There’s nothing remotely good for the Buffalo Sabres to take away from a 9-4 loss in which mistakes of all kinds repeated themselves and wound up in the back of the net.
BUFFALO — It’s not supposed to go like this. At least that was the idea.
The bad old days of spinning wheels in the mud with a team of young stars with very little support were supposed to be in the rear-view mirror and the shine of what was nearly a playoff season a year ago was meant to be the first flickers of light from a new, young core of future stars ready to storm the NHL and become a perennial postseason participant.
Whether the team got too high on its own supply or thought it would only get easier as their youthful players gained experience and grew into their NHL careers, the 2023-2024 season has served a harsh reminder that the professional ranks will break you down and humble you at any time, especially when it’s not treated with the proper respect it demands.
Numerous times the Buffalo Sabres have been served a reminder of what happens when they think the job will be easy or if the opponent will roll over. Time and time again the counterpunch is delivered straight to the nose. On Tuesday, the Sabres were served another example of what happens when the easy route is taken but met with heavy resistance in a 9-4 drubbing by the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Too often the Sabres have gone into a game and from the outside the take is, “Well, they can’t lose to these guys…” and seen the game get turned on its head the moment a mistake is made, or a counterpunch is delivered.
The Sabres got the start they were looking for when Rasmus Dahlin scored 30 seconds into the game but gave up the next seven goals over the following 30 minutes which included a natural hat trick by Columbus Blue Jackets winger Kirill Marchenko. They chased Devon Levi after the first four goals and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen was treated just as rudely in relief having to suffer numerous odd-man rushes against and getting screened by his own teammates.
It was bad. It was ugly. It was the worst effort of the season that’s careening rapidly towards irrelevance.
“I feel like when the mistakes are coming at you like that, you just go deeper and deeper,” Sabres captain Kyle Okposo said. “We played that game like a young team. We just played where we were trying to make things happen when they weren’t there, and we were trying to find our game happen. When you’re having a game like that when mistakes are costing you, it’s hard to try and dig yourselves out of that by making pretty plays and not just keeping it as simple as possible and we did not do that tonight.”
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We’ve talked before about the familiarity of some of these losses and how the same things seem to keep happening. The same mistakes, the same way one goal against turns into two or three or four—or seven—and that was brutally apparent against Columbus.
Seeing one mistake turn into one goal against and then very quickly turning into a 3-1 deficit because of other mistakes is maddening. Mistakes of effort or passion are forgivable because they’re borne from trying hard and looking to make a play. Too often of late, however, the mistakes are coming from taking a shortcut, completely misreading the situation, or trying to make an easy play a lot harder by doing too much.
They’re youthful kinds of errors sometimes and you have live with them with a young team, but too often they’re mistakes that keep happening despite knowing how they’ll turn out in the end.
“That’s just a factor of being tight,” Okposo said. “You want to do well, you want to get back in the game, so you try and make an extra play when—you know how it is—when we score three goals and we’re feeling good, everything seems to end up on your stick and it’s just the other way around. We’re giving that team too many chances when we don’t feel good about their game and the more they transition back at us, the better that they feel. The more that they think they can play in their zone and make plays and we’re feeding that narrative too much when we’re down and it’s costing us in the back of our net.”
We mentioned this not all that long ago about how Granato wants his players and this team to feel the heat and the pressure that comes from expectations. He wants them to know what that’s like so they can learn it and adjust. Right now, the way it’s been handled is that of a group that’s too young to rein in the good things and apply them forward and instead collapses in the face of any resistance. That’s something this team didn’t do often last year.
Comebacks seemingly happened often and deficits of one, two, or three goals would be met with an attitude that said, “we can get it back.” Chalk up the lack of that kind of response to the goal luck they’ve had this season. Be it blocked shots, goal posts, or a power play that can’t get out of its own way at times, there’s a severe lack of offensive confidence and that can affect a player of any age.
“I think there are times where we play as a young group and it’s not always easy,” Okposo said. “This is not an easy league. It’s an unforgivable league. If you are off at all, it is going to get shoved down your throat really hard and that’s exactly what happened tonight. And when you don’t have a game that you feel 100 percent comfortable that you can fall back on and play to an identity, that’s what happens. That’s what happened to us and that’s on us.”
Getting this figured out could be as easy as “score goals, duh” but there has to be a way to get things right when the puck isn’t going in as regularly as it did a year ago. That’s what’s stunted them this season. Last year they were able to outscore their issues and the confidence that carried with it was able to override some of their issues. Now that it’s gotten harder and the puck luck isn’t as good and teams are wise to the way the Sabres want to play and defending it well enough…life has gotten more difficult.
What was apparent in the ways in which they tried to dig out was how not everyone was on the same page. It’ll sound like classic coach speak, but when they’re playing together as a five-man unit, they’re one of the most dangerous teams in the league on the attack. Instead, breakouts struggled because forwards were flying up the ice waiting for passes that never came because one opposing forechecker was able to foil the defensemen’s plan to escape the zone. Forwards weren’t circling back to help restart the breakouts and the defensemen had to play long-distance catch with each other to try and free up space to skate ahead. That’s when turnovers were happening or they’d get stuck in their own zone.
I’m the furthest thing from being a coach but even my mediocre eyes could pick out how the Sabres were shooting themselves in the foot trying to break out up the ice. If I can spot it, you can be damn sure the actually hockey-smart people can and are strategizing against it. That’s where calls to put the issues on Granato are tricky because he can scream at them from the bench to not do that, but if the players keep trying to do it to no avail…that’s on them.
It’s youth, and recklessness comes with age, but eventually you learn to stop putting your hand on the hot stove. For every game where the Sabres look like they can be one of the best teams in the NHL (wins against Vegas, the Rangers, Colorado, Toronto for example), there are the head-scratching stink bombs that make us question what’s real and what’s fraudulent.
What’s real right now is that the Sabres are a wildly inconsistent team that’s low on confidence and high on letting mistakes pile up in an instant.
“You have a good game, you feel real good about your game, get a little bit too high,” Tage Thompson said. “Same thing goes, you have a game like this, maybe you get a little too low. It’s just about find that even keel. I feel like good teams, they don’t get distracted by outside noise, and I think maybe that’s been getting to us a little bit. I think we’ve got to try our best to block that out, as tough as it may be.”