When Jason Pominville and Thomas Vanek walk into the Buffalo Sabres Hall of Fame together on Jan. 14, most of the tribute will focus on the obvious: eight seasons skating on the same wing in Buffalo, a combined 751 goals for the franchise, two names inseparable from the Sabres’ mid-2000s core. That part’s well worn. What’s more interesting is how their partnership actually started, and how it refused to end even after Buffalo let them go their separate ways.
Start at the beginning, not in Buffalo but in Rochester. Both players broke into pro hockey with the Sabres’ AHL affiliate, the Rochester Americans, before either one ever wore the blue and gold at KeyBank Center. Vanek set the Amerks’ rookie goal-scoring record with 42 goals in 2004-05, then followed it with 68 points the next season. Pominville had already been grinding through Rochester for three seasons by that point, once even getting waived by Buffalo before clearing and forcing his way onto the 2005-06 roster. They were rookies together in the NHL that same season, but by then they’d already spent years as teammates in the minors, working toward the same goal in the same locker room.
Then came the part nobody scripts. In 2013, Buffalo traded Pominville to the Minnesota Wild at the deadline, blindsiding him. The man who drove him to the airport at 4 a.m. for his cross-country flight to meet his new team wasn’t a family member. It was Vanek, his Buffalo teammate, staying behind in a rebuilding Sabres organization while his closest friend in hockey left for the West.
It didn’t stay that way for long. A year later, Vanek signed with the Wild as a free agent, reuniting the two for a third act nobody could have predicted when they were AHL teammates a decade earlier. They’d already been neighbors during their Buffalo years. In Minnesota, they picked up exactly where they left off, playing top-six minutes together again, with Pominville openly telling reporters it was Vanek who first convinced him to embrace the Twin Cities as home.
That’s a version of this story worth telling before Jan. 14: not just two Sabres legends who happened to play together, but two guys whose careers kept finding a way to intersect, from Rochester to Buffalo to Minnesota, across three organizations and a decade of hockey. Pominville is now coaching youth hockey back in the Montreal area. Vanek works in hockey operations for the San Jose Sharks. Different cities, different roles, same friendship that started in an AHL locker room over twenty years ago.
Buffalo gets to celebrate both of their numbers going up together this season. But the real story isn’t that they were teammates. It’s that even when their careers pulled them apart after Buffalo, they ended up on the same team anyway.
