With Tuesday night’s win over the New Jersey Devils, the Bruins clinched the first wild card spot in the Eastern Conference and set up a first-round match-up with the Buffalo Sabres.
After missing the playoffs for 382 years, the Sabres won the Atlantic Division with either 108 or 110 points, depending on how their last game of the season shakes out.
Buffalo will close out their regular season tonight against the Dallas Stars in a game that means absolutely nothing to either side, so it should be a real
barn-burner.
The match-up will be a meaningful won for some segments of the Sabres fanbase, as the Bruins were a boogeyman of sorts for Buffalo for the better part of a decade.
Some very wise, excellent, good person wrote a post for this site a while back about how the Bruins essentially broke the Buffalo organization back in 2011, sparking a downward spiral that continued until just about this season.
It’s kind of fitting, then, that Buffalo will have to go through the Bruins to continue what has been a pretty remarkable story to this point.
The Bruins and Sabres last squared off in the playoffs in 2010, a first-round series that the Bruins won, 4-2.
Buffalo was the higher seed in that series and took a 1-0 series lead, only for the Bruins to win three games in a row then hold off Buffalo in Game 6.
That series was notable for a variety of reasons, from Tuukka Rask’s Superman save on Mike Grier to Johnny Boychuk tomahawking Thomas Vanek to Miroslav Satan’s 2OT heroics.
(The best part of this is that while all of these occurred just yesterday to me, many of you will read that sentence like it’s from some ancient Sumerian papyrus.)
The best highlight from that series will be obvious to those of you who have been around here long enough:
Big Money Wides at his best.
If you want to tie that series to the present day, there are a couple of interesting threads with the current coaches of the Bruins and Sabres.
Lindy Ruff was the Sabres coach then, just like he is today. He had a few other gigs between then and now, but he’s back behind the Buffalo bench.
Marco Sturm was playing on Patrice Bergeron’s wing for the Bruins during that series, though he went pointless in six games, so it might not be his happiest memory.
This season, the Bruins took three out of four from Buffalo, with two of those games going beyond regulation.
It’s worth pointing out that two of those four games (two Bruins wins) came back in October, before the Sabres figured it out and went on their big run.
We’ll keep you posted as a schedule gets released, but I’d imagine this series won’t start until Saturday or Sunday.
Should be fun!
