Daniel Briere played six seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers.
That number looks high to me. It’s hard to believe, but that’s 50 percent longer than his tenure with the Buffalo Sabres. That explains why Briere was honored by the Flyers before Tuesday night’s game in Philadelphia against the Sabres. It explains why Flyers fans gave Briere and his three genetic copies huge applause during a ceremonial puck drop.
But Briere belongs to Buffalo. He always will, because the moment he left the Sabres were never the same. And they still haven’t recovered.
Sure, Briere had huge moments with the Flyers. Enormous, franchise-altering moments, especially in the playoffs. He retired as a nearly point per game playoff performer, an incredible feat that currently puts him 53rd all time.
Even with all that success and a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals with the hated Flyers, Briere is beloved in Western New York. Though his time here was relatively brief and he arguably found more success elsewhere, what he did in Buffalo left an enormous impact on the franchise and its fans.
Just look at Briere’s highlight reel from the 2005-06 playoff run. I was in the crowd with my father in Game One of the Flyers series, on the blue line in the 300 level where Brian Campbell crushed R.J. Umburger with one of the biggest hits in Sabres history. Soon after, Briere scored in double overtime to give the Sabres the early series lead. It’s a goal Briere has since called his favorite in his career with Buffalo, and a moment I’ll never forget.
What made Dany Briere and Chris Drury so important is difficult to quantify. It wasn’t a $5 million arbitration ruling for Briere his final season or the max contracts that followed the co-captains’ time in Buffalo. The currency those two players still deal in around here is the emotion that carried that team to the brink of the Stanley Cup Finals in 2006.
That feeling, the realization that something special was happening with a group of athletes, is difficult to replicate. It hasn’t happened here since, it wasn’t even the same the next season, one that ended with another loss in the Eastern Conference Finals. Plenty has been made of the atmosphere at First Niagara Center in the following years, but the drop off directly correlates with expectations and excitement among fans for this team.
WGR’s Paul Hamilton did an interview with Briere on Tuesday that was a difficult listen if you remember the former captain’s time in Buffalo. It’s a trip down a path Sabres fans have tried hard not to travel down after The Summer of 2007.
If you missed it, here’s what you need to know: Briere remembers what that run felt like. He loved Buffalo. Truly, truly loved the city and the fans and that team. It was there in his voice and the words he spoke. All the things you put into that playoff run as a Sabres fan, he felt them. The other players on that team felt it, too.
Buffalo was absolutely crushed when Carolina got by the Sabres in seven that year. High school me was crushed. Everyone I knew was crushed. The players—healthy or wounded beyond playing shape—were crushed. No one was rewarded, and Sabres fans haven’t been the same.
But here’s what I think we’ve learned in the down years since: it doesn’t make that year or those feelings any less real. We all tried again the next year and fell short against Ottawa in five. We tried again and again with Vanek and Miller and what was left of the team that changed what hockey meant in our lives. But no one was ever convinced to really go all-in on a team again. Not again. Not without the impossible assurances that it would all pay off.
We’ll never know what the Sabres could have accomplished with a fifth or sixth year from Danny Briere. Nor will we know what Chris Drury could have done with more time in Buffalo. Mistakes were made. It’s not worth going through the unrealized possibilities. So many versions of the Buffalo Sabres have come and gone since then.
And in that time, the moment when it all changed seems so clear. Everyone seemed to know that the chance for something special was gone once Briere and Drury left the city. You can’t fake that feeling, but you can certainly feel it leave and wordlessly watch the decline.
The current fervor over Jack Eichel isn’t some groundswell of practical thinking about the long-term health of the franchise. It isn’t a new approach to fandom and better understanding the values of labor and resource management in professional hockey. People are not excited because the Sabres get premium talent at a discounted rate during his rookie contract. At its core, it’s an emotional search for a player that can provide all the things a player like Briere once did. And hopefully then some.
Right now, fans will gladly settle for a Sabres team that’s fun. Adjectives like “special” can wait, for now “exciting” is enough to bring the castoffs back to the fold. Those fans will know right away if something special is happening in Buffalo. Thanks to guys like Daniel Briere, it will be an all-too-familiar emotion.
Maybe this time fans will be more hesitant to go all-in, but I’ve found that if you have the right guys in place, you don’t really have much of a choice.