Let us start with the part that deserves nothing but a full-throated cheer. Buffalo ended the longest active playoff drought in the sport, a wait so long it became the league's running punchline and the fanbase's inherited grief. A return to the postseason, 109 points, a city that had earned the right to lose its mind. That happened, it is real, and no spreadsheet gets to take it away.
But this site's whole job is to tell you what is underneath the result, and underneath Buffalo's breakthrough is a warning worth hearing before next season starts, because the way the Sabres got to 109 points is not the way teams stay there.
| Metric | Number | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Standings points | 109 | Ended the playoff drought |
| 5-on-5 expected-goals share | 49% | 20th in the NHL - below break-even |
| Goals for vs expected | +25 | Finishing ran hot |
| Goals against vs expected | +25 | Goaltending bailed them out |
Start with the middle rows, because they are the ones the celebration skips. At five-on-five, Buffalo controlled 49 percent of the expected goals. That is a below-break-even number, 20th in the league, the underlying profile of a team that gets out-chanced more nights than not. Teams that control the run of play like that finish around the playoff cut line on a good year and below it on a normal one. They do not, by their own even-strength play, finish with 109 points. So how did Buffalo?
Fifty goals of good fortune
Two ways, and they are the top and bottom rows of that table. First, the Sabres finished well above expectation, scoring roughly 25 more goals than the quality of their chances predicted. Second, and just as important, their goaltending saved roughly 25 more goals than an average crease would have, with Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen and Alex Lyon combining for one of the better tandem seasons in the league. Add it up and Buffalo banked something like 50 goals of positive variance, half from shooting hot and half from stopping pucks at an elite rate. Fifty goals is not noise around the margins. Fifty goals is the difference between a lottery team and a 109-point one.
Here is the problem with building a season on those two things: they are the two most volatile inputs in hockey. Team shooting percentage and goaltending swing hard from year to year and regress toward the middle with almost gravitational reliability. The chances you generate and allow, the 49 percent, are far stickier. They tend to look next season a lot like they did this one. Which means the safest bet about Buffalo's 2026-27 is that the finishing cools, the goaltending comes back toward earth, and a 49 percent team is left standing in the daylight without the 50 goals that hid it.
This is not all bad news
There is a real player at the centre of the good news. Rasmus Dahlin had another excellent year, 74 points and a genuine play-driving impact, the kind of number-one defenceman you build around, and his own on-ice share sat comfortably above the team's. The Sabres have talent, and a young roster can improve its underlying game organically as its best players enter their primes. That is the optimistic path, and it is available to them. What is not available is assuming the 49 percent does not matter because the record said otherwise.
We have seen this movie before, and recently. Montreal ran the same play last season, winning 48 games while getting out-chanced, and the honest read there was the same as the honest read here: enjoy the banner, then fix the underlying game before the luck files its notice. The teams that turn a variance-fueled breakthrough into a sustained one are the teams that treat the good season as a head start, not a destination.
What Buffalo should do with this
The wrong lesson is to run it back and assume 109 points is who they are. The right one is to use the credibility and the momentum of a playoff berth to address the actual flaw: a five-on-five game that ranked in the league's bottom third. That means shot-suppression on the back end, a middle six that can control play rather than trade chances, a system that does not ask Luukkonen and Lyon to be top-five goalies again just to break even.
Do that, and the drought-breaker becomes a foundation. Do not, and Buffalo learns the hardest lesson the standings can teach: that the difference between a breakthrough and a mirage is often just a year of average luck. The celebration was earned. The next step is making sure there is something under it.