With NHL action returning on Wednesday following the 2026 Winter Olympics, the Buffalo Sabres will look to finish the season strong and put an end to a dubious streak.
After a lengthy break for the 2026 Winter Olympics that spanned most of February, the NHL is returning to action on Wednesday as teams look to power through the home stretch before the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs in mid-April.
With a 16-team playoff format since the absorption of the World Hockey Association in 1979-80, more than half of the league’s teams were guaranteed to make the postseason every season until 2021-22, when the Seattle Kraken were introduced as the league’s 32nd team.
As the league utilized a playoff format that allowed more mid-level teams to consistently make the playoffs, the lengthy playoff droughts that were and are commonplace in leagues like the NFL and MLB never really took hold in the NHL.
With that said, NHL teams have certainly not been immune to longstanding futility, with the Buffalo Sabres of today serving as the most clear and obvious example.
After a sustained period of success throughout the late 1990’s and early-to-mid 2000’s, the Sabres began a record playoff drought after falling to the Philadelphia Flyers in the first round of the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
With the Sabres currently occupying the top Wild Card spot in the Eastern Conference with 70 points, Buffalo will look to put an end to a record 14-season playoff drought – safely holding the record by a margin of four seasons.
Outside of the Sabres, most of the longer playoff droughts in NHL history have also come in relatively recent years, with the sheer size of the large playoff format in a growing league for many years maintaining postseason opportunities for most clubs.
Though it may be a long time until the Sabres’ playoff drought is challenged – and that’s assuming they find a way to end it this season, which is no guarantee – here’s a look at the only playoff droughts to last at least a decade:
1. Buffalo Sabres: 14 seasons (2010-11 to present)
The Sabres will be looking to play hockey past mid-April this season for the first time since I was a freshman in high school, hoping to put an end to a miserable 14-year playoff drought.
As mentioned above, the Sabres’ sudden futility came on the coattails of a long period of relative success in Buffalo. Although the Sabres had just one Stanley Cup Final appearance to show for it, the team had made the postseason in nine of the previous 14 years, which included four trips to the Eastern Conference Final.
After the gut-wrenching Game 7 loss in 2011, the Sabres have rotated between pure futility and being on the cusp of competitiveness.
The franchise’s futility has encountered two separate low points in this drought – a dreadful 106-point showing over the course of TWO full NHL seasons in 2013-14 and 2014-15, and a 15-win season in the 56-game pandemic-shortened 2020-21 campaign.
Led by Tage Thompson and a high-octane offense this season, the Sabres will look to put an end to the noise that has engulfed Buffalo winters for the past decade and a half.
2. Florida Panthers: 10 seasons (1999-00 to 2011-12)
A 10-season drought that included the season lost to the 2004-05 NHL lockout, the Panthers were arguably the league’s worst team throughout the 2000’s, making memories of their Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final in 1996 feel especially distant.
Of course, on the heels of two straight Stanley Cup championships and three straight Stanley Cup Final appearances, memories of the Panthers’ struggles similarly feel a world apart today.
Florida had made the playoffs just three times in franchise history at the start of the streak, with their run to the Stanley Cup Final in 1996 marking the only season in which they won a playoff series.
While the Panthers were especially awful in the first half of the decade, the post-lockout NHL saw Florida barely fall short of the playoffs on a few occasions – which included missing the playoffs on a tiebreaker to the Montreal Canadiens after a 93-point season in 2008-09.
Florida put an end to the streak in 2012, winning the Southeast Division and capturing the No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs – with the Panthers falling to the eventual Eastern Conference champion New Jersey Devils in a 2OT Game 7 heartbreaker.
3. Edmonton Oilers: 10 seasons (2005-06 to 2016-17)
Emerging from the lockout with one of the most remarkable Cinderella runs in NHL history, the No. 8-seeded Oilers plowed through a gauntlet of Western Conference powerhouses before falling to the Carolina Hurricanes in the seven-game 2006 Stanley Cup Final.
Little did disappointed Edmonton fans know that it would be over a decade until they got to see playoff action from their team once again.
The defending Eastern Conference champions returned in 2006-07 with a 71-point campaign and a last-place finish, which served as a sign of things to come rather than a fluke.
Outside of back-to-back winning seasons in 2007-08 and 2008-09 that saw the Oilers narrowly miss out on a playoff berth, Edmonton was exceptionally bad throughout their decade of playoff absences.
The Oilers finished in last place in six of the 10 seasons in which they missed the playoffs, embarrassing futility that was directly responsible for the team landing four No. 1 overall draft picks in the 2010’s, including an unprecedented three in a row.
While Taylor Hall and Nail Yakupov didn’t turn out to be long-term stars for the team (or stars at all in Yakupov’s case), the Oilers were able to draft the greatest player of this generation in Connor McDavid, who along with Leon Draisaitl, have led the Oilers to two consecutive Stanley Cup Final appearances.
Yet after falling short to the Florida Panthers for two consecutive seasons, the Oilers remain in pursuit of their first Stanley Cup since Mark Messier led Edmonton to the promised land in 1990.
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