Buffalo’s 5-1 loss to the New York Rangers serves notice that nothing will be easy but also, it’s the first game of the season.
BUFFALO — That could’ve gone a lot better for the Buffalo Sabres. A 5-1 loss to the New York Rangers in their season opener at home was not in the plans, but instead it was the kind of loss that showed the Sabres what trying to get back to the playoffs is going to entail.
The Rangers used a disciplined defense, a stout shot blocking mentality, and creative opportunism to upend the Sabres.
It was a game that still had some stank of preseason on it but it’s one of the 82 that counts for real. At least for Buffalo there are 81 more to go because this was one in which there were very few lessons to take away from it.
“I thought our guys did their best to not be frustrated and stay in the moment and stay on it, and it was a challenging night,” Sabres coach Don Granato said. “You get scored on twice in the first I think maybe three chances against, it’s tough sledding, especially in this scenario where you’re not in a rhythm, you haven’t played games in the regular season yet. We fought hard the rest of the game to try to dig out of that.”
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Even though hockey is a sport meant to be analyzed endlessly through video and statistics, the easy takeaway from Thursday night’s loss is that it was instructive. It taught Buffalo that things can be very frustrating and finding a way through that creates a challenge unto itself.
For instance: Shesterkin made 24 saves to earn the win. A mostly pedestrian night in which the only puck that got by him was a JJ Peterka rebound from a shot by Owen Power that was blocked initially. The shot attempt got Shesterkin moving, and the block helped to open up targets for Peterka to shoot at. He did and didn’t miss.
“The games like that where a lot of shots get blocked, obviously that’s not what we want,” Peterka said. “But yeah, we got to stick our head in there and keep going.”
Blocked shots were the talking point after the game, that and the Rangers using a mostly passive 1-3-1 forecheck. Never mind the boring forecheck, lots of teams do dull stuff and dealing with it and imposing your own will the way to remedy that. When I spoke with Rangers defensemen Ryan Lindgren and K’Andre Miller this morning, they both stressed how important it was to do just that to try and slow down a team like the Sabres that likes to attack with speed and overwhelms with a pinching defenseman as well.
“We obviously have struggled against the 1-3-1 in the past and we’ve got to figure out how to play a simpler game when we play it because we just overcomplicated it tonight,” Sabres captain Kyle Okposo said. “We’re going to face teams that play that system. We’ll talk about it; we’ll figure out a way to make sure that we’re feeling good because I don’t think anybody in this room felt good tonight—going into that game and throughout that game. So, we’ve got a find a way in our system to feel good and that’s simplifying our game.”
But it was the shot blocks, particularly by Rangers captain Jacob Trouba who was credited with eight of them, that proved to be the biggest source of the Sabres’ discouragement in defeat. In all, the Rangers blocked 23 shots. Bust out your calculator or abacus and note that 25 shots found their way on net and another 23 went into the bodies/shinpads/skates of Rangers skaters. New York coach Peter Laviolette referred to their shot blocking as “courageous” particularly during a third period penalty kill. Hard to say it wasn’t given the results it had on the scoreboard for the Rangers and in grinding the Sabres’ gears on offense.
“It’s not for everyone, but when you have guys that are willing to do, it kind of goes through the team,” Trouba said. “And it’s kind of an attitude that we want to establish early, kind of a culture and I guess what makes our team us is that that passion, that energy and that that spreads throughout the locker room.”
After the game, Granato wasn’t eager to discuss any singular players performance apart from goalie Devon Levi. He said Levi was fine and liked that he “battled hard, gritted hard” throughout it which is fair, it was a gnarly game to get a handle on, particularly for the first one of the season. But as far as anyone else goes, getting a concrete take about anyone’s performance is a bit of a fool’s errand because it’s the first sample size of 82 to be had.
Mistakes, misplays, and everything in between are going to happen in every game and with a season that has so much hype attached to it as well as the hopes and expectations of making the postseason, of course the disappointment is tangible. This is how it will be. The highs will be sky-high, and the lows will feel like they’re in the pits of hell. Any single performance will be just that until Saturday when the second one happens on Long Island in what should be another challenging slog with an elite goaltender between the pipes against the Islanders.
If you want the bright side, consider that Thursday’s loss turned into the perfect way to prepare for their next game.