The Sabres along with the Vancouver Canucks, joined the NHL in the 1970-1971 season. Their first owners were Seymour H. Knox and Northrup Knox, scions of a family long prominent in Western New York and grandsons of the Woolworth’s variety store chain; along with Robert O. Swados, a Buffalo attorney. On the team’s inaugural board of directors were Robert E. Rich Jr., later the owner of the Buffalo Bisons minor league baseball team; and Geroge W. Strawbridge Jr., an heir to the Campbell Soup Company fortune. Buffalo had a history of professional hockey; immediately before the Sabres’ establishment, the Buffalo Bisons were a pillar of the American Hockey League (AHL), having existed since 1940 (and before that, another Bisons hockey team played from 1928 to 1936), winning the Calder Cup in their final season. (https://web.archive.org/web/20110307143201/http://forty.sabres.nhl.com/history.asp?year=1967)
Wanting a
name other than “bison” (a generic stock name used by Buffalo sports teams for
decades), the Knoxes commissioned a name-the-team contest. With names like “Mugwumps”, “Buzzing Bees”
and “Flying Zepplins” being entered, (https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-team-nickname-origins-explained-283976168) the winning choice, “Sabres”, was
chosen because Seymour Knox felt a sabre was a weapon carried by a leader, and
could be effective on both offence and defense.
The Knoxes tried twice before to get an NHL team, first when the NHL
expanded in 1967, and again when they attempted to purchase the Oakland
Seals with the intent of moving them to Buffalo. Their first attempt was thwarted when Pittsburgh
Steelers owner Art Rooney persuaded his horse racing friends James and Bruce Norris to select Pittsburgh over Buffalo, while the second attempt was
due to the NHL not wanting an expansion market to give on a team so soon, nor
isolate the Los Angeles Kings (the only NHL team other than the Seals west
of St. Louis at the time) from the rest of the NHL entirely. At the time of their creation, the Sabres
exercised their option to create their own AHL farm team, the Cincinnati Swords.
Former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager and head coach Punch Imlach was hired in the same capacity with the Sabres.
The year the Sabres debuted (1970) was an important year for major league
sports in Buffalo. In addition to the
Sabres’ debut, the Buffalo Bills officially
joined the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball
Association’s (NBA) Buffalo Braves also began
to play, sharing the Memorial Auditorium with the Sabres. The city of Buffalo went from having no teams
in the established major professional sports leagues to three in
one off-season, a situation that proved to be unsustainable. Between the Braves and the Sabres, the Sabres
would prove to be by far the more successful of the two; Paul Snyder, the nouveau riche Braves
owner, publicly feuded with the old-money Knoxes and
the local college basketball scene, eventually losing those feuds and being
forced to sell his team in 1976.
Subsequent owners of the Braves, in a series of convoluted transactions
tied to the ABA-NBA merger, moved the
team out of Buffalo.
When the Sabres debuted as an expansion team, they took to the ice to Aram Khachaturian’s Armenian dance, “Sabre Dance”. (https://artvoice.com/2017/11/hockey-sin-city-andrew-kulyk-peter-farrell/#.Ws-U_YjwZuU) The music has been associated with the team
as an unofficial anthem ever since. (https://as.com/videos/2016/07/06/en/1467824254_902709.html) It is often played between periods and after
goals.
The consensus was that the first pick in the 1970 NHL Amateur Draft would
be junior phenomenon, Gilbert Perreault. Either the Sabres or the Canucks would get
the first pick, to be determined with the spin of a wheel of fortune. Perreault was available to the Sabres and
Canucks as this was the first year the Montreal Canadiens did not have a
priority right to draft Quebec-born
junior players.
The Canucks were allocated numbers 1 – 10 on the wheel, while the Sabres
had 11 – 20. When the league president Clarence Campbell spun the wheel, he initially thought the
pointer landed on one. While Campbell
was congratulating the Vancouver delegation, Imlach asked Campbell to check
again. As it turned, the pointer was on
11, effectively handing Perreault to the Sabres. (https://archive.org/details/hockeychronicles00tren) Perreault scored 38 goals in his rookie
season of 1970-1971, at the time a record for most goals scored by an NHL
rookie, and he received the Calder Memorial Trophy as the
NHL’s rookie of the year. Despite
Perreault’s play, the Sabres finished well out of playoff contention.
In the team’s second season, 1971-1972, rookie Rick Martin, drafted fifth overall by Buffalo in 1971, and Rene Robert, acquired in a late-season trade from the Pittsburgh Penguins, joined Perreault and would become one of the
league’s top forward lines in the 1970s.
Martin broke Perreault’s record at once with 44 rookie goals. They were nicknamed “The French Connection” after the movie of the same name and in
homage to their French-Canadian roots.
The Sabres made the playoff for the first time in 1972-1973, just the
team’s third year in the league, but lost in the quarterfinals in six games to
the eventual Stanley Cup champion Montreal Canadiens.
After a subpar year in 1974 that saw them miss the playoffs (as well as
ageing defenseman Tim Horton’s death in
a DUI-induced car accident), the Sabres tied for the best record in the NHL in
the 1974-1975 regular season. Buffalo
advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time in team history to play
against the rough Philadelphia Flyers (who had been recently named the “Broad Street Bullies”), a series which included the legendary Fog
Game (Game 3 of the series). Due to the unusual heat in Buffalo in May 1975 and the lack of air conditioning in the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, parts of the game were played in
heavy fog that made players, officials, and the puck invisible to many
spectators. During a face-off and
through the fog, Sabres centre Jim Lorentz spotted a
bat flying across the rink, and swung at it with his stick, killing it. It was the only time that any player killed
an animal during an NHL game. The Sabres
won that game thanks to Rene Robert’s goal in overtime. However, the Flyers would wind up taking the
Stanley Cup in six games, winning the series 4-2.
Here are some photos to go with some of the names mentioned above:
No comments:
Post a Comment