Buffalo – The playoff beard is full and probably will require trimming as the Buffalo Sabres advance through the NHL playoffs.
“I’m older now,” Sabres co-captain Chris Drury said Friday, smiling and looking back to the days when, to avoid embarrassment (“You call that a beard?”), he was clean-shaven during the Avalanche’s 2001 Stanley Cup run.
It is nearly five years after the Avalanche traded Drury – one of professional sports’ proven big-game performers, and one of hockey’s proven big-goal scorers – to the Calgary Flames.
He is up to his old tricks, including when he scored a game-tying goal with 7.7 seconds left in regulation of Game 5 against the New York Rangers on Friday in Buffalo to force overtime and perhaps even save the Sabres’ season. The Sabres won 2-1 in overtime to take a 3-2 lead in the series, and, with momentum on their side, got another goal from Drury on Sunday as they closed out the Rangers with a 5-4 victory in New York.
Next up for Drury and the Sabres: the Ottawa Senators in the Eastern Conference finals.
Run the oft-advanced theory past Drury, now 30, that the Avalanche’s regression began the day he was traded, and that Colorado has yet to recover, and he is genuinely embarrassed.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Pause. “That’s a pretty strong statement.” Double pause. “I guess I don’t really have a comment.”
Drury, who has seven goals in the Sabres’ 11 playoff games this spring, can be an unrestricted free agent July 1. He made $3.15 million this season, and with the Sabres, the issue is whether Buffalo can find a way to re-sign both Drury and his co-captain and fellow center Daniel Briere, who also can be on the market if he hasn’t re-signed by July 1. Briere made $5 million this season under a one-year arbitration award.
In Buffalo, the smart money seems to be on Drury staying and Briere leaving, and it seems inconceivable the Sabres would allow both to leave.
“Hockey and playoff hockey is hard enough without having your mind elsewhere,” Drury said of free agency in general. “So I’m just looking to the next game.”
But has Drury thought of possibly returning to Colorado?
“It hasn’t even crossed my mind,” he said. “Again, it would be unfair to the 24 guys in there” – he gestured toward the nearby dressing room – “if that was where my mind was.”
Drury is a jarring reminder of how fast the pages come off the calendar, especially in the short-term career world of sports. It doesn’t seem long ago when he was one of the Avalanche’s “kids” – a Paul Stastny precursor – on what then was a star-studded roster.
A few years later, he is the toast of the Anchor Bar, where Buffalo chicken wings were invented, and a lot of other spots in town.
Nearly half the Sabres’ replica jerseys worn in Buffalo, it seems, have Drury’s number 23 and name on them. (The others tend to have Briere’s, goal- tender Ryan Miller’s or defenseman Brian Campbell’s.) Drury kills penalties, is on the first power-play unit with Briere, and in general is one of the faces of a franchise in a city that has re-embraced the Sabres after the down periods of ownership bankruptcy and sparse crowds.
Drury is still capable of sounding like the wide-eyed “kid” who came to Colorado as the former Little League World Series hero and Hobey Baker Award winner at Boston University. Again, he was sheepish when asked if he has become to Buffalo what Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg were at Colorado.
“Oh, geez, no,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel I’m as good as those guys. The way I look at it, my four years there in Colorado were like I went for my master’s degree in hockey. I had four years in college and four years there, and to watch those guys day in and day out – obviously also including Patrick (Roy) and Adam (Foote) and Rob (Blake) …I could just sit there and watch, not say anything and absorb everything. It was an unbelievable four years of learning.”
Drury and his wife, Rory, have two young children, daughter Dylan and son Luke, and even that is a basis of comparison.
“I remember when I was starting off in Colorado,” he said. “Joe started having his kids, and Rob and Adam, too. You’re a kid and you’re going, ‘Yeah, great,’ but if you hear another story about Barney (the dinosaur), you’re going to puke. Now that you have your own kids, you get to look back and see what they meant.
“I remember Rob and I went to the Washington Park Grill once, and we took Rob’s son Jack with us when he was about 5 months old. I had no idea and he was pretty much into being a father and we tried to eat as fast as we could and get out of there. Now, when I look back, it’s amazing.”
Chris and Rory own homes both in the Buffalo area and in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where they live close to Rob and Brandy Blake.
“It’s a summer home to put our stuff and cribs in,” Drury said. “We had visited a lot with Rob being out there and my wife being friends with Brandy, so we just liked it and it felt like a nice fit.”
That seems to raise the possibility that Drury could be prone to listening to an offer from the Kings, but Drury has made it clear he doesn’t handle losing well – and with the Kings in a rebuilding mode, that might be a tough sell. And Drury truly is enjoying playing in Buffalo.
“Well, first, we have a pretty good team,” he said. “There’s an old saying that when the hockey is good, everything is good. I think it holds true for me and it holds true here. I think it makes for a lot of fun days and a lot of fun trips and days at the rink. And the people here are great. It’s a small community and they’re passionate fans, about the Sabres and about football and the Bills. Overall, it’s just a great fit. The people treat me great and the Sabres have given me a lot of respect, and I’m just trying to give back the best I can.”
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
