Chip and Chase

Notes on Hockey #3

PROLOGUE

The Sabres are on a fourfive-game win streak after the Olympic break. I had jotted down extensive notes following their third victory, a 6-2 blowout against the Tampa Bay Lightning who, at the time, were at the top of the Atlantic Division. But I didn’t hit “continue”; I didn’t publish. Next the Sabres dispatched the Golden Knights. Then on Thursday Buffalo ran roughshod over Pittsburgh, 5-1, pulling even with Tampa in terms of points.

The following notes were largely written sometime after the Vegas game, a meaningful contest for reasons I’ll explain. But then, every game now is meaningful.¹

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1. These days I hear announcers use the term “chip and chase” a lot. Originally the name of a drill, in a game situation it describes an action in which the attacking forward, unable to gain the blue line, dumps the puck into the corner, in the hopes that he can outrace the defender or otherwise create a new offensive opportunity.

2. Speaking of new offensive opportunities: It seemed like the U.S. hockey team couldn’t help but offend in the aftermath of their gold-medal victory. There was the matter of the FBI director going bonkers in their locker room and putting them on the line with his boss; the president saying that he would invite them to the White House, as well as the women’s team—joking that if he didn’t offer parity, he’d be impeached; the laughter that greeted that remark; the eventual trip to D.C. (all but five players went), in which one player let the president wear his medal (while the gold-medalling women’s team declined the invitation); the presence of the team at the State of the Union address, in which the Medal of Freedom was bestowed on goalie Connor Hellebuyck.²

3. All of this was parsed seven ways to Sunday, at least on my feed, much of it by people who seemed unfamiliar with the sport until the cascading controversies. Which is fair. This was a bad look for a team that had just won a huge game, but I wasn’t truly surprised. Forty percent of NHL players are Republican, even though only 30% of the players are American.

4. Forty percent are Canadian, and another 20% hail from Europe. I’m not sure how the math works out.

5. An aside: Three weeks ago, while the Olympics were still underway, I went to Wesleyan to give a talk. My driver asked where I was from, and I gave my standard answer: I’m from Buffalo, but my parents are from Korea.

6. He was, in fact, more interested in the first part. “Buffalo,” he said approvingly. “A lot of my people are there.” He told me he was from Bangladesh, and that he’d visited the city once, years ago.

7. “Very cold,” I said, and he agreed; or maybe it was the other way around. In any meeting outside the city limits between a Buffalo native and an outsider, the relative chilliness must be remarked on.

8. I am chipping and chasing, here. Who knows where things will land?

9. Last Wednesday [2/25/26], in their first game post-break, the Sabres came to Newark to face the Devils. There was a ceremony honoring the Devils’ Jack Hughes, fresh off his golden goal in Milan; Hughes brought out his Olympic teammate on the opposite bench, the Sabres’ Tage Thompson.

10. The day before, in D.C., Hughes and his brother Quinn were pictured wearing USA caps, alongside White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and others. Thompson wears a cap, too—a MAGA cap. He gave a statement later, saying, “I’m proud to be an American and I have my own faith and my own beliefs. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions and beliefs as well. We should be able to live in peace knowing that not everyone’s going to agree with you.”

11. That same Tuesday, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, was found dead after being dropped off at a closed Tim Horton’s in Buffalo by Border Patrol agents. The overnight temperature was 14 degrees.

12. He had spent a year in jail. He had no English, could barely see. No one had told his family where he would be, or even that he was being released.³

13. Tim Horton’s is a popular donut and coffee chain in Canada and parts of the U.S. Many today don’t know that Tim Horton was a real person—a star defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs. (He was lured out of semi-retirement when Punch Imlach, who’d coached him for the Leafs, was hired as GM and coach in Buffalo.)

    

14. Horton was an active businessman—car dealer, then donut-shop entrepreneur—while still a player. He had an exit plan. (He has a cameo in my novel Same Bed Different Dreams.⁴) Wayne Gretzky—that perplexing thing, a Canadian Trumper—is widely acknowledged as the “Great One,” but is it possible “Tim Horton” has greater name recognition in the non-hockey world at large?

15. Another aside: An acquaintance once told me he took his young son to a college hockey game at Madison Square Garden; the team from his school was playing Harvard. This was in 2014. In line, he heard someone (a much younger alum) tell friends, approvingly, “Everyone here is white!” Then he saw my friend, who was not white, and the guy’s face fell a little, but he didn’t exactly look away.⁵

16. Last night [3/3/26] the Sabres hosted the Vegas Golden Knights, for their first post-break home game. Following the Prudential Center script, Thompson was celebrated, alongside his fellow U.S. Olympians on the other side, Jack Eichel and Noah Hanifin. Before the game, there was the possibility that the crowd would boo Eichel, who was the second overall pick in the 2015 draft; he came to Buffalo, where he played his first six seasons, in the middle of the Sabres’ 15-year playoff drought.

