The Buffalo Sabres had a 1-0 lead after two periods but wound up eating a 3-1 loss in the home opener against the Los Angeles Kings.
BUFFALO — Of the all-time predictable hockey clichés, saying “we’ve got to play a full 60-minute game” is among the most obvious and predictable that players and coaches alike fall back on. Seeing a game play out in real time in which a team does not play a solid 60 minutes will happen with some kind of regularity.
In Buffalo, the Sabres of many years past have routinely not played a full 60 minutes and Thursday’s home opener was another one to add to the list. But this one had a different flavor.
A 1-0 Sabres lead after two periods wound up turning into a 3-1 loss after three periods when Los Angeles Kings captain Anze Kopitar netted a natural hat trick (two of them past Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen and one into an empty net) to get them off to a good start while they spend the next few weeks away from home with their arena being renovated.
A misplay by Rasmus Dahlin 13 seconds (yes, Buffalo fans, for real) into the third period allowed Kopitar to score his first and tie the game. A questionable penalty call against Jason Zucker late in the period put the Sabres and their very strong penalty kill back into action, but a Mattias Samuelsson penalty 1:32 later put them down two men. Seconds later, Kopitar’s slap shot beat Luukkonen to put the Kings ahead with 1:38 to go in the game and followed it up 56 seconds later with his hat trick tally.
After 40 minutes this was meant to be an upbeat write-up on all the good things the Sabres had accomplished. Those extra 20 minutes turned out to be rather important.
“I think we did a little bit better job, I think, leading up until we gave up a soft goal in the third and we started playing a little bit on our heels and didn’t get back to our game nearly enough and shift after shift like we were in the first couple periods,” Sabres forward Alex Tuch said. “Disappointing is an understatement. It’s a good first 40, but we have to be able to play 60 to win in this league.”
Thoughts and observations on the way…
The content below was originally paywalled.
If there’s something that we can, perhaps, look forward to with Lindy Ruff as the head coach of the Sabres, it’s the sudden influx of blunt takes. What Tuch said might read as a hot take on Luukkonen (saying “soft goal” will get any goaltender’s hackles up) but it was the play of everyone on the ice in that moment.
The Sabres opened the third period with a very short power play, but the play wound up back in their own end quickly Dahlin making a poor judgment turned into Alex Laferriere stealing the puck from him along the wall to him passing to Kopitar driving the net with the forwards in full “oh shit” mode trying to get a body or stick on him and failing thus turning into the tying goal.
“I made a bad play,” Dahlin said. “He came down in the middle. Kopitar doesn’t miss those chances, so we just got to clean it up.”
Captains have to own it when they make a mistake and Dahlin always does, so his take was expected. After Don Granato was fired, the biggest buzzwords were about accountability and taking ownership of mistakes is a big part of that.
“Guy got under his stick,” Lindy Ruff said about the play. “I don’t know if I love their choice of the play off the faceoff win. They’re killing, they’re back and we’re trying an up-the-middle play. For me, I would have liked to see them take that pass out wide and get in their zone. A little bit of a combination of why that ended up in our zone too.”
It’s not a great play and it all led to the tying goal in a flash. But at that point it’s 1-1 with virtually the rest of the third period to go and with the way they played in the opening two periods, a second goal would be inevitable… right? About that…
Kings starting goalie Darcy Kuemper was out of his gourd. He made 32 saves including a few that might not land on a highlight reel, but in the moment were incredibly athletic plays. He stopped a Ryan McLeod shorthanded wraparound attempt in the first period with a slide back across the crease from the far post to deny him.
Moments later, McLeod was hauled down as he was about to break in from the blue line on a breakaway by Quinton Byfield and was awarded a penalty shot. Kuemper stopped that one, too.
“He kept us in it early. He kept us in it in the middle. And he kept us in it late. So that means that it gave us a chance to stay in the game and to hang around,” Kings coach Jim Hiller said. “And that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t have that many chances, but we were opportunistic. And it was all because the goaltender gave us a chance to hang around.”
Another not-as tired hockey cliché is about how if you let a team hang around, they can beat you. The Sabres hit numerous posts and when they didn’t, Kuemper was there to deny them with equal amounts of athleticism, positioning and skill. But saying the Sabres got “goalie’d” would make it easy to dismiss the mistakes made in the third period. Should they have had the game more or less put away before that? Absolutely, but those are the breaks sometimes. Giving opponents the chance to get back into the game? No bueno.
That takes us to the final minutes of the third when Jason Zucker went for a puck in the corner in the offensive zone and felt back pressure coming from the Kings defense, in this case it was rookie Brandt Clarke. Zucker, knowing he was either going to be hit or tied up in the corner along the wall, made a reverse hit to fend off the defender.
Zucker caught Clarke up high with his back/back of his shoulder and bloodied Clarke’s mouth in the process. Referees ruled it to be worthy of a roughing call despite much protestation from Zucker that also earned him a 10-minute misconduct. The Sabres penalty kill all game long was outstanding and bottled up the Kings’ power play so much so that the Sabres were able to generate numerous chances shorthanded. Their PK gave a visible lift to the rest of the team and earned an audible response from the sold-out crowd for doing so. And for good reason, they were outstanding.
That’s what made Mattias Samuelsson’s slashing penalty against Alex Turcotte 1:32 after Zucker’s penalty such a backbreaker. Killing a 5-on-4 power play, while challenging, proved to be effortless for the Sabres killers, but a 5-on-3 is a whole other thing and Kopitar made them pay.
“I don’t like that (Zucker penalty),” Ruff said. “The Samuelsson is like hockey suicide to take a penalty like that because our penalty-killers had done an unbelievable job. That is just lack of composure for a group that played so well. The killing had been so good to that point. We have to learn from that one. We’ve got to sense that, ‘Man, these guys are doing an unbelievable job.’ That’s not on the officials. That’s a good call.”
Samuelsson’s slash was obvious, loud and broke Turcotte’s stick in half. It’s an automatic call. Even with Zucker’s penalty being so dubious, Samuelsson’s penalty cannot happen. Oddly enough, of the five minor penalties the Sabres were called for on Thursday, Samuelsson’s was the only one taken in the defensive zone. The four previous were whistled while the Sabres were in possession of the puck in the offensive zone.
This will be the first test of accountability for this group and given Ruff’s disdain for what Samuelsson did and ultimately turned the game, it would be stunning if he is in the lineup Saturday night against Florida. The Sabres are carrying eight defensemen with Jacob Bryson and Dennis Gilbert in tow. Gilbert skated in warmups Thursday with Zach Benson’s status in question, but Benson returned to the lineup and played well. JJ Peterka remained out despite looking very much like he would be back in during practice this week.
After how poorly the first two games went in Prague, Thursday’s home opener looked every bit of the part of what Ruff wants this group to play like for two periods. They played fast, they played hard, and the played committed together. Even despite the power play going 0-for-5 against the Kings, those two units showed improvement on entries and generating chances.
“We worked hard on (power play) the previous three days, getting in the zone cleaner,” Ruff said. “There’s so much good stuff and I’m about to sit here and be pissed off about the end of the game.”
Lindy won’t be alone in that respect and for as upset as fans are about starting off 0-3-0, for 40 minutes there were plenty of reasons to believe there are good things ahead for this group. It’s unfortunate that the final 20 proved to be a vision of more of the same old thing. But it’s three games and there are a lot more loops on this roller coaster yet to be driven.
“I know we have zero points, and we would love all those six points, but we’re not going to be gripping our sticks in here,” Tuch said. “We’re not going to be going downhill like that. We’re going to be ready to go come Saturday and we’re going to be getting two points.”