you haven’t seen before, something that provides a surprise in a world where the only surprises are the rotating taps at the bar down the road or finding that salad is buy one get one free at the supermarket. In short, it’s nice to have hockey back again.

I think it’s fair for fans to feel robbed about last season. Year Two AT (After Tank) was supposed to be the first opportunity to enjoy the rewards of the suffering, the trades, the worthless free agents, Andre Benoit, Torrey Mitchell, Ted Nolan, Coyotes updates, Trending Buffalo. It was supposed to include a playoff push at least and that was almost secondary to getting to see how Eichel took hold of the league in his second year. He came back right at the perfect time to serve as a distraction from the anxiety that comes with being made a prisoner of your own country but by that time the team was right back where they’d been every year of the decade before the tank, 8, 10 points back with the season practically a write-off.

January 20th I called in sick, turned off twitter notifications, threw on the Ken Burns Civil War series at around 11am when I started drinking. There was an aura of nihilism, hopelessness, dread that months later hasn’t dissipated so much as settled over the country like the Denora Smog, and struggling to breathe is just how we exist now. As they’ve always been in bad times there was a Sabres game that evening, won in overtime against Detroit by a goal from Okposo. The next night they were in Montreal, trailing late. As my inaugural bender continued they tied it up, Lehner made the save of the year (likely bolstered by a fellow white supremacist being in office) and Bogosian won it again in overtime. They’d provided a brief moment of joy after years of darkness.
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Two nights later Eichel makes the play of the year and suddenly a few weeks later I’m watching from the bar at the golf dome with my parents as the Sabres climb one point out of a playoff spot. That was the tease, the brief run that made us think about what could have happened with a full year of Jack, wonder what could happen if they were managed by a coach whose style encouraged players to use their speed to force the opponent into capitulation and not simply hang around and hope for a timely goal. We have all of those things now and as we get ready for the season I must say, it’s terrifying.

The Outlander

EDIT: So if you're reading this you already know. The season's been boarded up. The doors, the locker rooms, everything. We're staying in the Comfort Inn, room 112. I love you.

Or, alternatively you can read what I wrote before the news Eichel will be out 4-6 weeks (say 8 to be safe) because really, truly, it changes little about the enthusiasm or really what your expectations should be.

In every article, book, quote, post I’ve ever read about writing, the one piece of advice that is nearly universal is this: keep writing. Write every day, write something. For many years I did; I wrote in college classrooms during lectures, wrote during work hours in Vermont and Buffalo, wrote at home with the sound of a game in the background. If I wasn’t working on some story (which, from age 12-26 I almost always was), I was working on papers, about the death penalty, the Dred Scott decision, Vatican II, the influence of the frontier on early American Literature (gleamed almost entirely from SparkNotes), or the impact personality had on the Good Friday Agreement.

Point is I can tell you that when it comes to getting words to flow onto the paper/screen, nothing can replace the simple act of beginning to write. You can think about your post while in the car, search your tweets for a coherent #narrative, smoke a blunt and watch a Ken Burns series; nothing is going to help as much as sucking it up, closing the door and starting to type shit out until it clicks.

I say this because for the last few months I’ve had absolutely NO idea what I wanted to say about the upcoming Sabres season. There’s no longer a goal that’s bigger than the game; with the first year of development behind Eichel and Reinhart, and the first year of playing together behind nearly everyone, the shift as gone from “let’s just hope they’re fun and we see improvement” to “okay well now let’s try to make the playoffs.”

The fact that this takes some getting used to is by itself a testament to how shitty the past three seasons have been. The fact I can barely remember what it’s like to be a fan of a team that had expectations and potential makes me want to open my window and scream “what the fuck have we been doing!?”
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Then I watch Jack Eichel (EDIT: in 4-8 weeks), Sam Reinhart and Ryan O’Reilly and I’m like, “oh yeah.”

