The Sabres are good. Seriously! Plus: 5 weird NHL stats

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Red Light newsletter 🏒 | This is The Athletic’s hockey newsletter. Sign up here to receive Red Light directly in your inbox.

Good morning to everyone except for everyone on my fantasy football team. Hope you all enjoyed your week off. I hate each one of you bums and hope all of your Christmas toys need weird batteries that aren’t included.

Where were we? Oh right, hockey. We’ve got plenty to talk about, so let’s dive in …

Kekäläinen Era Starts Strong

We had some breaking news in Toronto last night in the form of a coaching change, although not the one most were expecting. Head coach Craig Berube still has his job; instead, it was Maple Leafs assistant Marc Savard who paid the price for a flatlining power play.

But enough about failure, let’s talk about a winner like … (checks notes) … wait, it can’t be them.

With six straight wins, the Sabres are the single hottest team in the league right now. They’ve climbed out of the Eastern basement, passing teams like Columbus and Toronto, and are within a few points of a wild-card spot. And they’ve done it in the aftermath of a rare midseason GM switch, with Jarmo Kekäläinen replacing Kevyn Adams. The vibes around the Sabres right now are … good? Great, even?

Folks … we may be seeing the ultimate Christmas miracle.

You see, the thing about this year’s Atlantic Division: It hasn’t made any sense. Just about every team has already cycled through multiple stretches of hot and cold, the playoff picture changes every day and every team gets a few days in first place. There’s no consistency … except for one thing that we could always count on: The Sabres. More specifically, the Sabres being bad.

With the division all muddled and the Sabres all good, it’s very confusing. So I did what I always do when I’m confused and found somebody smarter than me to pester with questions. Our Sabres beat writer, Matthew Fairburn, was kind enough to walk me through this near-unprecedented situation.

SM: Wait, are the Sabres good now?

MF: Maybe? It’s hard to buy in completely after the way the last 14 years have gone, but the vibe around the team hasn’t been this good in years.

SM: In all seriousness, this team looked hopeless just a few weeks ago. What’s changed?

MF: It’s amazing what a change in leadership can do. They fired Adams and replaced him with Kekäläinen. You can’t overlook the jolt that’s given the entire organization, even if Kekäläinen hasn’t done anything to the roster yet. There was a void of leadership and experience at the top of the organization, and Kekäläinen solves that. There’s reason to believe in that building again. It also helps they’ve gotten healthier with Josh Norris and Michael Kesselring returning to the lineup. And they’re getting great goaltending from Alex Lyon and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen during this six-game stretch.

SM: Week 1 of the Kekäläinen era saw him round out his front office by bringing in Marc Bergevin and Josh Flynn. He was never shy about making big moves in Columbus. Should we expect to see a roster shakeup once he’s had time to settle in?

MF: I’m expecting a few significant moves from Kekäläinen at some point. How soon that comes could depend on how long the Sabres keep playing like this. He mentioned in his introductory news conference he defines talent a little bit differently, with an emphasis on character and hard work. I’m sure he has some players in mind who may not fit his vision, but he’s going to be calculated about how he does things, especially while the team is rolling.

SM: Finally, with a ton of momentum and an Eastern Conference in disarray, let’s just put it out into the world: Is this team going to make the playoffs?

MF: I would have said no chance a few weeks ago. But the Eastern Conference is such a mess, and it’s tough to say definitively there are eight teams better than the Sabres. They’re sitting at around a 30 percent chance at the playoffs, according to The Athletic’s model, despite being three points back of the second wild card and third in the division. They dug themselves a deep hole early in the season, but this latest winning streak is enough for them to stay in the mix at least into the new year. That’s a start.

• 💡 Trivia time: Since Matthew just guaranteed the Sabres are making the playoffs, let’s stay on that topic. Can you name all of the active players in today’s league who have ever faced Buffalo in the postseason?Hint: It’s not a long list, as you might expect given the Sabres’ drought stretches back to 2011. But there are multiple players on it, and all of them share something in common: They all currently play for Atlantic Division teams, although none of them is still on the team in which they originally faced the Sabres in the postseason.

Coast to Coast

🥈 Russo has the latest scoop on how Team USA is shaping up.

🥣 How does a professional athlete stay in shape with a fractured jaw? Not very easily, according to Charlie McAvoy.

🏒 In my latest weekend power rankings, I listed five teams that should be feeling a sense of holiday panic. Who topped the list, Winnipeg or Toronto? Only one way to find out.

👶 It’s almost World Juniors time, and Corey and Scott have your look at the top 25 NHL prospects in the tournament.

🎯 James and Dom dive into one of the league’s biggest mysteries: Why isn’t Auston Matthews good anymore?

🎙️ On Monday’s “The Athletic Hockey Show,” Max and Laz hand out one thoughtful gift to all 32 NHL teams and on a special Tuesday edition of the Prospect Series, the guys preview the World Junior Championship. Get both shows here.

