If it seemed like the Buffalo Sabres gave away the game to the New York Islanders in their 4-3 loss on Friday night, you’d be right.
BUFFALO — Losses have a way of leaving a bad taste in the mouth of everyone associated with it. You know, because losing is bad and it should make you feel bad.
Sometimes a loss has a little extra on top of it for the way it came to be and that would be an apt way to feel about the Buffalo Sabres’ 4-3 loss to the New York Islanders at home on Friday.
The Isles entered the game without Mat Barzal, having not scored in their past eight periods of play, and having one of the worst offenses in the NHL. There’s been drama on Long Island with coach Patrick Roy and GM Lou Lamoriello (that’s probably not true but when things are down, rumors be happenin’) and when losses pile up, things get uglier as they go. The Isles were also down two defensemen midway through the second period.
With all of that information and the Sabres on the first game of back-to-backs, the “Trap Game” alarm was blaring loudly and should’ve been heeded.
Buffalo had a lead for all of 40 seconds in this game when Dylan Cozens finally scored his first of the year, on the power play no less, at 9:03 of the first period. It was 40 seconds later that Bo Horvat caught the Sabres defense out of whack for a breakaway which Devon Levi got a pad on, but it still went in.
The Sabres didn’t play crisp hockey throughout and were careless with the puck too often. Lindy Ruff put a lot of the blame on himself for not having the team in better form, but players play, and the players did not play well.
“Let’s be real, we handed them three goals,” Ruff said. “We’ve been playing pretty tight, it started to slip, and again, we get beat 1-on-1, we got a defenseman caught deep where our forwards covering and gets on the wrong side of the puck on an easy—really an easy—coverage play. You’re not going to win a lot of games if you hand the opposition two or three breakaways or two-on-one, on-nothing plays.”
You’re not and they didn’t. More ahead on a less-than attractive loss at home.
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Mulling this game over was difficult for a couple reasons.
One is because the Sabres have another game Saturday night in Detroit which means the funk lingering over Friday night’s loss can be fumigated with a win over a division rival.
The other reason is because even though this was an early season loss with all the new bells and whistles that come with having a new coach and some new players, there have been enough repeat problems from previous years under different coaches with other different players that still occur.
Whether it’s watching them give up a goal soon after scoring one of their own, allowing opposing goals to pile up quickly because of the sag that happens naturally after allowing a goal, the mistakes made in coverage, or even the mistakes in general, they all bring back negative thoughts. And that in itself is natural after witnessing what Sabres hockey has been for this long. The names change but the problems often stay the same.
That’s what makes Ruff’s thoughts on seeing these issues come up under his watch to be more heartening to hear. After all, he was here a while back when things first started to take a downward turn and, damn it all, he wants more than anything than to fix it. That those feelings came out when asked about how Devon Levi performed in his first start in two weeks shows where his mind is at.
“This game was not on our goalie; I’m just telling you,” Ruff said. “Just, again, I have to clean up, I have to clean up. That’s on me. I’ve got to clean up our play. We’ve been defending well, we had a focal point on making sure we stay around the front of the net and, really, the first goal and the fourth goal are goals that just…they can’t happen. Can’t happen.”
The first goal was tough, the fourth one was almost unfair. Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s third period goal happened after Anders Lee ripped a backhand shot wide of Levi to the corner. Levi said he thought the puck was going to the corner and was going to rim around. Instead, it went right on Bo Horvat’s stick and he centered a pass back out front quickly that he might’ve been trying to bank in off Levi, or he tried to hit Pageau streaking to the net. It was the latter that worked, and Levi nearly was able to stick it away only to have Pageau get a little bit more of the puck and put it in.
“I think it’s luck of the draw sometimes,” Levi said. “That’s how the game goes sometimes. You get some bounces, you don’t and being able to stay even keeled throughout those moments and just controlling what you can control. Most of the of the time if you do the right thing, the puck will end up bouncing for you. So that’s kind of the mentality.”
What was mostly lost on that goal, however, was any sort of defensive presence on the backcheck. Horvat, Lee, and Pageau blitzed in from the blue line after they took the puck away in the neutral zone and quick passes and shots had Sabres defenders spinning to react while help attempted to get back in place.
Defensemen got caught deep in the zone multiple times. Mattias Samuelsson and Connor Clifton on a couple of occasions was made to look bad for pinching in because forwards didn’t rotate back to cover Samuelsson when he got in deep. We’ll not get into the how’s and why’s of him getting in that far, but that’s part of what Ruff’s system allows for, it just looks nicer when it’s Rasmus Dahlin, Owen Power, or Bo Byram doing it, but even those guys will get white hot heat when forwards aren’t helping mind the store along the blue line.
We can’t call these growing pains because these guys have all grown up together and, despite their ages, they’re adults in the league now. Lesson learning ended last season. What they are, however, are errors we’ve seen repeated this season and they’re ideally eliminated with more games played in the current system so that it all becomes second nature. Repetition and muscle memory, that kind of thing.
In any situation that wasn’t with the Buffalo Sabres, it’d be more tolerable to watch players go through these kinds of bumps with a new coach. But Ruff knows what he’s dealing with. He coached against this team over the years, and he knows there are old habits that must be erased and replaced with good ones. It doesn’t stop people from saying, “Not this again…” when it does happen.
Ruff said Friday morning there’s a good possibility that the back-to-back schedule would allow for some changes to be made to the lineup to work some guys in. After how things went in the game, the only question is whether or not all three players who were scratched Friday (Dennis Gilbert, Jacob Bryson, and Jiri Kulich) will go in and who comes out for them.
There would be sufficient enough reason to swap players out. Ruff was rankled by some of the penalties taken along with the turnovers and lack of winning 50/50 puck battles.
On the upside, Zach Benson skated with the team during the optional morning skate on Friday. Ruff said Benson will almost certainly be ready to go next week. Benson when asked about trying to play through the injury said he had the best of intentions.
“I want to win, right,” Benson said. “I want to help this team win. I want to be able to go through it with the guys. There’s not much to it than I just want to be out there with the guys. They’re my best friends and I want to go through the fight with them.”
It’s a moment like that when a cold, hardened monster like me is heartened to hear that from a 19-year-old living the dream. I get it, you get it, we all get it. We’d probably be the same way, too.
When Benson returns, you’d have to imagine that it’ll be Kulich headed to Rochester barring any other injuries to forwards.