The Outlander

I didn’t think I’d write about this simply because I’ve talked about it so much, written so many words about it while only scratching the surface. I am acutely aware that all of this, the emotional connection I feel to it still today, the memories it elicits comes off both heavy handed and corny. I’m a cynic, antagonistic, dismissive about many things these days (off the top of my head: The election, fake jersey wearers, Rex Ryan, Pennsylvania drivers, my retirement prospects), but this, this was a time where everything- on the surface- seemed perfect. There will be greater moments ahead both in sports and in life but never have they both met in such a beautiful collision for me as what happened in spring 2006. This is that run as I experienced it, as much as I can remember and write without going down the many various tangential rabbit holes that would easily quadruple the size of this piece. If you wanna hear about any of the spinoffs sometime, @ me.

I usually find myself thinking about that playoff run around this time of year and I suppose since you took the time to click this, you do too. However, the ten year anniversary of the 05-06 team has come abruptly, quietly, though I suppose that’s what happens with a team that can’t even claim the most basic banner. They didn’t win their league, their conference, or even their division. Any and all metrics tell us that we should have a greater affinity for teams that came after- in 2007 and 2010 for instance- or before, in the case of 1999 or 1997. Still, The Buffalo News has practically made it a daily feature and even the Sabres twitter account has gotten on board despite the fact everyone in the marketing department thinks the organization was founded in 2010.

This summer is also my ten year college reunion. In what I am sure will shock all of you, none of my friends from Tonawanda High went away to college, and as an only child and the first one in the family to go to college, I felt rather overwhelmed, even at a tiny liberal arts school in Olean. I found some friends but felt awkward, out of place; I loved to drink so that alone got me through a year and a half until I studied abroad. When I returned my junior year, however, it was like a light bulb went off. The day I drove onto campus (drove! Finally!) I went to a party and met the girl that would dominate my memories of that Sabres run and years beyond. I made better and closer friends on campus, established a usual crew, house, bar, a place for the first time as a Bonnie.

Subsequently, after being one of dominant interests through high school, the Sabres found themselves relegated to the back of my mind in college. I’m not even sure we got MSG the first couple years I dormed there (to put it in perspective, I had an actual phone in my room freshman year because there weren’t any cell phone towers); abroad I could only follow the results from checking the TBN website each morning on campus. By junior year and the lockout, I just didn’t care. I was coming into my stride socially, getting acquainted with some of the lovely women on campus, basking in the Red Sox first World Series title in 86 years and for a month in there the Bills actually mattered! Come 2005 and the start of my Senior Year my biggest concerns were, in no particular order:

1. Breakup with the Long Island girl I’d started dating spring semester for some inexplicable reason
2. Get into law school at Penn State
3. Eschew responsibility for fun at every opportunity

​My first actual memory of that season was reading Sports Illustrated’s preview issue (Sabres 28th, Hurricanes 29th); my first firm memory of that season was in November. I was home from Bonas for the weekend and had brought a girl with me for the first time. She was the now-sophomore whom I had met at that party my first night back Junior year. Her age mattered little on this trip since there were numerous dive bars around Tonawanda that would serve a 19-year old without question, even more of which that would serve her accompanying usual customers such as my friends. For whatever reason we watched a game against the Senators in my grandparents' basement, several friends who I don’t exactly recall, me and her. As the Sabres took yet another early season shellacking at the hands of this apparent juggernaut (research tells me it was a 6-1 loss), I shook my head and commented to no one in particular “they are so fucking good.”

The boys are back. In this episode, with a delayed release due to Dubs being equal parts overworked and forgetful, The Outlander, The Commander and The Barrister gather from their disparate locations outside of WNY to discuss, in large measure, the value in recognizing expat stories when we discuss the City of Good Neighbors. We also make bad jokes, curse a bunch and talk about beer, the Sabres and awful sports media, as per protocol. 
Music by Avalanches, streaming below, iTunes subscription through the button below that, download here or here, RSS subscribers hit here. 

