| 02 November 2011
Sitting here, it's kind of weird. I feel like I have SO much to say about the Sabres but I also feel like I have no idea WHAT to say. I feel like it's still way too early to panic or jump to any conclusions but I also feel like we're all going to be really let down this season. I feel like in the long run, the team will be just fine and I'll mostly enjoy them but I also feel like I want to walk down the line and punch everyone in the nose. (Okay, Vanek, Pominville, Regehr, Sekera, and Adam are excused.) I am, in a word, conflicted.
Below is the latest podcast that Joe and I recorded (featuring special guest start Dave Davis of The Sabres Observer who was awesome.) In it, we talked about the goalie "controversy" and whether it was really a controversy among fans or something that's kind of been started or exacerbated by the media. We agreed that neither of us was particularly eager to see Jhonas Enroth play more and no real people we know felt like that. And just like that, I miiiiiight feel differently.
Ryan Miller feels wrong, doesn't he? Am I off-base? I'm not going to blame it on his poor, beleaguered wife (correaltion does not equal causation), but he doesn't seem to be completely in on hockey which might be my biggest surprise so far this season. I'm in the camp that thinks he wasn't particularly good last season. At times he hurt the team more than he helped and even in the playoffs he flipped between being awesome and being awful, with little in-between. But I also know he was hurt and that even little injuries can really nag at and affect a goalie for a long period of time. There were a lot of unknowns coming into this season - How would Ville Leino do at center? How would the new defense gel? - but the one thing I knew for SURE was that Miller would come back, ready and raring to go. He had to know that he wasn't good enough last season, and it just seemed very him to use that as motivation. I totally saw him having an awesome bounceback season. I'm... concerned.
Miller is a complicated piece of the puzzle. Goalie is such an important position that a coach almost has to be willing to go with the goalie that's playing well. If it seems clear that a goalie is just having one of those years, why drag down the whole team with him? You can roll a struggling forward or d-man out there without him hurting the team TOO much, depending on the talent around him, of course, but a struggling goalie can sink the ship. However, Miller was such a central piece of the team's psyche that it wasn't as easy to pull him out. It was his team really. Joe and I talked about this last season and Tim Thomas and the Bruins, and I argued that Miller had a very different role on the team than Thomas had on the Bruins. Even if he wasn't playing well, Miller was the heart of the team. It's hard to healthy scratch the heart. I'm not sure I'd really say that's true anymore though. I'll probably blog about this more at some point this month, but in the last couple of years I think Jason Pominville has really become the beating heart of the team and Vanek has shown himself more capable of carrying the team when needed. Maybe now you can scratch Miller for a handful of games and tell him to get his head together without freaking out the rest of the team too much. I don't know. It's very perplexing.
Okay, here's the podcast. Thanks again to Dave for joining us. Check him out at The Sabres Observer over at Kukla's Korner and follow him on Twitter at @DaveDavisHockey.
