We're getting to the point in the season where the real and truly bad teams are starting to separate themselves from the pack more seriously than they could when the season was younger.

The Buffalo Sabres and Edmonton Oilers are two of the three worst teams in the league, and only Carolina stands between them. And unlike them, Carolina seems to be moving back to health and a general decent quality of play, so the wheat will likely be further separated from the chaff.

Both also entered last night with a game in hand, meaning that the Hurricanes also have more time to move themselves ahead of this desperately poor two-pack.

And make no mistake, these are two organizations now deeply committed to losing as many games as possible over the course of the season, and as far as the Sabres go that's been the case since Oct. 1.

The Sabres are, in fact, so crassly tanking for the right to draft either Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel that they hosted the former's junior team in their building for no other reason than to have the locals come by to gawk.

The Oilers only arrived at this decision a little more recently, when they spent almost a month getting no bounces whatsoever, fired the coach, and a few weeks later started selling off parts (for now it's just David Perron, but one gets the feeling a few more guys will join him in hopping a plane out of town in the near future).

And look, these are the two worst teams in the league in terms of outscoring their opponents by a wide margin. Going into last night's games, Edmonton was second-worst at a stunning minus-49, nearly 29 percent worse than third-worst Arizona at minus-38. But Buffalo — oh god — they were minus-62. That's almost as big a gap in terms of percentage as the drop-off from Arizona to Edmonton. And it's 63 percent(!!!) worse than Arizona. This is minus-62 after 40 games.

They're never going to catch up to the 1974-75 Capitals' record of minus-265 in 80 games, but the cap-era record of minus-95 by the 2005-06 Blues seems like it should be reached by mid- to late February. They'd need to pick up the pace a little bit, sure, but I believe in them and you should too. Because keep in mind, the Sabres haven't even started their sell-off of the few useful veterans they have to hand off in exchange for picks and prospects. Edmonton could close in on that record before the end of the season if it all really goes to pot (and again, one assumes that this is the aim).

And so in the face of all this losing, fans are really only presented with two options: Accept it or don't. You can gnash your teeth over every pitiful loss to the worst teams in the league, and every blowout loss to its giants. And you can bemoan the fact that the Sabres or Oilers just don't have the horses to compete with anyone's bottom-six, let alone the big guns to go toe-to-toe with the Chicagos and Tampas of the world, who have differentials that 90-plus goals better than that of the Sabres. That's a mind-boggling statistic for early January, but here we are.

Both teams have had so long to deal with these realities at this point that fans have grown weary of wanting something better in the short term, and who can blame them? If the Oilers could go out and get, like, Steven Stamkos or someone to ferry them along until his current deal expires, they'd probably do it (maybe) but to what end? This is a team with so many issues that even getting a Stamkos for the short-term really only puts wallpaper up on the last standing bit left of a house that burned down three years ago.

So some fans, instead, have started cheering or the tank job. And who can blame them? Turns out, it's the players and the local media, tsk-tsking every once in a while all season long at the idea that the team is actually trying to lose, and that fans should want that to happen, respectively. Coincidentally, consecutive midweek mornings saw the release of two such articles, the first in Edmonton after the Oilers lost badly to the Red Wings (only 4-2, but they were outshot 41-23, so that looks like a massacre to me).

Some fans cheered — perhaps sarcastically — and set Robert Tychkowski off:

“A city that once followed Mark Messier’s lead is now giggling about finishing last and weaseling into a better draft lottery position.

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