The Sabres' Playoff Drought Lasted Generations — But It's Almost Over
Tracking the franchise's 15-year postseason absence, from a kindergartener Zach Benson in 2011 to a 51-year-old Patrick Lalime in 2026.
Now clear of last Friday’s trade deadline, the NHL playoff picture is still very much a wild fight to the finish in both conferences. According to my Elo-based forecast model (as of Sunday morning), 10 teams were wedged between 32 percent and 76 percent postseason odds — with four more between 11 percent and 21 percent — fighting over the bottom two spots in the West and the bottom four in the East.
One outcome that is relatively safe as we look ahead to the playoffs, however, is that the Buffalo Sabres will probably be in the field. Buffalo went into Sunday’s action ranked No. 5 in the league in Elo — their first regular-season appearance in the Top 5 since Oct. 23, 2008 — with 99 percent postseason odds in the model:
Ordinarily, that would simply be a really good season for a young team that is hoping to keep progressing and make some noise in the playoffs. But the Sabres aren’t just any team. They currently hold the NHL’s all-time record postseason drought at 14 seasons and counting, not having skated for the Stanley Cup in any way, shape or form since the 2010-11 season.
How long ago was that? The oldest player on those 2011 Sabres, goaltender Patrick Lalime (born July 7, 1974), is now about four months shy of his 52nd birthday. (He’s just one of four players from that team now in their fifties.) More than a third of that team’s roster hasn’t played in the NHL in at least 13 seasons, more than two-thirds hasn’t played in a decade, and only one player in that group — defenseman Tyler Myers, who was a 20-year-old in his second NHL season in 2011 and is now age 36 (and recently traded to the Dallas Stars) — is still active in the NHL today:
(In fact, Myers is the only member of the 2010-11 Sabres who was played in the NHL in any of the past four seasons.)
The era in-between saw a lot more lows than highs. The team won 424 games and lost 651, with a minus-580 goal differential. There were seasons where everything that could go wrong, did:
A number of talented players passed through Western New York along the way, including Jack Eichel, Jeff Skinner, Sam Reinhart and Rasmus Ristolainen. All were supposed to help Buffalo return to the playoffs, but all departed instead without so much as a single postseason appearance for the franchise.
Two of the top three players of the drought years, though, are Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin, who happen to be two of the Sabres’ three best players by adjusted Goals Above Replacement this season as well (with goalie Alex Lyon serving as as the other). Both debuted in 2018-19 and have been with the club through the building phase — and now are among the longest-tenured NHL veterans on the current Sabres roster.
Both are also still shy of their 29th birthdays, meaning they were in middle school the last time Buffalo made the playoffs. Lyon was slightly older still, at 18 years and 138 days old when the Sabres lost Game 7 of the 2011 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, so he may have a real memory of Buffalo’s last playoff team.
The Sabres even just acquired Luke Schenn, who was 21 years and 175 days old — and an active NHL player — the last time the Sabres were in the playoffs. But Schenn is the only member of the 2025-26 Sabres who was actively in the league before the drought began:
Current Sabres LW Zach Benson is in a different category: He was weeks shy of his sixth birthday during that 2011 playoff Game 7, making him the youngest of eight players whose ages were in the single-digits that year. They’ve practically never known the very concept of a Buffalo Sabres playoff team — until now, that is.
The main connective tissue is head coach Lindy Ruff — who was actually behind the bench the last time they made the playoffs, too, before stints coaching Dallas and New Jersey in between. Ruff was age 50 when he coached that 2010-11 squad, 13 years into his NHL head-coaching career. He’s 65 now, and 25 years into that same career. Time has a way of flying by whether you’re having fun or not.
Now, nothing is sure until the playoff spot is officially clinched, but it would take a massive collapse for Buffalo to squander their opportunity to end this drought. And the weight of the drought had been equally massive. Only two other teams in history — the 2000-2012 Florida Panthers and 2006-2017 Edmonton Oilers — even had a 10-season playoff drought, and the gap between the Sabres and them is the same as the gap between them and teams who aren’t even on Wikipedia’s all-time drought list.
And if Buffalo does finish the job, the players who finally skate the team back into the postseason will do something almost no one in this organization (save for Ruff) has ever actually experienced. For an entire generation of Sabres players and fans, playoff hockey in Buffalo has existed only as a story from another era. Now, at long last, it’s on the verge of becoming something real again — a memory that everyone hopes won’t take another 15 years to revisit.