Thomas Vanek played 1,029 NHL games over 14 seasons with eight organizations.
Along the way, Vanek’s teammates praised his sharp hockey mind. When he started his career in 2005-06, the Buffalo sabersThe dressing room spoke his language and shaped his perspective.
“The conversations we had about hockey with so many of those guys,” Vanek said, “we’d say ‘Yeah, I get exactly what you mean,’ and we’d go out there and run it.”
At first, Vanek believed that was the way it was in the NHL, where the best skaters, the best competitors, and the best thinkers gathered at the top of the hockey world.
He eventually learned otherwise.
“Later in my career,” Vanek said, “I could try to explain that same concept and you could say they just didn’t get it or see it the way I saw it.
“That Sabers team had a high hockey IQ.”
2005-06 is considered by many to be the best team in Sabers history. They emerged from lockdown a fast, unrelenting ball of fire seemingly destined for a championship before a nasty wave of injuries washed over them. a cruel period before the Stanley Cup final.
Buffalo’s collection of skills and character was obvious, but what we’re discovering nearly two decades later is just how much brainpower was assembled inside the locker room.
the San Jose Sharks this month named Mike Grier general manager, giving him the same power that his 2005-06 linemate Chris Drury has with the new york rangers. the philadelphia flyers this year he named Daniel Briere special assistant to the GM. Last month, the chicago blackhawks promoted Brian Campbell to hockey operations adviser, a position that could grow further with the departure of senior adviser Scotty Bowman two weeks ago.
Jay McKee won an OHL championship last month as head coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs. Adam Mair is the director of player development for the Sabers.
“That’s the group we had,” said Ryan Miller, the NHL’s top goaltender in 2005-06. “We were competitive and we worked hard. We come to things honestly. That bubbles. You have to have knowledge of many different aspects of hockey.
“They are connected that way. All of these leaders have taken the next step in their evolution in hockey, coming off the ice makes a lot of sense.”
Miller and more of those Sabers could also be on their way to NHL offices and banks. Former teammates consider Miller, Vanek, Jason Pominville and JP Dumont as front office coaches or naturalists.
Dumont is the coach and director of hockey operations for the Nashville Junior Predators.
The other three want to wait until their children are older before taking the plunge. Miller attended the NHL Draft as an adviser to her old friend Kay Whitmore, the league’s senior director of hockey operations. Pominville trained the Montreal Junior Canadiens, including her son, to a championship at the prestigious Quebec International Pee-Wee Tournament.
“It’s really fun for a friend and former teammate to see all these guys doing well,” said Vanek, who has been emphasizing baseball and other sports as well as hockey for his three sons in Minnesota. “You want those guys in the game. That’s what’s great. It’s new blood, and it’s the right blood.”
With so many Sabers from 2005-06 already involved and more willing to participate, those glory years will stay alive as former teammates try to emulate what worked so well when crowds overflowed outside HSBC Arena to watch playoff games in projection screens.
Even with Drury and Campbell winning the Stanley Cup and Briere reaching the finals at other clubs, the Sabers’ roster built for 2005-06 should be in their minds as one to emulate.
They will also have seen it firsthand to avoid mistakes like general manager Darcy Regier’s policy of not negotiating contracts during the season, which eliminated crucial leverage and led to harrowing departures, most notably Drury and Briere to free agency in 2007.
“You don’t realize how important culture is until you lose it,” Briere said. “We had guys who wanted to be together and play together. That goes a long way. And we had so many guys who always want to learn.
“That’s what was so great about it. We all had our own ways of leading, but we were also learning other ways.”
The suit-and-tie emergence of these Buffalo teammates is even more remarkable when you consider that they haven’t branched out from any particular coach or executive tree.
scores of NFL Coaches and executives have had opportunities in the league simply through working relationships with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has had a similar effect on the NBA.
The influence of Sabers trainer Lindy Ruff is not entirely reciprocated, but is seen as a common denominator.
“With Lindy,” McKee said, “I don’t think it was always about winning and losing as much as going all out and leaving it all there. When that takes root in you as a person, when you stop playing, you don’t turn it off.
“Me as a coach, and these guys who are now general managers, that do-whatever-it-takes mentality stays with you, whether it’s putting in overtime or outperforming everyone around you.”
