If you’ve been trying to find the right way to describe what the Buffalo Sabres are doing this season, being flummoxed and sputtering out words and jumbled phrases that amount to a bumbling screed of how you thought they were going to be like every other Sabres team of the past decade-plus and then they weren’t without actually giving a take about it would be the most appropriate way to do it. The complete 180 they pulled in December and just stuck with it isn’t unheard of in hockey history, certainly, but doing so in a positive way is brand new for this franchise.
Ever since the Sabres climbed out of the cellar and ascended to the top of the standings among the joy emanating from the fan base, there’s also the classic Buffalo dread. The feeling of waiting for everything to fall apart. In the Sabres case, it’s waiting for the other shoe to drop; for the fun to come to a screeching halt. Unfortunately, the fan base is so damaged that this feeling comes about anytime they fall behind in a given game or when there’s an injury.
These Sabres were forged in the fires of mass injuries. They’ve fought back in games throughout the season. Their back-to-back set against the New York Rangers and Columbus Blue Jackets further added to their résumé on all accounts.
Against the Rangers, they got out to a 2-0 lead before allowing it to melt away and trailed 3-2 headed into the third period. There, Alex Tuch and Jason Zucker scored 1:23 apart in the opening 10 minutes of the third and added an empty netter from Zach Benson to win 5-3 going away. It was a game that was solid after one, miserable after two and a ho-hum victory in the end where everyone outside of the locker room wondered why they got so worked up about the deficit in the first place.
Thursday’s game at home against the Blue Jackets came with a dose of bad news. Goalie Alex Lyon will miss the next week with a lower-body injury, a muscle strain according to coach Lindy Ruff, which thrust Colten Ellis back into the full-time backup role, one that comes with a start now and again. Ellis hadn’t started a game since February 3 and played for the first time since then when he entered the Sabres loss in Washington over the weekend in relief of Lyon 10 minutes into the game after the team came out completely flat on the way to a 6-2 loss.
Going two months between games and just a hair longer than that between starts would normally be a rough spot to be thrust into, particularly with a team that’s not just going to the playoffs but still has a shot at winning the Atlantic Division. All Ellis did to answer the bell was pitch a 37-save shutout, the first of his NHL career, in a 5-0 victory, the Sabres’ third in a row since that howler in D.C.
“To get a win tonight, it’s special for us and for our group,” Ellis said. “We’re pushing for home ice, pushing to win the division. It’s going to come right down to the last game. I think we’ve just got to focus on one game at a time, and the rest will take care of itself.”
Ellis joined his goaltending battery mates Lyon and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen in earning a shutout. The Sabres have had three goalies earn a shutout in a season just three other times in team history and this season’s trio pulling it off is even more remarkable when you consider everything that’s gone on with injuries and the stress of the schedule.
At 23 years old, Ellis is the most junior member of the group and while the starts and games haven’t been there while Lyon and Luukkonen have split starts, he’s still been there for every practice and morning skate. Practices and skates aren’t done at game speed, but with how the Sabres have played this year, getting to work with their shooters all the time has its perks that work for everyone.
“He puts a lot of work in,” Ruff said. “He’s the ultimate competitor. He’s doing a lot of extra skates with our extra players. Every time he steps in the net in practice, he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t get scored against. First guy to the rink a lot of times, almost every day. I think that’s part of a routine that leads to a lot of great habits.”
With Lyon’s status now up in the air and the playoffs coming in a week’s time, Ellis getting this start and having this kind of performance against a desperate Blue Jackets team isn’t just a huge reassurance, it’s another example of resilience of a different kind.
“He was unbelievable tonight,” Josh Doan said. “I think you’ve seen throughout the year the progress that he’s made, and he’s become quite the goalie. It’s a little bit of a secret how good he can be, and I think tonight, the world got to see what Colten Ellis can do.”
While Ellis might be a bit of a secret, Doan very much is not one anymore.
Doan scored twice while Peyton Krebs, Jack Quinn and Rasmus Dahlin each added one of their own, the latter’s an empty-net goal from 182 feet away from his own goal line. Doan’s goals gave him 25 for the year while Quinn’s goal was his 20th. It’s the fourth straight season the Sabres have had at least five players score 20-or-more goals. It’s their longest stretch of doing that since 1990-91 to 1993-94.
Doan reaching 25 goals this season after he entered the year with 28 career points is one hell of a glow-up. It’s not as if this kind of growth couldn’t be foreseen, he had 14 goals a year ago in Utah, but 25 goals and now more than 50 points is a phenomenal way to get established in the NHL for good.
“I think what we saw is the reason we got him signed,” Ruff said. “Just for the fact that I think he’s got even more upside. He keeps progressing. He’s got great bloodlines obviously. His dad was one heck of a player, one heck of a competitor and I think he’s following in his dad’s footsteps when it comes to the way he competes and how hard he works. There’s not many days this guy has a bad day. He’s just a great kid to be around.”
It’s still staggering to think Utah parted with Doan, a young player very much in the mold of what the Mammoth have been building there going back to the days in Arizona. Everything about the way he’s played in Buffalo this year screams he’s a guy you don’t want to give up, even to get a very good player. But the feather in Kevyn Adams’ cap from last summer was making sure to get both Doan and Michael Kesselring for J-J Peterka when Adams was well aware that Peterka wasn’t going to stay in Buffalo.
Utah is happy with who they got and they’re going to the playoffs for the first time since setting up along the Great Salt Lake, but the way Doan has played this season is going to grant him status as a guy who’ll never have to buy a beer here ever again. With fans marking out on the video screen holding up their brand spankin’ new Doan jerseys to the whole building singing along to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” and holding off pronouncing the “T” in “don’t,” the work Doan has put in leading up to this season is paying off for everyone.