17. Eichel left the Sabres under a cloud, tangling with Sabres GM Kevyn Adams, who wouldn’t allow him to get a specific kind of neck surgery. Off he went to Vegas, which would win the Stanley Cup two seasons later.

18. No one booed Jack Eichel on Tuesday, though—not yet, at least. (He would be booed every time he touched the puck in the ensuing game.) Adams is gone, after all—deposed on December 15, with the Sabres three dubs into what would be a pivotal 10-game streak.

19. Eichel’s face always looks very pink, like he’s unused to how cold rinks are.

20. After the photo op, a singer in a blue suit belted the Canadian and American national anthems. I once thought that every NHL game started with both anthems, but that’s no longer the case—in fact, Buffalo is the only U.S. city to always feature both. (Other American cities will trot out the Canadian anthem only if the opposing team is from Canada.) Anyway, no one booed the Canadian anthem.

21. Jim Kelly, the former Bills QB who led the team to four straight Super Bowls, was on hand to pound the ceremonial drum alongside the mascot, Sabretooth. (It should be said that the Sabres’ unlikely success has distracted me almost completely from the Bills’ anticlimactic season.)

22. Buffalo was up 3-0 in the second period, and it felt like another rout was on the way. Then Vegas clawed back two goals. Unlike teams of even fairly recent vintage, the Sabres didn’t cave. Thompson’s goal would prove to be the game winner.

23. On Thursday, the Sabres went a couple hours south to Pittsburgh and beat the Penguins. Something unusual happened in the first period: During a Sabres’ penalty kill, center Ryan McLeod got a shorthanded goal, not so much shooting as guiding the puck through the five-hole just as he ran out of runway. Then, less than three minutes later, the Penguins got a shorthanded goal.

24. The turning point came in the second period. There was an incident between Sabres captain Rasmus Dahlin and the Penguins’ Evgeni Malkin in the Pittsburgh end. After enduring some cross checking to the back, Malkin turned around and slammed his stick into Dahlin’s neck. (Slow motion makes everything look brutal, but this looked pretty bad even at regular speed.) What might have been an overture to fisticuffs was denied; Dahlin clutched his head, drawing what would turn out to be a game misconduct for his hacker. This took a while to sort out, and through the period, there were additional penalties and delayed penalties, the number of bodies on the ice fluctuating like a math problem—5 on 4, 5 on 3. (At one point the Sabres were penalized for too many men on the ice—6, but I actually counted seven. The Sabres kept scoring (including a handsome shorthanded goal from Alex Tuch) but Pittsburgh wouldn’t score again.

25. The Penguins pulled their goalie relatively early, making it 5-on-6 with about six minutes left in the third period. Then defenseman Mattias Samuelsson scored on the empty net—this is usually a job for Peyton Krebs—with three minutes left. Pittsburgh put their goalie back in.⁶ There was no point.

26. I’m not sure what the point of most of these notes are, since you can just watch the highlights. But it is fun to think of ways to describe things. (See Postscript.)

POSTSCRIPT

Excitement: men in rapid, hard, close physical conflict, not just with bare hands, but armed with the knife blades of skates and the hard. fast. deft sticks which could break bones when used right He had noticed how many women were among the spectators, and for just a moment he thought that perhaps this was why—that here actual male blood could flow, not from the crude impact of a heavier fist but from the rapid and delicate stroke of weapons, which, like the European rapier or the frontier pistol, reduced mere size and brawn to its proper perspective to the passion and the will. But only for a moment because he, the innocent, didn’t like that idea either. It was the excitement of speed and grace, with the puck for catalyst, to give it reason, meaning.

—William Faulkner, “An Innocent at Rinkside,” Sports Illustrated, 1955⁷

1. See the Postscript for Faulkner’s feverish emotional experience at a Rangers game c. 70 years ago.

2. To be fair, many athletes have received this honor, most recently Simone Biles—though it doesn’t usually happen in the SOTU address.

3. The full story is more complicated than the initial reports I saw—and no less heart wrenching.

4. Interestingly, the Buffalo News didn’t review Same Bed when it came out; a year later, though, Erik Brady’s The Sabres May Not Be Great, But This Book Partly About Them Is,” ran in the Dec. 9, 2024 edition. Brady concluded that it was “wildly imaginative and immensely fun to read, with writing as sharp as a skate blade. Or a saber.”

5. This is a fiction. I am the acquaintance. I am telling it to you.

6. For a long time. I assumed Samuelsson was a Swedish import; wouldn’t you? Then I heard him talk and thought, Wow, his English is great. Then I read that he was born in Philly and raised in New Jersey.

7. I can write about this more next time, if people want.