After racing out to a 4-0 lead, the Buffalo Sabres watched the Colorado Avalanche roar back to deliver an embarrassing 5-4 loss.
BUFFALO — If ever there’s a telltale sign of a team’s maturity, it’s how they respond to big, emotional situations.
The Buffalo Sabres’ response to racing out to a 4-0 first period lead and chasing Colorado Avalanche starting goalie Alexandar Georgiev was to, in the players’ words, think the game was going to be easy and be able to cruise to a victory.
Instead, the Avalanche got a goal back in the second period after a poor turnover by defenseman Connor Clifton led to Nathan MacKinnon scoring. Even still, the Sabres entered the third period with a three-goal lead and needed a solid, quiet period to salt the game away and end a three-game winless slide.
Instead, the Avalanche paid the Sabres back for their four-goal first period with a four-goal third period of their own and left KeyBank Center with the two points Buffalo thought they had locked up after 20 minutes in a 5-4 come-from-behind win.
“It sucks, it just sucks, honestly,” Alex Tuch said. “We need to be better; each and every guy needs to be better. It’s honestly horseshit. Pardon my French, but it is. We left Upie hanging, we left each other hanging, we weren’t working for each other after the first period. We thought it was going to be easy; they were just going to go in a hole. That’s the former Stanley Cup champs over there. One of the best players in the world, one of the best defensemen in the world. You can’t give them opportunities like that and, yeah, it’s total crap.”
Nathan MacKinnon had two goals while Joel Kirivanta, Logan O’Connor and Artturi Lehkonen also scored to send the Sabres to their fourth straight loss (0-3-1) following a three-game win streak.
Among the many, many losses witnessed in this arena since the beginning of the playoff drought, this one with a team very much intent on being part of the wild card hunt in which they took a team that features MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Cale Makar and Devon Toews for granted ranks as one of the most egregious in that time.
“I think we thought it was going to be easy in the third, they were going to shut it down,” Tage Thompson said. “They’re a good team; they’re going to have a push. I think their push intimidated us. I think we let it fold us, and we didn’t look like we had any confidence to make plays or execute anything coming out of our zone. It looked like when we had it on our stick we didn’t want it and just got rid of it. They obviously took advantage of that and go in the neutral zone, quick transition back into our zone, and then once they were in our zone we were just running around. So, a lot of panic in our game in the second and third. Upie bailed us out a lot. It could have been a lot worse.”
More from a nightmare evening and what should be a wake-up call to the room ahead.
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The fans booed and booed in a way that had the disgust and frustration of years of losing behind it. That it wasn’t a sold-out crowd, or remotely close to one, is a blessing in retrospect. The players didn’t need to hear it to know it. Of the tough losses this group has experienced together, they’re familiar with hearing it from the fans but often that’s become something to easily tune out. You hear it enough and it loses the meaning.
Boos are like tough losses that way. You eat enough of them and no matter how much a player hates to lose the senses can be dulled over when they happen enough times. But a loss like Tuesday night? That’s the kind that rarely happens.
According to the NHL, the Avalanche are the eighth team in the past 25 years to overcome a four-goal deficit and win in regulation. It’s the fourth time the Avs have done it in franchise history, and it never happened when they were in Quebec City. This Avalanche team has been fighting it for most of the season because their goaltending has been brutal. It was again in the first period. And they still came back to win.
“It’s a little redundant. It’s a little repetitive,” Tuch said. “I know that every team goes through a learning experience, but you have to learn individually and as a team going forward. It wasn’t a good enough effort from any of the guys in this room, honestly. We just need to be better. … Just don’t forget how this feels because it sucks. We didn’t want to lose multiple games in a row, let alone four now.”
Two years ago, this Sabres group under Don Granato was green and spent the majority of that season “learning lessons” and those moments led them to a 91-point season. Last season, they parked the talk of lesson learning yet fell back on it when it was almost necessary to deal with new situations that cropped up. Now? School is out and they’re on the hard streets experiencing real life — and real life is really tough.
“We’ve all been in this league long enough now it’s not an excuse anymore,” Dylan Cozens said. “There’s absolutely no excuses for what happened tonight. It’s embarrassing and just not good enough.”
