Before Sabres’ biggest game in 15 years, Lindy Ruff embraces the butterflies
BUFFALO – Playoff games used to keep Lindy Ruff awake.
And we’re not just talking late-1990s Buffalo Sabres games and skates in the crease. You have to rewind quite a bit further than his early coaching days to find the start of Ruff’s playoff experiences. They came when he was an NHL player, a rugged defenseman converted to a left winger with the Sabres primarily during the 1980s. He was part of many an Adams Division war, often against the Boston Bruins; he racked up 168 penalty minutes in 42 career postseason games as a Sabre. And the anticipation of violence got his heart racing when he was trying to get some rest during the day leading up to a game at night.
“You knew that night, it was going to be one of those nights you feared for your life sometimes,” Ruff said Sunday morning at KeyBank Center, hours before he’d coach the biggest hockey game in Buffalo of the past 15 years. “The game is different. The intimidation was a huge part of the game. Back then, fighting was a big part of the game. Every team probably had four or five guys that could take care of almost anybody. And those series we had with the Bruins were examples of it. But the game is in a lot better place now. You still saw last night there was a fight off the opening faceoff [between the Carolina Hurricanes and Ottawa Senators]. We’ve had a couple games this year where there’s been quite a number of fights inside the game. I think playoffs is a time where you can expect out of the normal.”
Sunday, with his Sabres back in the postseason for the first time since 2010-11, crowned Atlantic Division champs and waiting to face those same Bruins, adrenaline and anticipation are again the theme. Ruff won’t be involved in the fisticuffs this time – he jokes that those games were “fun” simply because got out of them alive – but it’ll still be a battle to keep the heart rate under control Sunday. With 15 years between playoff games, the atmosphere at KeyBank Center will be atomically energetic. One could argue the anticipation of the NHL-record 14-season playoff drought ending could produce a louder rink for Game 1 of the first round than we’d even get for Game 1 of a Stanley Cup Final; just look at the way ticket prices exploded for Sunday’s 7:30 p.m. ET tilt. And Ruff, 66, feels it on a personal level. He guided the Sabres as their head coach during one of their most successful eras in franchise history, included the Dominik Hasek years, yielding the 1998-99 Final berth, and the mid-2000s run that included a Presidents’ Trophy and multiple Eastern Conference final trips. No coach was able to bring Buffalo back to the postseason after his 2013 firing. He made it there during stops in between with the Dallas Stars and New Jersey Devils, but the anticipation of being back here with the Sabres is unique. Ruff feels the butterflies, and he embraces them.
“I’m looking forward to that,” Ruff said. “The building has been so great the last couple of months. And knowing that it’s going to go to a new level tonight, I’ll feel it. [The players will] feel it. You want them to feel it. I think you should have butterflies going into something that’s just the anticipation of all the work we put in during the year to get to this point.”
Of course, anticipation and energy can mean jitters. If the Sabres aren’t careful, that could be used against them Sunday. The Bruins and coach Marco Sturm are counting on it. He’s about to coach his first playoff game and recognizes the full-circle moment as someone who played on some Bruins teams that faced the Ruff-coached Sabres in the 2000s, including a series in 2009-10. Sturm needs any edge he can find against a Buffalo group that finished the season 39-9-5 over its final 53 games, and he believes being the road team is in fact an advantage for Game 1.
“Don’t forget, the pressure is on them, too,” Sturm said. “They’ve been waiting for this moment. Not just the players, but the whole organization, the fans, the city have been waiting for that moment. So there is a lot of pressure on the whole team. I do believe, if you look at the games yesterday, they kind of went, for some reason, the opposite were the home team [the Stars and Pittsburgh Penguins] struggled. So it’s not easy. It’s funny, because sometimes I felt that way [as a player]. I was glad to actually start on the road and not at home.”
That’s why Ruff, as excited as he is, needs to be the steady hand, too. And that’s why he was careful to ensure his players didn’t break their routines in preparing for Game 1, including keeping Sunday morning’s skate optional. He wants his players to straddle the line between feeding off what is sure to be a high without twisting the feeling into pressure.
“I’m hoping that we are amped up, because it will be electric, and it will be a totally different feeling for sure,” Ruff told Daily Faceoff. “I’m looking forward to how our guys are going to react to it. We’ve talked about the energy we need to bring, how we need to play, and I anticipate them being ready to do it.”
Make no mistake: perhaps more so for Game 1 than for any other part of this postseason, Ruff’s presence matters. The Sabres have 11 players in their expected Game 1 lineup who have 0.0 career NHL playoff games on their resume, including their captain, No. 1 defenseman Rasmus Dahlin; their top-scorer, center Tage Thompson; and their starting goaltender, Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. A bench boss with 132 playoff games is invaluable.
“It’s definitely a sense of confidence with him,” Dahlin told Daily Faceoff. “He’s been through it so many times. He knows what to do in a playoff series. He knows what it takes. So we’ve had a bunch of good meetings now leading up to this game. It’s gonna be fun.”
Spoken like a player who listens to his coach. Ruff wants to lean hard into the fun of Game 1.
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