'This is the place' | Dahlin, Thompson reflect on journey to playoffs

In their quiet moments since assuming roles as leaders of the Buffalo Sabres, Rasmus Dahlin and Tage Thompson have often had the same conversation.

For more than a decade, good players have come and gone in Buffalo and won elsewhere. They would be the ones to do it here – to steer the franchise out from under the weight of a 14-year playoff drought.

“I think we’ve had that conversation maybe 10, 15 times, honestly,” Dahlin told Sabres.com. “There’s a lot of people that have come in here and tried to change it, and then they leave. But to be the ones that really, really are trying every single year, and eventually you’re a big piece of that change. That’s bigger than a lot of things. Me and Tage, we’ve just manifested it or whatever, talked about how that feeling would be, and it’s indescribable, honestly.

“There’s so many guys that have asked out or don’t want to be here. But we said to each other, ‘This is the place. We’re not leaving. We have to turn this around.’ It’s a crazy feeling.”

Dahlin and Thompson – the two longest-tenured Sabres with eight seasons in Buffalo – saw their mission through on Saturday. The Sabres officially clinched their first playoff berth since 2011 following Detroit’s loss to the New York Rangers.

This drought was not theirs to bear – it began when Dahlin was 11 years old, seven years before his selection as the top pick in the NHL Draft. Thompson was playing for the Alaska All-Stars 14-U team when the Sabres last made the playoffs.

Fourteen years of no playoffs in a hockey-crazed town like Buffalo comes with baggage. It’s the undertone beneath every question in a postgame scrum, the angst felt after an early-season loss. Dahlin and Thompson took it head on.

“Me and Dahls, we came in at the same time,” Thompson said. “A lot of other guys were here too that came and went. Guys before us, even, and a lot of good players, too. That was something we always talked about. You see those guys go on and have success, and sometimes it stirs up in your mind, ‘Well, what would happen if I left?’

“We always agreed that it’d be really special to be the guys that turned it around here. Fourteen-year playoff drought, whatever it’s been. To be the guys that brought playoff hockey back to Buffalo is something that was a big goal for us.”

It can be easy to forget now, but Thompson’s and Dahlin’s paths to stardom were not always so clear, at least to the outside eye.

Thompson was traded from St. Louis to Buffalo as part of the Ryan O’Reilly deal in the summer of 2018. He watched the organization that drafted him win the Stanley Cup the following season as he was trying to find his footing in the NHL. His next season began in Rochester, and when he got a shot to play for the Sabres that November, a crash into the boards in the final minute of his very first game left him with a season-ending shoulder injury.

Dahlin, meanwhile, flashed the world-class skill that earned him No. 1 pick status immediately upon entering the league. But it took years for him to truly assume the role of a No. 1 defenseman – and to feel comfortable enough in his new home to truly be himself: the brash, outgoing, physical defender who approaches every shift as if there’s no one on the ice who can stop him.

Things came together for both players late in the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season, when an exodus of past Sabres veterans cleared the way for Dahlin, Thompson and other young players to truly assume ownership of the team.

Thompson scored 38 goals the following season; he’d scored a combined 18 in the four seasons prior. Dahlin was named to his first All-Star Game. They were the faces of a Sabres team that was suddenly young and promising again.

But success isn’t always linear. The Sabres came a point shy of missing the playoffs in 2022-23, then dipped each of the past two seasons. Players were traded; coaches changed. The city, rightfully, grew impatient. Early deficits were met with boos. 

“Tommer and Ras have been here longer than me, but there have been some dark times, for sure, and a lot of down moments where you don’t know how we’re gonna get out of it, or what’s gonna happen,” said Mattias Samuelsson, who was drafted one day after Dahlin and made his Sabres debut in 2021.

“Going through it and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now, and seeing the guys you’ve been battling with and in the trenches with for five-plus years, do it as a group together, I think it makes it way more special, for sure. It feels rewarding to be one of the guys who has been in it from the beginning of, I would say, this Sabres era. It’s a sense of accomplishment, I would say, that we finally did it. Did it with the guys that we’ve been in the trenches with.”

The reality of the Sabres’ situation has been clear for some time now. We all know the story: last place in early December, followed by a 10-game winning streak to ignite the best run in franchise history. They’ve been safely in a playoff spot since after the Olympic break, and the fruits of their labor have shown in 15 consecutive KeyBank Center sellouts.

Still, Thompson couldn’t help but smile when he arrived at Capital One Arena on Saturday, in the hours after the clinch became official.

“We’ve finally got our spot in the postseason,” he said. “Now, we get a chance to chase what really matters.”