Buffalo Sabres vs. Boston Bruins 2026 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs preview

AtlanticBruinsCanadiensLightningMaple LeafsPanthersRed WingsSabresSenatorsMetropolitanBlue JacketsCapitalsDevilsFlyersHurricanesIslandersPenguinsRangersCentralAvalancheBlackhawksBluesJetsMammothPredatorsStarsWildPacificCanucksDucksFlamesGolden KnightsKingsKrakenOilersSharksScores & ScheduleStandingsPodcastsFantasyNHL OddsNHL PicksPlayoff projectionsNHL Draft rankingRed Light NewsletterBuffalo Sabres vs. Boston Bruins 2026 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs previewThe Sabres reaching the playoffs is a major milestone after a 14-year drought. But the work isn’t done yet. Bob DeChiara / Imagn Images Share articleCongratulations to the Buffalo Sabres, who ended their playoff drought before it was old enough to drive. Congratulations to the NHL and various TV executives, who now get to reap the benefits of a hockey-mad audience in Western New York. Most of all, congratulations to Sabres fans, who, at long last, actually get to enjoy a spring hockey event that isn’t the draft lottery. Now, the Boston Bruins are standing between their team and their first playoff series win since 2007. After 15 long years, the Sabres aren’t just happy to be here; they’re here to make up for lost time and go the distance. While the model is skeptical of that, despite being one of Buffalo’s biggest champions to start the season, it does see the Sabres as favorites to advance past the Bruins. Getting to play arguably one of the weakest playoff teams to start will have that effect. It’s not necessarily going to be a tight series, nor does it appear lopsided in any way. But the Sabres do start with a tangible edge to keep this magical season alive. The Bruins have a core of veterans still around with more experience for the moment, but all the reasons to be skeptical about Buffalo’s ability to go deep apply even further to Boston. Let the PDO Bowl begin. The plus-14 gap in Net Rating between the Bruins and Sabres primarily stems from differences in offensive strengths. The Bruins’ shot quality is relatively underwhelming, but it may be slightly undersold thanks to some of the group’s pre-shot movement. There is a lot of high-danger passing in the top six that adds more oomph behind their chances. The Sabres’ scoring rate is slightly higher than Boston’s, sitting at fourth in the league. While this team has forecheckers to add balance, the rush is a key part of their strategy. It’s easy to brand the Sabres’ strategy as river hockey, especially since they sit just above the break-even line in xG this season, but their play down the stretch has added more substance on both ends. The results still outpace the process, but there have been real improvements in shot and scoring chance suppression. Boston has been streaky all year at five-on-five, but this latest run raises some red flags; while the team doesn’t allow a ton of shots, the quality has been a problem down the stretch. The goaltending does the heavy lifting to mask that. That’s true on the penalty kill, too. The good news is the Sabres aren’t the toughest matchup here; their predictability is a big reason why they’ve only mustered 6.6 goals per 60 since the Olympics. Boston’s power play, across the full season, has the edge. But since the break, it has seriously struggled to convert on its chances, with just 5.1 goals per 60 — the third-worst mark in the league. The Sabres’ shot improvements and steady goaltending could keep that trend going. Can the Bruins keep getting away with it? Are we being too harsh? Perhaps. There are things to like about the Bruins, and we’ll talk about them in detail shortly. With a roster built primarily through an endless series of lopsided trades, GM Don Sweeney is on a years-long heater. Boston has high-end pieces at forward, defense and goaltender, and they generally deserve credit for dramatically outrunning their preseason projections. The model had them as an 80-point team with a 16 percent shot at making the playoffs. Whoops! Good for those guys. The difference between the Bruins and a surprise playoff team such as the Pittsburgh Penguins, though, is that the Penguins out-kicked their (projected) coverage in wholesale, sustainable ways. That means that there are under-the-hood reasons to believe that Pittsburgh has an edge in its own first-round matchup against the Philadelphia Flyers. They didn’t get to this point by using smoke and mirrors; they got here because, top to bottom, in several different areas, they’re a pretty good hockey team. It’s more challenging to say that about the Bruins. It’s not just that they had the worst expected goal share at five-on-five (46.7 percent) among