Way back in October, this magical Buffalo Sabres season began against the New York Rangers \u2013 with a 4-0 loss.<\/p>\n
It can be easy to forget now, given the divergent paths the two teams took this season. The Rangers \u2013 perennially a playoff team in recent years \u2013 were eliminated last month. The Sabres are vying for an Atlantic Division title with four games to go.<\/p>\n
Buffalo got some help to that end on Tuesday in the form of a 6-2 loss for Tampa Bay. Montreal won, meanwhile, setting up our current scenario: the Sabres, Lightning and Canadiens, all tied with 102 points and all having four games left to play.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, these last four games will go a long way in determining the Sabres\u2019 first-round playoff opponent \u2013 it could be Montreal, Tampa Bay or a wild card team \u2013 along with home-ice advantage in Round 1 and beyond.<\/p>\n
The puck drops tonight at 7 p.m. Here\u2019s what you need to know in the meantime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Way back in October, this magical Buffalo Sabres season began against the New York Rangers \u2013 with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5100],"tags":[1107,229,5133,5,4,1108],"class_list":{"0":"post-547596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-buffalo-sabres","8":"tag-buffalo","9":"tag-buffalo-sabres","10":"tag-buffalosabres","11":"tag-hockey","12":"tag-nhl","13":"tag-sabres"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116369833691599435","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}