Well, we’ve had our share of bad news here in Buffalo recently. Vanek, the third-leading goal scorer in hockey, and just the second player in NHL history to have four consecutive natural hat tricks, officially had his face halfway removed by Anton Volchenkov’s Senatorial slap shot. Talk about your bad luck–Vanek’s also one of the most durable of the Sabres, having until now missed only one regular season game in four years. The Sabres do seem to have problems with their players’ jaws–remember when Teppo Numminem was out because of a small bone fracture in his jaw a few weeks ago?

And of course this is happening just when we’re catching fire at last, having just moved into the 7th playoff seed position on the energy of an 11-5-1 run. Now the guy that largely brought us here is going to be gone for up to a whole month.

I know, Derek Roy’s been having a solid season as Center, too. But of late his productivity has been tailing off some, and now the line that took over from his as the top gun line on the Sabres has been marred by this luckless slap shot incident. Roy, Jason Pominville, and Ale Kotalik are going to have to kick it up a notch if we’re going to hold on to a playoff seed. The Eastern Conference is not the conference for losing momentum late in the season and still making it; there is too much talent coming at ya.

And we don’t have that floppy puppet guy in goal anymore to save us like he did in bygone seasons. We really need to step up the defense a little and start putting that puck in the net some more to sustain this run for the post-season. Our scoring isn’t poor by any means, but there’s too much parity between scoring and getting scored on as far as the season goes. Maybe we can step it up, though!