Mike Harrington
Sports Columnist
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Lindy Ruff’s career with the Buffalo Sabres started in the Aud on Oct. 11, 1979. He was 19, a second-round draft pick selected just four months earlier from the Lethbridge Broncos in far-off Alberta. But there he was on the blueline for a 6-3 win against the Washington Capitals, joining a team that had nine players who someday would be in the Sabres Hall of Fame and was being coached by legendary Scotty Bowman.
Thursday night in KeyBank Center, nearly 46 years after that debut, it’s Opening Night again for Ruff when the Sabres meet the New York Rangers.
Ruff turned 65 in February and is on the back half of a two-year deal he signed to return 18 months ago. Fans ate up his return and it was comfort food for the soul for owner Terry Pegula, who was never comfortable with the way Ruff was fired in 2013. It also was a clear Hail Mary for general manager Kevyn Adams, who has to be on win-or-else status in the final year of his contract.
Ruff’s status came into the open last week from Pierre LeBrun, the league insider for TSN and the Athletic, who noted that Ruff is now the only lame-duck coach in the NHL. Yep, he’s the only one who isn’t signed for the 2026-27 season after Edmonton’s Kris Knoblauch and Calgary’s Ryan Huska inked extensions last week and Tampa Bay quietly extended Jon Cooper over the summer.
Ruff’s contract isn’t a talking point around the Sabres because the only discussion topic is breaking the franchise’s 14-year playoff drought. If the Sabres win this year, Ruff will be back if he wants. If they stumble badly, it’s not absurd to think Adams takes the fall and Ruff could still have a chance to stick around. Just maybe not as the coach.
Even through a run of injuries, training camp has been upbeat. Ruff has been raving about the team’s weekend retreat to parts unknown. And a skeptical fan base is still remarkably loyal, as the building is expected to be full for the opener.
“I think we’re all excited,” Ruff said. “We’re all tired of looking at preseason video and practice video and now let’s put it to the test against the other team’s real lineup. … Let’s go to work and prove what we’ve been working on will make us a winning hockey club.”
It’s been nearly three weeks since camp started. It’s finally time to play a real game, so I asked Ruff on Wednesday how much pressure/responsibility to get thing right this season after last year’s 79-point faceplant.
Eden’s Alex Iafallo is entering his ninth NHL season and has played all 82 games in first two years in Winnipeg, the defending President’s Trophy champions.
He exhaled for a moment before he spoke. Before he said a word, you could tell that still bothers him.
“Honestly, I feel like we’ve put ourselves in a good spot. But yeah, you do feel it,” he admitted. “You want, first and foremost, something for the fans to wrap their arms around. And for me, that’s important.
“Come to the rink and see a team that’s going to work extremely hard, that’s going to claw and scratch for every inch and and get themselves in a place where you’re competing and putting yourself in the playoffs by the end of the year.”
The players feel much more comfortable, too. It took a long time last year for them to figure out what Ruff was up to. In-game adjustments on the bench were foreign to many of them. A shortened training camp hurt. It took a good 50 games for both sides to be in sync and the season was already lost.
“We’re still learning,” captain Rasmus Dahlin said with a laugh Wednesday. “He cares. He cares a lot. We’re building something really good here and he’s been a huge part of it. He loves it here. All he wants to do is win here. He really, really cares about winning. He’s such a competitor and it’s fun to be a part of it.”
Tage Thompson talked about the need for a good start to the season. It’s important any year, of course, but getting the fans to stay on your side in a schedule that opens with 10 of the first 14 games at home really seems paramount.
“We don’t have to learn something new,” Thompson said. “There’s no new systems really, not that much turnover in our group. You don’t have to take games to do your learning now. You know from your mistakes, you know the system. We know what we need to do out there, so we should be able to hit the ground running.”
Ruff wanted this job in 2019, freely admitting he was disappointed to not get a sniff in a stunning Channel 2 interview designed to reminisce on the 20th anniversary of No Goal.
In one of the worst decisions by any general manager in franchise history, Jason Botterill turned down his old coach’s bid to return to his former spot behind the Buffalo bench so he could hire Ralph Krueger.
Kane, in his third season with the Detroit Red Wings, opens the 2025-26 campaign needing 32 points to pass former Minnesota/Dallas star Mike Modano to became the all-time scoring leader among American-born players.
Krueger, an interesting chap who was an absolute fraud as an NHL head coach, hoodwinked Botterill with a lot of polysyllabic verbiage and basically ran the franchise into the ground during the Covid season.
It took five more years for Ruff to get a chance after Don Granato did a good job developing players but someone else was needed to get this team to another level.
The goaltending remains a huge question. But there does finally seem to be a lot of answers on this roster, too.
“You’ve got to believe what you’re doing will lead to wins,” Ruff said. “I still bounce back to the last 20 games (last season’s 12-7-1 finish), even with people out of the lineup and some young guys up, we played winning hockey and the type of hockey that would allow us to be a playoff team.”
That’s all people want to see. Just win.
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Mike Harrington
Sports Columnist
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