The Outlander

Last time I wrote here, it was regarding the depressing, soul-sucking death march to 30th place and the hand-wringing, moral crusading, negative nancies and militant pragmatists that came with it. It was by far the least amount of fun I’ve had following this franchise for the last twenty-five years or so, and that’s selling it short; it was not fun at all. There was zero fun outside of the occasional gallows humor that comes with some of the worst hockey players in franchise history hockeying together at once.

Yet I’ll remember April 10th. I went to Orioles opening day with my girlfriend and her friends, a miserable 50 degree day where the Blue Jays crushed the home team - much like they would to clinch the division title less than six months later - before we started barhopping. Shortly before some hardcore browning and blacking out between the two of us respectively, in the last final seconds before my phone died, I refreshed my score app continuously to see the Sabres lose to Columbus. It was glorious. Aside from the guarantee of McEichel, it was such a relief to just be proven right after doubling down on the certainty of 30th the entire season. As any borderline narcissist knows, things like that are victories in themselves.

The Sabres, regardless of the reasons for excitement that I assure you I’ll get to, are in a peculiar position they haven’t found themselves in for some fifteen years: that of afterthought. This is Bills time, and it will continue to be Bills time until that team’s season has either run its course or stomped on our hearts (nice start Sunday btw), forcing us to return in November or December to the team that has been our salve, our dependable solace for more consecutive football seasons than we’d care to address. It is that dependability, that wins help numb the pain of a previous Sunday’s disappointment and even losses (it’s a long season and what do you want, they were dead last two years in a row) help get us through the time in between those Sundays that for now just seem like such an insufferably long time.

I feel for many of us born in a certain window, who came of age in Western New York at a certain time, have felt more connected to the Sabres than the Bills mostly due to results. On my 15th birthday I watched from my Grandparents house as the Sabres took a 3-1 series lead over the Leafs in the Conference Finals. Two nights later my Mom dropped a friend and I off at the old Tops on Young in Tonawanda (now a Big Lots/Subway) just as Game Five started. The store played the game on the PA system and we got to hear RJ’s voice call the comeback victory and trip to the Stanley Cup Finals. To pass the time throughout the night, a large group of fans taught us Euchre, a game I’d play pretty much every lunch period for the rest of high school.

Despite being numbers three and four in line, the antiquated system at Tops was too slow when the tickets went on sale. Didn’t help that the two middle aged guys in front of us bought four tickets to each home game but when it came our turn, my friend got one ticket to Game Three, me one ticket to Game Four. I was dropped off at the foot of Washington Street while my Mom and Grandfather went to Coca Cola Field to watch the game on the scoreboard. I’ve been to many games afterwards and maybe seen better teams, but the noise when Sanderson scored on a breakaway in that game (the only home Cup Final win in forty years) was the loudest I’ve ever heard that arena.

I was hooked. Seven years later I was on the precipice of graduating college and was #blessed enough to have some of the best weeks of my life tied into the most exhilarating run a Buffalo team has given us in a generation. I got to watch Game 1 against Philly in the last row of the arena, where my first hug was not my girlfriend but the stranger who shared his nachos with me (and brought HIS girlfriend). I got to watch the Sabres murder that finesse team day drinking before a house party, I got to watch Game 1 against Ottawa at a Quad Party at Canisius, Game 3 from the Bonaventure Golf Course Clubhouse with over a hundred folks jammed four rows deep behind the bar to squint at the one small TV in the corner. Game 5 was the night before graduation, slip n’ sliding down a hill in the rain afterwards, warming up that chill at a bonfire until 5am with fifty friends who just didn’t want morning to come before my girlfriend told me “Matt you graduate in four hours.”

