Satin, Zhitnik prove replaceable  
The Sabres are a better team without Satin, who was their leading scorer for six of the last seven seasons. With Buffalo, Satin was a player who put up offensive numbers, but did little else. Satin was the Sabres' leading scorer, but he wasn't their hardest working player.

His departure has opened the door for other players to emerge offensively like wingers Ales Kotalik and Maxim Afinogenov, who are among the team's leading scorers. So other players have filled the void created when Satin left.

Besides Satin, the Sabres lost their top defenseman Alexei Zhitnik also to the Islanders in free agency. I yawned when the Sabres signed defenseman Teppo Numminen, but Numminen has helped the Sabres produce the third-ranked power play in the league.

In today's NHL, a team wins or losses on its special teams. Through Dec. 30, Numminen had 22 assists, and 12 of those came on the power play.

When I look at special teams, I always combine the rankings of a club's power play and its penalty kill for a special-teams index. If a team has a strong power play, but a weak penalty kill, any advantage is pretty much canceled out.

Buffalo's third on the power play, and eighth on the penalty kill so the Sabres have a special-teams index of 11, and there are only three teams that can top that — Ottawa, Detroit, and Nashville. So Buffalo is in pretty good company.

Expectations could climb come playoffs  
Buffalo is one of the hardest working teams in the NHL. Opponents are just not going to outwork the Sabres. Hard work is something that Ruff demands. With its hard work and superb team speed, Buffalo is an intimidating opponent for other clubs.

The Sabres have a payroll under $30 million, and when I talked to Regier earlier in the season, he said that's where he wanted to stay for now. To be where Buffalo is in the standings, and to have the payroll the Sabres have, they are in perfect position for the second half of the season. If they chose to make a trade, they will be dealing from a position of strength, and they will have some money to work with.

If somebody would have told me that on the day after Christmas the only team with more points than the Ottawa Senators would be the Buffalo Sabres, I would have told them they were crazy.

But if Buffalo's goaltending continues to be as good as it was over the first three months of the season, and its work ethic doesn't slip, I wouldn't want to be a team that runs into the Sabres in the playoffs.

If the Sabres keep up their regular-season success, they will face high expectations come the playoffs. And the catch in that is that they are a young team with some of their key players untested in the playoffs. But if centers Chris Drury and Daniel Briere, out now with a sports hernia, can be big-game players in the postseason, that should help compensate for some of Buffalo's playoff inexperience. 

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