1999 Stanley Cup Game 4 vs Buffalo Sabres
The Sabres have twice advanced to the Stanley Cup Final, losing to the Philadelphia Flyers in 1975 and to the Dallas Stars in 1999.
The Buffalo Sabres are a professional ice hockey team based in Buffalo, New York. The Sabres compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a member of the Atlantic Division in the Eastern Conference. The team was established in 1970, along with the Vancouver Canucks, when the league expanded to 14 teams. The Sabres have played their home games at KeyBank Center since 1996, having previously played at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium since their inception. The Sabres are owned by Terry Pegula, who purchased the club in 2011 from Tom Golisano.
- Series
- 1999 Stanley Cup Finals, Game 4
- Opponent
- Buffalo Sabres
- Venue
- Metro Centre, Buffalo, New York
- Result
- Stars win (takes 3-1 series lead)
- Franchise milestone
- First Stanley Cup as the Dallas Stars (completed Game 6, two weeks later)
- Offensive core
- Mike Modano, Brett Hull, Doug Weight
- Starting goaltender
- Tom Barrasso
Lore & Background
The Sabres have twice advanced to the Stanley Cup Final, losing to the Philadelphia Flyers in 1975 and to the Dallas Stars in 1999. The Sabres, along with the Canucks, are the oldest active NHL franchises to have never won the Stanley Cup. The Sabres held the NHL record longest playoff drought in the NHL at 14 seasons, which occurred between the 2010–11 and 2025–26 seasons.
In Their Own Story
The Metro Centre hummed with a low, restless energy. Buffalo had believed in Game 2, had tasted a win, and now the Stars skated out with that quiet, almost bored confidence of a team that has already seen the trophy. The ice was bright under the arena lights, pucks pinged off boards, and somewhere in the third period the crowd's roar thinned to a murmur as the Stars pulled away. Modano stood at the blue line, stick dragging, watching the clock bleed out. He didn't celebrate. He didn't need to. The Cup was already in his head, already in the trunk of a car that would be packed with confetti in Dallas two weeks from now. He just skated to the bench, peeled off his helmet, and let the silence of the locker room fill him.
Reader's Guide
The Sabres' debut in 1970 also coincided with the AFL–NFL merger in which the Buffalo Bills joined the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association's Buffalo Braves also began to play. The city of Buffalo went from having no teams in the established major professional sports leagues to three in one off-season. Between the Braves and the Sabres, the Sabres would prove to be by far the more successful of the two.
Did You Know?
- The Sabres' first owners were Seymour H. Knox III and Northrup Knox, scions of a family long prominent in Western New York and grandsons of the co-founders of the Woolworth's variety store chain.
- The Sabres' name was chosen from a contest; Seymour Knox felt a saber was a weapon carried by a leader, and could be effective on both offense and defense.
- The Sabres used Aram Khachaturian's 'Sabre Dance' as their entrance song since their debut.
- The Sabres won the first pick in the 1970 NHL amateur draft via a spin of a wheel of fortune, selecting Gilbert Perreault.
- The French Connection line of Gilbert Perreault, Rick Martin, and Rene Robert was one of the league's top forward lines in the 1970s.
More in Iconic Matches & Playoff Moments
Elsewhere in the Dallas Stars universe
Spotted an error? Know more?
This is a living reference — every entry is fact-audited, and reader corrections feed straight into our audit queue. Suggest an edit · See this site's audit record