I listened to the Drury game in a tiny townhouse bedroom at Penn State, Property book open but used only to rest my elbows as I leaned as close to my speakers as I could, hoping for a miracle that, for once, came. I watched the mad rush to the postseason in 2011 in a dive bar in Barre, Vermont and welled up when the Flyers inexplicably played for a tie. And April 10th this year I high-fived people in Baltimore over a loss, the meaning of which they couldn’t understand. But it started long before all this.

The Commander

I really wasn't sure how to open this...because I'm writing it with some serious rage. My creativity isn't quite flowing past the bile that I'm gagging on at the moment. 

I'm a pretty nice guy, I try to be respectful of people and stuff. I limit my criticisms to open ended subtweets and passive aggressive shit, I try to stay away from the SJW type stuff that a lot of people get involved in, not because I don't believe in a lot of the good people are trying to do or because of my own values. I'm just not really that type of person. 

But man, when you take something I love and enjoy like oh..... Sabres hockey and make a complete mockery out of it, man I get a little punchy. 

This one's been building up for awhile, but it's coming to a head these past few weeks. 

It's time to face facts. The off-ice department of the Sabres is a complete fucking embarassment. 

I'll start with the easy thing: the decision to not live stream the Prospects Tournament. This is a layup for me to be mad about. 

I don't live in Buffalo, I can't go to this fucking thing and buy hot dogs and beers and hats. Does that make me any less of a fan? Does that mean I shouldn't be able to follow the prospects that I've been waiting on for a few years while the actual garbage hockey team was dressing waiver wire fodder and trading away actual good players to get these kids? 
 
The frustrating thing about this is that I know it's not a financial decision. It can't be, right?? I mean, there's a literal plaza and complex of hockey related shit down there that cost 14 billion dollars. There's a sports bar that draws a buttload of people. I know, even aside from the fact that the owner is a kajillionaire, they can't be hurting for money. 

If you're not going to stream it as a decision of some type? Just tell me why. I might not (ok, there's no way I would) accept your reasoning, but at least I'd know why you're being dickish about it. And hey, if I'm wrong and you want to squeeze money out of people, I'll pay $10 to watch the tournament online, because I'm stupid as shit. Give me the option. Give me SOMETHING besides ignoring the outcry and telling me it's on the shitfucking radio like I want to watch Phil Housley and this is 1982. 
 
Otherwise, I'll just happily sit here and point out that the fucking Nashville Predators, in the smoking hot hockey hotbed of NASHVILLE FUCKING TENNESEE is streaming theirs. 


That's the easy one, EVERYONE is pissed about the streaming thing. 

Oh but there's more...there's SOOOOO much more. 

How about trying to buy merchandise from the Sabres Store when you live out of state? I just bought a jersey from there a couple of weeks ago. The process itself is easy, you call up, tell them what you want, the person goes to check stock, confirms said stock, takes your info and places the order.   

You see the problem I have is that I was charged $25 for shipping UPS Ground on a $180 order. Look here Sabres, I understand that you're not Amazon and don't have your own logistics company to offset the cost of doing this type of business. I mean, sure, charge me for shipping if you need to. But $25 for standard UPS is fucking ridiculous by itself... let alone when I'm spending $180. Also, since I don't live in the area, I can't take advantage of any sales that the Sabres Store has, so maybe free shipping on a $100+ order is a nice gesture, I dunno...I'm a sucker for trying to support my fucking team. I just don't want to get bent over so thoroughly when I do so. 

My retail spending habits aside, HOWEVER... The biggest, and most egregarious problem with the Non-Hockey portion of the Sabres office is the god damned Twitter account.

The motherfucking Twitter account. The cringe-inducing, make your butthole pucker up nice and tight while you follow along with it Twitter account.

I'm not sure when this all started, and I'm certainly not the first to voice the dissatisfaction here. If you want to go back a few years even, I believe most people started to take notice of this when the account started egregiously retweeting shit like OMG IM AT THE SABERS GAME WITH MY BESTIESS!!! during games instead of providing any sort of game information whatsoever. The outcry over this eventually led to the creation of a different account for this pandering nonsense, which I guess is fine if you get off on being noticed by the Sabres Twitter account for showing up to a game - that's cool, you deserve it after the last few years. Go nuts. 

