The Buffalo Sabres play Game 3 tonight in Montreal, tied 1-1 in the second round of the playoffs, and there is still something slightly disorienting about typing that sentence without it being fiction. Not because they don’t deserve it. They won the Atlantic Division with 109 points. They went 32-6-2 after December 15. They beat the Boston Bruins in six games in the first round — a team that has owned them in postseason memory for a generation. They deserve every inch of this. The disorientation is a residue of 14 years of failure so thorough it rewired how an entire fanbase processes reality.
Game 3, tonight, 7 PM ET on CBC, SN, TVAS, and ESPN, Montreal. Go watch it.
This is playoff hockey in Buffalo! 🤩#LetsGoBuffalo | @NHL pic.twitter.com/f0v7rnjsN3
— Buffalo Sabres (@BuffaloSabres) May 6, 2026
How a December Firing Turned Buffalo Into a Contender
On December 15, 2025, the Sabres were 14-14-4 and sitting outside a playoff position in the Atlantic. GM Kevyn Adams was fired. Jarmo Kekalainen — who spent eleven years building the Columbus Blue Jackets into a playoff program — was hired the same day and said at his introductory press conference, without hedging, “I firmly believe we can make the playoffs this year.” At the time, a significant portion of the hockey internet treated this as the kind of thing executives say when cameras are pointed at them.
What followed was the best 40-game stretch the franchise has put together since 1996. The 32-6-2 run included win streaks of 10 and 8 games, swallowed the Atlantic standings whole, and ended with a division title — Buffalo’s first since 2010. According to NHL.com’s oral history of the season, the pivot point came at a dinner table in Calgary, before a mid-December game, when the leadership group — Alex Tuch among them — made a choice. “We can either mail it in and say it’s over,” Tuch said, “or we can buckle down, go out there and have fun and try to win.” That’s not an inspirational poster. That’s a group of professional athletes deciding they give a damn, which is rarer than teams let on.
Kekalainen is worth understanding here, not just as a hire but as a template. His 2019 Columbus team — built from scratch, perpetually dismissed — walked into Tampa Bay’s building as a Wild Card and swept the Presidents’ Trophy winner in Round 1. It remains the most stunning first-round upset in modern NHL history. The guy has a demonstrated ability to make organizations believe they can win before the scoreboard says they should. That’s not a soft skill. That’s the whole job.
Rasmus Dahlin had the season that makes all of this make sense structurally. Named a Norris Trophy finalist during the playoff run, Dahlin has been the spine of whatever Buffalo was supposed to become since they drafted him first overall in 2018. “If stuff is gonna get good here, we are the ones to have to drive the bus,” he said in the same NHL.com oral history. He’s been saying versions of that for years. This spring, the bus actually went somewhere. Fourteen Sabres players made their NHL playoff debut in Round 1 against Boston. Fourteen. And they won.
What the Sabres’ Run Means If You’re Watching From New York
The Rangers missed the playoffs for the second straight year — 28-35-9, injuries to Adam Fox and Igor Shesterkin that cost them a stretch of games they couldn’t recover from, Mike Sullivan’s first year ending the way Mike Sullivan’s first years tend not to end. That’s a real thing, and it stings the way these things sting. But spending tonight watching the Rangers not play is a waste of perfectly good hockey.
Buffalo clinched their playoff spot and streets in the city flooded. Fans who were children the last time this franchise won a playoff series — 2006-07 — are now in their late twenties and early thirties and getting their first real taste of this. Dahlin, who has played his entire career in a city defined by this particular kind of absence, described it with the plainness of someone who has been waiting a long time: “To see the city, what it can be like or what it’s like now, it’s just unbelievable.”
Game 2 went badly — Montreal won 5-1 behind Alex Newhook’s two goals, and the Canadiens are not a team you want playing with confidence in their own building. The series is genuinely alive. That’s the other thing about actually watching this instead of pretending it’s a footnote: Buffalo is playing real hockey in a real series, not hanging on. Game 3 tonight decides whether they’re in the driver’s seat or whether Montreal makes this a proper fight.
The darkly funny part of all this, if you want it: the Rangers spent parts of the last two seasons arguing internally about their own rebuild timeline, about patience vs. urgency, about whether the core was good enough. Buffalo fired their GM in December when they were 14-14-4 and outside a playoff spot and went 32-6-2. The Sabres didn’t philosophize their way into the second round. They had a dinner in Calgary and decided to stop losing. New York management could stand to eat out more.
