Buffalo Sabres

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.

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; 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.

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 because 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 Armenian war dance 'Sabre Dance' as their entrance song, typically at the beginning of each period.
• The first pick in the 1970 NHL amateur draft was determined by a spin of a wheel of fortune; the Sabres won the spin and selected Gilbert Perreault.
• The French Connection line of Gilbert Perreault, Rick Martin, and Rene Robert played together from 1972 to 1979, and a statue of the line stands outside KeyBank Center.