Five Weird Stats 🤓

Andrew Mordzynski / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

I spend a lot of time digging around hockey stats sites — no, I’m not dealing well at all with the recent hockey-reference navigation tweaks, thanks for asking — and I’ll occasionally discover something that I think is neat but have nowhere to use. Here are five examples:

Every Devils game is over after two periods. OK, not every game — if it’s tied after 40 minutes, you still have reason to watch. But the Devils are a perfect 14-0-0 when leading after two periods, and a perfectly awful 0-13-0 when trailing after two. No other team is perfect on both ends of the after-two spectrum.

The Rangers are oh-fer in the second half of back-to-backs. That’s bad news, because they’ve been in that situation seven times, tied for the league lead. They’re 0-6-1 in those seven games, with the most recent loss coming against the Predators on Sunday. But if the glass is half full, you could point out that the Rangers are 18-10-3 in all other rest situations, which is a 103-point pace … and they don’t have any more back-to-backs until the end of January.

The Wild are the only team without a bench minor all year. Everyone else has at least one. So, take a bow, John Hynes, I guess.

The Panthers are the only team with multiple wraparound goals. Talk about a dying art … where have you gone, Dougie Gilmour? Only 10 teams scored a wraparound goal this year, at least according to official NHL stats, with two by the Panthers. The Rangers haven’t even attempted a wraparound all season.

The Blues are done after 60. In a league where a record number of games are stretching past regulation because teams are chasing loser points even though it makes the hockey gods sad, the Blues have a problem. Well, two problems, actually. The first is that they’re the only team left in the league that has yet to score an overtime goal this year. But they’ve also yet to score in the shootout, the only team that’s true for besides Utah, who haven’t had a shootout yet. Add it all up, and the Blues have had eight games go past regulation, they’ve lost all eight and they’ve yet to even put a puck in the net in the process.

What to Watch

It’s a busy one, with 26 teams in action on the NHL’s final night before the three-day holiday break kicks in.

📺 Canadiens @ Bruins
7 p.m. ET on ESPN+ / TSN / RDS

Arguably the game’s best modern rivalry has some serious Atlantic playoff stakes this year. They’ve only met once so far this season, with the Bruins earning a 3-2 regulation win in Montreal back in November. This one’s in Boston, the second game of a seven-game road trip for the Habs that wraps around the holiday break.

📺 Panthers @ Hurricanes
7 p.m. ET on ESPN+

These two teams met in the conference final in both 2023 and 2025. They might do it again this season. Florida has to make it first, and stealing two points in Carolina could help make sure that happens.

📺 Flames @ Oilers
9 p.m. ET on ESPN+ / Sportsnet360

Forget about what the standings say — it’s the Battle of Alberta, which means there’s a good chance it will have a playoff atmosphere and somebody will wind up on Santa’s naughty list by the end of it.

Full NHL schedule here. Try streaming games like these for free on Fubo.

No Dumb Questions

We believe that in hockey, as in life, there are no dumb questions. So if you have something you’ve always wondered about the sport, ask away by emailing us at redlight@theathletic.com

🤔 Thinking outside the (penalty) box

Suppose a team takes a five-minute major penalty, and subsequently takes a two-minute minor penalty, resulting in two full minutes of five-on-three action. If the benefitting team scores on the two-man advantage, does the skater who committed the minor penalty get released from the penalty box?

My guess is no, but I am unsure because when it’s a typical five-on-three with two minor penalties, the skater who committed the first infraction is released, which in this case is the major penalty, which is non-releasable. — Patrick

The short answer is that the player with the minor does indeed get to leave the box. Basically, when a goal is scored against a team that’s shorthanded by virtue of one or more minor penalties, whichever minor has the least time left on is the one that’s released.

Simple, right? Well … kind of. But Patrick’s question gives me an excuse to mention one of my favorite parts of the NHL rulebook: The infamous Table 12, in which the league endeavors to address exactly these kinds of situations by listing just about every possible combination of penalties that two teams could account for before a goal.

Care to take a guess how many different combinations are covered?

The answer, believe it or not, is 64, broken down into eight sections. Patrick’s scenario is one of the simpler ones — the seventh one overall, labelled C3. We get all the way down to H10, which is the case where one player on each team gets a coincidental minor, time passes and then a player gets a double-minor, after which his team is scored on before the first penalty expires.

You can also dig into increasingly esoteric scenarios like E4 (Team A gets a double-minor, Team B later gets a minor and then Team B scores three consecutive goals), or F15 (Team A takes a minor, then Team B takes a minor, then Team A takes a minor, then Team B is getting called for a minor but Team A scores on the delayed penalty) or H6 (Team A takes a double-minor and a minor while Team B also takes a minor and then later Team B scores). That last scenario is one of several that leads to the always-fun “captain’s choice,” by the way.

The NHL rulebook: Helping insomniac sports fans get to sleep since 1917.

Your Trivia Answer

The only four active players I could find who’ve faced the Sabres in the playoffs are: Ottawa’s Claude Giroux, Detroit’s James van Riemsdyk and Florida’s Sergei Bobrovsky, who were all on the 2011 Flyers team, plus Florida’s Brad Marchand from the 2010 Bruins.

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