Mistakes, emotional sags, and a rally that came up short leads to the Sabres’ fourth straight loss and fifth in six games.
BUFFALO — The formula for the Buffalo Sabres’ latest loss resembled many of their other losses this season and that kind of sameness is helping bring back memories of seasons past where things often went off the rails for games at a time.
It’s a sensation that’s far too familiar and one the team would much rather leave dead and buried in the past with so many painful memories from previous failed seasons. Current players shouldn’t have to answer for the past and the current iteration of the Sabres certainly don’t need to do that.
The return of the same woes that have dotted other losses this season is concerning especially when this is supposed to be a season where the Sabres are meant to take that next step in their growth. Instead, it’s leading to dashed hopes and doubts across the board.
“I think it’s time to look at everything,” Sabres captain Kyle Okposo said. “There’s a lot of different conversations that go on behind closed doors, things that are said. But it’s probably time to look at a few different things. Sometimes it’s going back to basics. Sometimes it’s tweaking a thing or two here and there to try to get a spark. That’s something we got to figure out and we got to do it with the coaching staff and try to turn this thing around.”
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It was an obscenely loaded news day for the Sabres. Last season’s leading scorer Tage Thompson returned from a hand injury a week sooner than even the earliest expectations indicated to try and give the team a lift. Thompson’s return softened the blow of losing Alex Tuch to what appeared to be a hamstring injury Sunday against Nashville that will have him out for a week to 10 days. The Sabres placed Tuch and Jordan Greenway, who’s expected to be out about the same amount of time with an undisclosed but likely upper-body injury, on injured reserve.
Thompson played right wing to start the game on a line with Jeff Skinner and Casey Mittelstadt, but the state of the game and the Sabres deficit caused some line switches and led to Thompson skating on the wing with Zach Benson and Dylan Cozens.
Thompson’s return ideally should’ve provided some jump to the game, but the Sabres were behind early once again when Dylan Larkin scored 3:40 into the first period. Nearly five minutes later it was 2-0 with a Robby Fabbri goal.
The bad starts are almost a burned in trait for this team because it continues to happen. Every team plays better when they’re ahead, but the Sabres have been chasing more games than not this season. It’s the exact kind of thing that will take any team out of the rhythm they want to set in a game.
“We’re a group that is making a lot of mistakes right now and they’re costing us, they’re ending up in the back of our net,” Okposo said. “Those are things that we need to clean up. That’s what’s costing us games right now, and with who we have in this room, it’s a frustrating thing to continue to happen.”
When the mistakes keep happening and they’re winding up past the goalie with the kind of regularity they have, it calls into question the work that’s being done to prepare the team game in and game out. Injuries or not, youthful or not, they’re the kinds of things that teams serious about making the playoffs and going far in them get corrected sooner than later. That the signs these issues are being corrected aren’t showing up as often creates a growing amount of skepticism beyond the walls of the dressing room.
Accountability can be difficult to assess in a game where simple mistakes, or really big ones, are repeated. Turnovers, blown coverages, miscommunication…they all drag teams down into the muck. The way Don Granato manages the team means those of us on the outside never see players being dressed down or punished in some way for transgressions, but he’s not a fire and brimstone guy behind the bench.
“You’re either an accountable person or you’re not,” Granato said. “I can punish anybody… I can take ice time away. But you’re punishing them. You need accountable people, and I do believe we have accountable people. It’s a challenge. I think the biggest thing is for me to have confidence. I have confidence in our group, I have confidence that we can resolve this, and I have confidence in saying that this is what teams deal with, and you’ve got to learn to deal with it better to get out of it faster and become more experienced because of it. I know we’re going to get to the other side of this and as painful as it is, I think we’re going to be better because of it.”
When a team has lost four straight, five of six, and have won three games in their last 12 matchups, words will always ring hollow to a degree and it’s up to the players and coaches to prove the message that’s stressed each day is hitting the mark.
This group is being challenged in a way they were not for most of last season. Injuries were few and far between, particularly at forward. They played with a level of confidence a team as young as they were probably shouldn’t have had yet. Youthful ignorance perhaps but losing games saps away confidence and each time the Sabres give up the first goal of the game, the seemingly visible sense of dread is beyond apparent. It’s easy enough to tell players to be confident, but if the results don’t matchup with the effort that’s put in, doubt and frustration can win out.
“It shouldn’t be (a fragile group) and it’s something we got to address, something that needs to be fixed,” Okposo said. “It’s a big boy league. We’re coming in with expectations. You come in and everybody’s talking about the playoffs, and you got to go perform. And we’re not doing that right now. It’s frustrating, but that’s where we’re at, and nobody’s going to throw us a lifeline here. We’re going to have to do it ourselves. It’s going to come from this room and the people that are in it.”
The pressure from the outside is there, it’s being felt from the inside of the room, but how everyone responds to this and either turns it around or continues to wallow in it will dictate where things go from here and whether or not changes of some kind will follow.
This kind of situation is, unfortunately, also all too familiar.