playoff teams — it’s that they were bottom-five in the league, sandwiched between the San Jose Sharks and Toronto Maple Leafs. And yet, there the Bruins are, winning the actual-goal battle 182-150 despite giving up more chances than they take. The driving factor there, as you might guess, is the fifth-best shooting percentage in the league (10.66) and the sixth-best save percentage (.916). PDO can take you a long way, but you shouldn’t bet the house on it, either. Credit goes to the players responsible for it all, too; Jeremy Swayman has put up a .908 save percentage and saved 27.5 more goals than expected, third-most in the league. He’s the better goaltender in this series, and it’s easy to imagine him stealing a game or two on the way to a Bruins win. The second line of Pavel Zacha between Casey Mittelstadt and Viktor Arvidsson has led the way from a “results over process” standpoint, too — the Bruins have outscored opponents 42-22 with those three on the ice, despite controlling less than 50 percent of the expected goals. Shooting 17 percent: Never a bad thing. If you want to dock the Bruins for that, we can’t blame you. We can, however, offer a word of warning: The Sabres are in the PDO club, too. The difference on their end, though, is a deeper forward group and a process that improved enough during the stretch run to get their full-season expected goal share over 50 percent. Does any of that mean that the Bruins are already cooked? Of course not. As a franchise, they’ve spent most of the analytics era scoring and saving more goals than expected, so they don’t need to look far for proof, but a 7 percent gap is enough to put smart money on the bottom falling out, whether now or soon. Have the Sabres solved their issues on the third pair? The Sabres have cycled through a number of third-pair combinations to find the right fit all season. But it’s possible they finally found it down the stretch, by pairing up two pretty controversial picks: Logan Stanley, hated by the numbers, and Conor Timmins, hated by the eye test. Stanley’s size tends to drive a lot of his value, when his actual play generally hasn’t measured up. And those concerns were proven valid with some early post-trade lapses. But his game has stabilized as of late, alongside Timmins. At the very least, the Sabres need a third pair that isn’t a defensive liability in sheltered minutes. Stanley was with Luke Schenn. Pairing him with Zach Metsa led to high-event hockey on both ends. Timmins, on the other hand, has been a positive defensively throughout his minutes this year. And it’s translating in this pair, that has a 54 percent xG rate in 36 shared five-on-five minutes. It’s obviously not much, considering 1) sample size, and 2) how few scoring chances the team has generated with these two on the ice. But they have done more than just stay afloat; this pair has actually limited the damage against in a few games together, and that is promising. In terms of roster composition, the Sabres and Bruins have some key similarities. The most noticeable is they’re both guided by a no doubt superstar who is among the very best at his position: Rasmus Dahlin and David Pastrnak. Everything on either team flows through them. Dahlin had an understandably tough start to the season, but has been absolutely electric since returning from Sweden in mid-November. In 63 games, he has 65 points, a 56 percent xG rate and 64 percent of the goals. He’s done it all at both ends of the ice and his average Game Score of 1.75 since that point trails only Lane Hutson among defensemen. He’s been out-of-this-world good and finished the season in the thick of the Norris discussion. Pastrnak won’t get the same trophy love, but his importance to the Bruins can’t be understated after posting his fourth straight 100-point season. By far the most interesting aspect of his last few seasons has been the slow transition to one of the league’s best playmakers. After scoring 61 in 2022-23, Pastrnak’s goal totals have dropped in each year and he failed to score 30 for the first time in a full season in the last decade. But to make up for it, he dropped 71 assists this season, tied for fifth most in the league. Opposite to their position, there’s an offensively strong second-in-command leading the charge in Tage Thompson and Charlie McAvoy. Both players produce a lot, no question, but they also come with question marks that keep them out of the league’s upper echelon. Thompson’s inability to effectively drive play and McAvoy’s weaker defensive game are both worthy of scrutiny. Beyond them, there are the sturdy defensive sidekicks (Mattias Samuelsson and Hampus Lindholm) that anchor a stable top four with questionable depth at the bottom of the lineup