It's not that the Sabres Twitter is BAD. (Yes it is).  I mean it serves its purpose in a very basic way. It tells you there's a game tonight, it gives you some video of the players telling you they need to go out and give 100% and all the other cliched nonsense that the media drags out of those guys. That's fine, I'm ok with that - it's important. 

God forbid the Sabres Twitter actually had some decent original content to push out to us, though... funny videos, getting to actually KNOW the players, things like that. Other teams do this. Other teams EXCEL at fluff pieces like that - they get the players to buy in and do skits, and all sorts of fun things. I know the Sabres have some seriously talented people working in the Team Coverage department - shit, Kevin Snow was awesome before he left for greener pastures, Ian Ott is a totally normal dude who seems to get it, no other team has someone as dedicated to coverage of the teams' prospects as Kris Baker, Chris Ryndak was one of the most insanely talented bloggers in the Sabres blogosphere before he was hired. 


The problem is, you don't seem to hear from these quality gentlemen very often. The Sabres Twitter pimps the fucking hell out of that god awful Hockey Hotline show with those two idiots that host it - but I'd LOVE to see more original content from these talented people represented here. The blatant lack of self awareness of CK ANAL as he curates the content on @BuffaloSabres is what seems to drive everyone fucking nuts though. Holy fucking shit. When you're hosting a prospect tournament in your own barn, featuring one of the best hockey prospects of the past 15 years...your best play after the team decides not to stream it... is to tweet the most barebones information you possibly can with a vomit inducing amount of Emojis? 

We really can't do better than this? We can't find anyone better to run the public facing side of your social media presence than the person who uses the tool like you sat them in the "HERES WHATS COOL AND HIP ON TWITTER 2015!!" introduction class, gave them the password, and let them spam the red 100 emoji 15 times a tweet non-ironically? 

Holy motherfucking shit. @BuffaloSabres is run like the Twitter for Applebees for fucks sake. I realize that the Buffalo Sabres are a #brand, but sports teams aren't like types of laundry detergent. They have history, they have colorful characters, they have a never-ending stream of #content. And I'm motherfucking insulted that your Twitter account panders to people like there's a buy one get one free sale on you at Target this week. 

Look, people who follow you already LIKE you. They've already "bought" the product. This nonsense like "no arena giveaways," "no web streams of shit," "no dressing up Patrick Kaleta like Shrek" needs to stop. I'm not asking you to be the LA Kings Twitter or whatever. I'm just asking you to not be the fucking Orbitz Twitter. It's a fucking embarrassment. Give me a sense that you actually know who Derek Plante *IS* when he's going to be on Hockey Hotline - he's a guy who scored one of the Top 5 Goals in the fucking franchise history by the way. Cover the prospects game better than your goddamned AHL franchise did for starters...that shouldn't be hard. Don't tell me the score of the fucking prospects game and in the same fucking tweet, spit in my fucking face and tell me I can listen to it on the radio like this is 1957 and Jack Eichel is crinkling paper to make fire sounds effects after he scores. Stop using Emojis non-ironically like a 13 year old girl who just figured out that they are a thing that exist on her fucking Hello Kitty iPhone. When the rest of the league is doing a #fun thing like watching the Mighty Ducks movie and tweeting about it, having fun, making jokes with each other - don't be MIA. 

Eyes are going to actually be on you soon and I'd prefer they know Jack Eichel as the motherfucking cock of the walk, not the USA flag Emoji. 

If you need any fucking help, and it's clear that you do, it's right down the hall - maybe you can Periscope your walk over there: 

You can block me at @essbeeay if you're so inclined. I already know you're petty enough, and I already know I won't miss anything.