“There’s not a lot of places in the world where you get that kind of experience from fans, where they’re on your side and they’re cheering for you,” Doan said. “You’ve got to hold your end of the bargain and play hard and work hard for them, but they’ve shown their support, and it’s been super cool this year. At the end of the day, I just put my head down and work for them. They’re the ones showing up right now for us, and we’ve got to show up on the ice for them.”
The Sabres win coupled with Montréal beating Tampa Bay 2-1 in regulation has Buffalo staying atop the Atlantic Division with two games left to play. Tampa Bay and Montréal each have three to go so the race for the top spot in the division is far from over. The Lightning face Boston and the Canadiens meet the Blue Jackets on Saturday while the Sabres are off until Monday when they go to Chicago. Suddenly, Sabres fans are big Bruins fans not to mention Blue Jackets supporters.
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The resilience is how this team came together.
It’s how they won 10 in a row to turn the season out of the tailspin it was careening towards in early December. Every postgame where they’ve come back to win, it’s almost certain someone will be asked how they’ve been able to turn a game around in which they weren’t playing well or trailing in or both and the answer has been consistent all year. They bore down, did what they should’ve been doing and found a way.
That reads like a cliché, sure, but when it happens so consistently, it’s just who the Sabres are at this point. It comes from experience, both positive and negative. Think of all the games they’ve blown in years past, particularly last season, that should’ve been two points going away. Breakdowns, mental errors, flat-out poor decisions… you name it, the Sabres did it. All of those experiences can wear on players and teams…until you get fed up, anyway.
“(The maturity) is a long time coming, but I think that’s the age that we’re at, the experience we’ve had,” Alex Tuch said. “It’s been a lot of ups and downs; this season’s been a lot more ups, but we also had a tough stretch to start the year. To be where we’re at is something we’re proud of, but we’re not complacent with. We’re not sitting back and saying we’ve done our job; we’re continuing to push and get better every day.”
The season flipping during that six-game road trip turned out to be an obvious moment in retrospect, but at the time and while it was going on, wondering about what made it change was the big question. Since then, the team leaders made it clear how things changed among each other. After all, if they couldn’t make it work together as leaders, who else would make it happen?
“I think it all started on that West Coast Canada trip,” Tage Thompson said. “We had a leadership meeting and just basically said we’ve got to be better and expressed out loud what we each could do better as individuals to help our group. When you say it all out, it makes it easier for you to hold each other accountable.”
Since then, we’ve heard Thompson talk about how “everyone ropes, everyone rides” and aside from the fun cowboy imagery, it’s really how this group works. From rallying back in games to sticking up for each other when there’s pushing and shoving or worse, it’s a group that’s all bought in for each other. If you wondered why bigger trades didn’t happen at the deadline, it’s fair enough to assume more players didn’t go because of how tightly knit the room is and remains. There’s also maturity factor.
So much of what’s allowed the Sabres to get hot, stay hot and eliminate extended losing streaks is approaching each game as its own thing and not getting lost in the big picture. Last season, at least early on, the Eastern Conference standings were a fixture on one of the video screens in the locker room. Where the team stood was there for everyone to see and be reminded of daily and something Ruff said a year ago was that he didn’t want the team to hide from it, be it too high or low. Of course, things got low later in the season, and, at some point, the standings came down and stayed down.
This season, the message has been kept more directly in-house about working together and eliminating working solo. Togetherness helps bonding and using that to zero in on the game-to-game aspect of the schedule rather than getting swept up in streaks, good or bad, and the constant standings jockeying that goes on simplified the scope of the season. You can only play one game at a time so why worry about other games that were played or ones to come? Prepare for one and play for one and take care of business. Efficiency.
“We know every game is a new game,” Dahlin said. “I think we’ve done a great job. We work harder off the ice, too, and we make sure we’re ready every game.”
So many past Sabres teams would be guilty of getting too high on successes and getting far too down when stumbles occurred. Riding those emotional roller coasters takes a toll. Every loss is felt harder, and every win was celebrated with the kind of confidence that didn’t fit the moment. Think about the times we’d hear from one of the players after a loss to an allegedly weaker team and they’d say something along the lines of, “We got too high on ourselves,” or “We thought this game would be easier.” It would come off ludicrous given where they were in the standings and the overall lack of success they’ve had as a team. Taking any team lightly was a failing on everyone’s part.
Even this season we heard that line, early on of course, and it was a moment where it was difficult for us reporters to hear it again. Having to ask the follow up question of, “How do you explain how that continues to happen,” is in itself a surreal thing given that we’re asking the same players this who have said this before. Whether it was that leadership meeting after the Calgary game or another moment that snapped them out of it matters not, it just matters that it immediately stopped happening altogether.
For so long everyone has waited for the Sabres to have that awakening in which the reasons for why they didn’t do something stopped and the reasons why they’re doing them now was evident in how they executed. The maturity caught up to the talent and the talent is making the wins pile up. The maturity is also allowing them to be much more consistent and with that comes the resilience we’re seeing so often.
“I think it’s us learning to ride the wave and not let it affect us as much as it used to,” Jason Zucker said in early March. “I think that’s the big difference. It’s easy to look from the outside and say, ‘Oh, well, nothing’s affecting them, they’re winning every game,’ or whatever may happen during these little streaks. But you’re still riding the wave, you’re just finding a way to come out on the right side of it, trying to find ways to win games and try to help yourself be in those positions game after game.
“You’ll start learning how to close them out and that’s what we’re doing right now.”