Even when you incorporate shot differentials adjusted for the quality of the shots with Expected Goal percentage, you can see the Sabres were thoroughly tuned. And it was an indiscriminate beating, too – as long as the Eichel line was off the ice, Carter Hutton was seeing a ton of rubber. These games happen to the best of teams, and for Ralph Krueger, it’s probably a “burn the tapes and let’s move on to the Washington Capitals.”

The Sabres have shown enough thus far to make me believe in their longer-term sustainability – certainly more so than last season’s roller coaster. But some serious cautionary flags remain with the depth of this lineup. Though it has not impacted their winning to date, the truth is that the Sabres' depth is still being generally outplayed by the opposition. And the reason why it doesn’t seem obvious right now is because most of those players are riding white-hot shooting percentages – the type of shooting percentages that are extremely fleeting in nature and highly susceptible to regression.