The 2005-06 Sabers featured a host of former and future captains. The number was somewhat inflated by Ruff, who, the previous season, changed Buffalo’s captaincy every month.
But five players in the 2005-06 locker room were permanent NHL captains at some point in their careers. Drury and Briere were co-captains. Vanek and Pominville would become captains at the start of the Sabers’ record 11-season playoff drought. Defenseman Teppo Numminen, who came in with more than 1,200 games, previously served two years as captain of the Phoenix Coyotes.
Sabers forwards Ales Kotalik and Jochen Hecht and defender Dmitri Kalinin became captains in the professional leagues of their respective home countries. Defenders Rory Fitzpatrick and Nathan Paetsch were AHL captains. Dumont and center Derek Roy captained their youth clubs. Rookie forward Daniel Paille was the captain of the Canada team at the 2004 World Junior Championships.
“That’s a lot of C’s,” Pominville said, “that I wasn’t even aware of until you say it.
“Everyone had the opportunity to lead in their own way. When it’s always the same guy repeating things, it can get old sometimes. But he was always someone different, stepping up with the right words at the right times.”
The Sabers were so awash in leadership that McKee was never captain (he was injured half the season of Ruff’s monthly rotation), but McKee was Briere and Drury’s permanent backup in 2005-06.
Grier never carried a letter in Buffalo and never captained anywhere else, though he was a backup for the Sharks and Edmonton Oilers.
“We didn’t have anybody thinking, ‘I need to be the leader!’ Vanek said. “I saw eight or nine of those guys as the leaders. He spread across the room that we were one; we were here together.
Let’s not forget goaltenders, who are not allowed to be captains or backups in the NHL.
Buffalo had a couple of starting-caliber goalies with complementary leadership personalities.
“Millsie would break from time to time,” Pominville said with a smile. “I wasn’t afraid to say what he needed. He would get excited.”
Then there was Martin Biron, the effervescent narrator. When the Flyers acquired Biron in February 2007, he ranked third among all Sabers goaltenders in games, wins and save percentage.
“Of anyone on the team,” Vanek said, “Marty probably deserves the most credit because he could have been the No. 1 goalie in the league for 20 other teams. But he kept his ego to himself, he was never in a bad mood and he was a fun guy.
“Even though he was competitive, he was there for Ryan, he supported Ryan, he supported all of us.”
Compared to Vanek’s other stops, he noted that the 2005-06 Sabers didn’t have players who shrugged off loss just because they had a good stat line that night, a common phenomenon in all sports.
Buffalo’s locker room almost generated its own gravitational pull. McKee explained that when an individual attitude didn’t align with the team dynamic, that player would eventually give in to the pack or need to be traded.
“The leadership and culture of that group was off the charts,” McKee said, “and we would have won it all without the injuries.”
Although the Sabers reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 1975 and 1999, many believe their best chance to win it all came in 2006.
The good and terrifying sabers pierced through the flyers and left the Ottawa The senators faced with bad luck overcame his immense wisdom and talent.
A concussion for center Tim Connolly, a broken left ankle for Kalinin, a hip injury for Numminen, a broken arm for defenseman Henrik Tallinder, a rare ankle infection for McKee.
“That’s always the team that you look back on and think, ‘Ugh!’ Vanek said. “That’s a team that didn’t win, but it was the best team I’ve ever played on because of the guys we had and the feeling of wanting to come on the court and wanting to get better.
“That team from 2005-2006 provides so many examples of how to create the right culture.”
The 2006-07 Sabers won the President’s Trophy, but were defeated by the Senators in the Eastern Conference Final. Briere and Drury were co-captains again, but anyone who has played on both teams will tell you that the chemistry was not the same.
Grier, Dumont, McKee and Fitzpatrick did not return. Connolly was unable to come back from his concussion. until the penultimate game of the regular season. Tallinder was sidelined for half the year. At the trade deadline, Biron went to the Flyers for a second-round draft pick.
As the Sabers’ most recent glory years faded into obscurity, the competitive fire within those players continued, and their generality evolved, over the years and into retirement.
“I knew we had a really good leadership group, but we couldn’t figure out what it took to be good executives,” Briere said. “So I would be lying if I told you that I knew we would have so many future executives.
“We didn’t know what would happen in 20 years. It’s amazing to look back and see how special that room was.”
(Photo by Rick Stewart/Getty Images)