on the back end. Up front, there are similar depth questions that linger on the fourth line and suspicions regarding the top nine’s true ability to influence goals relative to the chances created at both ends of the ice. Still, it’s easier to like what Buffalo has more; the Sabres’ top nine carry a lot more substance. The Sabres have seven forwards who scored over two points-per-60 at five-on-five this season, almost all of whom pushed play in the right direction. Buffalo has an emerging quartet of young guns with varying skill sets that have started to become real difference-makers this season in ways their projected values above may not properly reflect. Josh Doan is a beast on the forecheck (plus-6.7 Net Rating this season), Zach Benson is a shifty two-way ace (plus-6.0 Net Rating), Noah Ostlund is already turning heads defensively (plus-2.9 Defensive Rating), and Jack Quinn is realizing his offensive potential (plus-2.8 Offensive Rating). It’s all coming together in real time and that group is supported well by a strong cast of veterans — Alex Tuch, Josh Norris, Jason Zucker, Ryan McLeod — that brings everything together. It just fits. It’s a similar story on the back end, where Owen Power and Bowen Byram have slowly started to figure things out to become above-average top-four defensemen. They even started getting the matchup assignments since the Olympic break and have handled it aptly. Boston’s group is solid, but it lacks the same upside and seems to be playing above its weight. Fraser Minten is the lone youthful comparable to Buffalo’s quartet, but he’s not on the same level. Morgan Geekie has become a prolific scorer, but Tuch, on the other side, has a little more two-way might. It’s worth mentioning that a major reason that Geekie’s value is significantly lower than his goal totals might suggest is due to how much credit Pastrnak is getting for it. Geekie has played 572 minutes with Pastrnak this season at five-on-five, where he’s scored 17 of his 23 goals at five-on-five, good for 1.78 goals-per-60. In his other 522 minutes, he has just six, good for just 0.69 goals-per-60. The first number would be second best in the league; the second would be 186th. On the second line, it’s admirable that Zacha and Co. have outscored opponents heavily in matchup minutes, but Zacha having one of the worst xG rates on the team is a red flag. That extends to the defense group, where neither Nikita Zadorov nor Jonathan Aspirot grades out as an above-average top-four option. Aspirot has been surprisingly solid next to McAvoy, but we know who’s driving the bus there. Zadorov’s 57 percent goal rate is great, but like Zacha, he has one of the weakest xG rates on the team. If there’s a potential equalizer in this series, it’s goaltending. We all know what Swayman is capable of in a playoff setting and his bounce-back this season has been tremendous. His 26.5 GSAx ranks third in the league and his track record, save for last season, speaks for itself. It’s a bit more difficult to feel as comfortable with Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. He had a terrific season himself with 10.8 goals saved, but that’s fewer GSAx per game and easier to do splitting starts compared to Swayman’s high-volume role. Luukkonen’s up-and-down resume also plays a role in his projected value being lower. Goaltending is a helluva thing to have an edge in, but the rest of the roster leans in Buffalo’s favor. Tage Thompson vs. Morgan Geekie Forty goals is a big number and each side has one guy who was right around the mark this season. For Thompson, it’s his second straight year scoring 40-plus and he’s the focal point of Buffalo’s offense. Geekie, on the other hand, is more of a sidekick, one who started the season incredibly hot only to cool down over the season’s second half, missing the 40-goal mark by one. In any sense, both Buffalo and Boston have someone with a knack for filling the net. It’s Thompson who’s a little more dependable in that regard and it’s one reason he’s rated more highly. This year, he has 10 more xG than Geekie while also having a stronger track record and being more potent at five-on-five. In a playoff setting, that could be the difference. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison; Thompson is The Guy for Buffalo, making a comparison to Pastrnak perhaps more fitting. But in terms of pure goal scorers, it’s hard not to like Buffalo’s sniper more. The Sabres reaching the playoffs is a major milestone after a 14-year drought. But the work isn’t done yet. Buffalo may have earned the advantage on paper this season, but the Bruins’ star power and streaky play make them a true wild card in this series. 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