The Buffalo Sabers entered the National Hockey League for the 1970 season along with the Vancouver Canucks. In the forty years since the Sabers began bringing exciting hockey to upstate New York, three Buffalo players have won the Calder Memorial Trophy as NHL Rookie of the Year.
Gilbert Perreault he was the first overall pick in the 1970 NHL Amateur Draft and the first player selected by the Sabers. In that inaugural Sabers season, Perreault scored 38 goals and assisted on another 34 for 72 points while playing all 78 games.
Gil was recruited from the Ontario Hockey Association, where he was a member of the Montreal Junior Canadiens for three years, from 1967-68 to 1969-70. In his final season, he scored 51 goals and added 70 assists for 121 points in just 54 games.
Throughout an NHL career that spanned from 1970-71 to 1986-87, all with the Buffalo Sabers, Perreault racked up stats at a rate that put him atop the Sabers’ all-time lists for games. played in his career, goals, assists and points. To date, Gil is the team leader in all of these categories. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1990, the same year that Perreault’s number 11 became one of six retired Buffalo Sabers numbers.
tom barasso he was the fifth overall pick in the 1983 NHL Entry Draft by the Buffalo Sabers. In 1983-84, the American-born goalie played in 42 games for Buffalo with a 26-12-3 record. Barrasso sported a 2.84 goals-against average and an .893 save percentage with two shutouts, winning the Calder. By today’s standards, those weren’t the best numbers, but you have to remember that 1983-84 was the height of Wayne Gretzky’s crazy offensive days in the National Hockey League, when scores of 8-7 were the rule, not Rule. exception.
Barrasso played with the Sabers from 1983 to 1984 until a trade sent him to the Pittsburgh Penguins during the 1988-89 NHL season. His career ended after the 2002-03 season with stints with the Ottawa Senators, Carolina Hurricanes, Toronto Maple Leafs and St. Louis Blues along the way. The man who was recruited straight out of high school in the United States is now a member of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame.
In 2009-10, 6’8″ defenseman Tyler Myers The Caldera won. Tyler was the Sabers’ 12th overall pick in the 2008 NHL Entry Draft. While winning the Calder, Myers played in all 82 regular season games for Buffalo, scoring eleven and totaling 48 points from the spot.
Like Barrasso, Myers was also born in the United States but moved to Canada when he was 10 years old. He spent four years with the Kelowna Rockets of the Western Hockey League before being drafted. In his final season as a junior, he helped Kelowna win WHL championships and a spot in the Memorial Cup. Additionally, he helped Canada win a gold medal at the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championships.
