Buffalo Rising Online

May 4th 2007, 10:35am By Dave Staba

Rumor has it there’s a hockey game tonight at HSBC Arena.

This might be a good time for the Daniel Briere who was one of the National Hockey League’s most exciting players right up until early April to show up.

Yes, the New York Rangers have done their best to smother Briere’s skills through four games of their Eastern Conference semifinal series. But the most valuable of players, those who excel when the long slog of the regular season gives way to postseason’s sudden death, don’t need to be given space. They create it.

As much as the Sabres have embraced the team approach, Briere – who becomes a free agent moments after the Stanley Cup is carried around a rink somewhere, sometime in June -- also has to be playing for himself.

Darcy Regier and Lindy Ruff have to make some very tough decisions, like whether to keep Briere or Chris Drury, another very rich young man-to-be. Neither made the choice any easier during the regular season as they took turns looking like the Most Important Sabre.

The playoffs have been another story. While Drury and Briere each have seven points through nine playoff games, Drury has continued his less measurable contributions – in the face-off circle, on the penalty kill and in the defensive zone, as Ruff has mentioned repeatedly.

Briere, though, is the hockey equivalent of a point guard. Even when he’s not scoring a goal or setting one up directly, he sets Buffalo’s offensive pace when he’s on the ice. And with Ruff mysteriously abandoning the four-line system that worked so well through the fall, winter and early spring, Briere was out there for about one-third of Game 4.

Unfortunately for the Sabres, you wouldn’t have known that without looking at the score sheet. Until not scoring a non-goal with 17 seconds left, Briere was nearly invisible.

He certainly wasn’t the only one off his game during the two losses at Madison Square Garden, which turned what started as another relatively easy win for Buffalo into a best-of-three ulcer inducer. Ruff’s compression of the depth chart and decision to bench slumping Maxim Afinogenov in Game 4 will seem particularly panicky should this series wind up in crushing disappointment.

But there’s no member of the Sabres who could do more to get his team back on track quicker than Briere, starting tonight.

(Photo by Joe Cascio.)