One of the more concerning things that has repeated itself already this season is the seeming lack of respect for opponents. It’s the NHL and no matter who is playing or what their record is, that team ices 20 of the best hockey players in the world in that game. Some teams may have more talented players than others, but it’s a league with so many ebbs and flows that anyone can win on any given night. That’s reality.
But hearing, again, about how the team thought it would be easy in some way to win is rather staggering considering the Sabres are still trying to prove themselves to the rest of the league. And what’s more is the players know this.
“I don’t really know. I think when you get up like that, we think it’s going to be point night or something, but we can’t change the way we play,” Cozens said. “Just keep doing the things right, not cheating and making smart plays, or else it’s going bite us in the ass like it did.”
Learning respect at the hands of MacKinnon, Rantanen and Makar is one thing, but after already getting lessons from the Montréal Canadiens and New York Islanders earlier this season in not taking an opponent lightly as well as from the Pittsburgh Penguins for thinking they had a game in hand, you’d hope that it would get through to not do that.
And certainly, it’s very easy to get caught up in the moment and thinking it’ll be an easy night when virtually everything is getting past the goalie. The Sabres scored on four of eight shots against Georgiev before he was replaced by Scott Wedgewood who then stopped all 22 shots he faced the rest of the way. But that’s when a killer instinct has to kick in. Instead of trying to create a highlight reel with incredible goals, making it so the other team wants to do anything other than be on the ice should be the aim. Instead, things played out differently.
“We got in trouble with puck management, the that has hurt us previously, I think it’s hurt this team in the past,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “You look at the first two goals, didn’t manage the puck well and not strong around and around the net in the last 40.”
Killer instinct is what the Avalanche showed after Joel Kirivanta cut the Sabres lead to 4-2 just 1:19 into the third period. It was that moment when fans, media, and apparently players alike, sensed things were about to turn. That’s the kind of metaphysical moment everyone realizes at the same time and it’s virtually fatalistic.
“I think once we give one up, we start panicking and thinking too much about worst-case scenario, and we just panic, we don’t make smart plays,” Cozens said. “We’re just thinking negatively about what could happen instead of just pushing and putting one goal behind us instead of just panicking and letting them get another, another. We just got to find ways, if we give one up when we have a lead like that, just to forget about it and get back to our game.
The Avalanche and their champion players sensed fear and then evoked another emotion out of the Sabres after Logan O’Connor made it 4-3 at 4:30 of the third, a goal that got Ruff to use his timeout.
“Really called the timeout to just sort of settle things down. I sensed panic,” Ruff said. “We were running around in our end. We’ve been pretty good at staying in pretty good position in our end. Two of the goals, we were out of position, just flat out of position. And then you look at the last couple, just net-front, box your guy out. Be strong around the net front. Not strong enough allowed them to tip the puck to get under puck, to get in front of our goaltender.”
Panic reads almost like a vulgarity when discussing hockey plays and players and the coach using that term was accurate. That other players also used it to describe the third period meltdown hammered it home.
“I think obviously they started to make a push and there was a bit of panic in our game,” Thompson said. “I think first period, we were all over them, making plays and going north with the puck. And then I think they make a push and we start throwing pucks around, not making plays, and just giving it right back to them, and they just shove it back down on our throat. Spend the whole second and third in our D-zone and just scrambling around. So, it’s just ugly. Ugly last 40 minutes of the game.”
Being able to see the feeling of “oh, shit” play out the way it did is something else. Unfortunately, it’s not unfamiliar. The hope now for this group is that seeing it play out the way it did on Tuesday night might be the shock to the system needed to get this group hyper-focused on winning games.
It’s bizarre to have the team captain leaving the game early in the third period being a footnote to any game, but here we are. Rasmus Dahlin played one shift in the third before he left the game. Ruff said he was dealing with back spasms. What’s concerning is it’s related to the injury that kept him out of the preseason and appeared to affect him at the start of the season.
Suffice to say, if Dahlin has to miss any time it’s a major loss and one that will test the limits of the defense. The Sabres rotated all five defensemen through the third period and leaned on Owen Power and Bo Byram, as expected. With the Winnipeg Jets coming in on Thursday and riding a four-game losing streak of their own, the stakes for getting things right on both sides are high and with Dahlin dealing with that issue, it makes facing one of the league’s best teams that much more daunting.