The Sabres were in control up 2-0 after the first period, but six unanswered Kraken goals and yet another obvious meltdown left everyone looking for answers.
BUFFALO — The classic snarky trope for this one would be to ask, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” but had that been the opening this time or any of the other times the Buffalo Sabres blew a lead this season, this post would be over.
The setting for Saturday afternoon’s game against the Seattle Kraken had all the vibes of a late-season tilt between two teams that know they’re fighting it in different ways and the way the game played out… it was the kind of win for Seattle that could spark them.
The Sabres got out to a 2-0 first period lead on goals by Sam Lafferty and a power play marker from Jack Quinn. With just under four minutes to go in the period, they were out-shot-attempting the Kraken 26-4 and held a decisive 15-7 shots on goal advantage at the end of the period.
The Sabres were cruising and opened the second period with an abbreviated power play. The lack of impulse and killer instinct to try and get another goal in that moment and the overall pushback from Seattle was notable, but when Ryker Evans got a pass from Chandler Stephenson and got a shot past Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen after a series of mistakes, it was yet another moment where the collective “uh-oh” was clear as day and the road to unraveling opened wide as the Kraken would score five more goals through the end of the second and through the third period on the way to a 6-2 come-from-behind victory on the road.
“We’ve seen it too many times this year where we give up one and it’s just a disaster,” Dylan Cozens said. “And then they get another and then another. I don’t know why it keeps happening, but we’ve got to figure it out and find a way to not let that happen.”
“Disaster” is the right word for what happened on Saturday. Not knowing why these blown leads and games keep happening is a problem for everyone on the ice, behind the bench, and in the management box needed to figure out before the Sabres crashed into the basement of the Eastern Conference.
“I thought the second period, embarrassing the way we played,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “We had O-zone time, didn’t get to the inside, didn’t get pucks to the net, passed the puck around the perimeter, looked for the pretty play, and eventually it caught up to us. And to give up a goal in the last couple minutes on the play, unacceptable. Just embarrassing, actually.”
More on the Sabres’ latest “embarrassing” “disaster” ahead if you’ve got the stomach for it or you find some grim sense of comfort in these hockey reruns.
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Ye gods, man.
The reaction on social media as the Sabres allowed the game to get away from them and then assisted in letting it get away from some was that it was “unbelievable” to see it happening. As an exclamatory word on its own, yes, allowing six unanswered goals to the Seattle Kraken, who came into the game averaging less than three goals per-game, is indeed unbelievable.
As an occurrence where the Sabres were rolling and in full control of a game only to then fumble it away in a glorious display, that’s unfortunately highly believable. It’s almost expected at this point when they give up a goal in a game that they were in full control of at one point, that things are about to get tight, if not outright deeply uncomfortable. Being that kind of predictable is beyond worrisome.
“The answer is you have to get back on the next shift and do the right things,”
Sabres captain Rasmus Dahlin said. “But we’re doing the right things. We’re trying to do the wrong stuff out there, and it cost us goals against. It’s that simple. If we want to start winning here, we have to change it.”
This isn’t Dahlin’s fault by any stretch, but he is the captain of the team and there’s a guidance aspect from him to help make sure things like this don’t keep happening. He’s just one guy out on the ice, though, and we’ve seen plenty of times in the past where out of the five guys on the ice he’s the one that’s fully engaged, and others aren’t on that same level.
The losses drive Dahlin crazy and he admitted after the game on Saturday that he was trying to stay cool while taking our questions. Being in his role and watching these same things repeating themselves must be enraging.
Having a lead in a game means playing with swagger and a bit of cockiness, and the Sabres certainly do that when things are rolling their way. Young teams, even those with the experience the Sabres have, are guilty of riding the emotional highs and lows hard, but when things suddenly deviate and take a turn for the worse, even for a moment, it lasts for a long, lingering time.
“Young players have to learn,” Dahlin said. “As soon as you start feeling good in this league, it’s over. You have to remind yourself it’s hard every single shift out there. You cannot take any shifts off.”
In Ruff’s case, it’s exasperating. We can only imagine what’s been going through his mind seeing this same thing happening again and again with his team continuing to make similar errors in judgment in situations where their confidence should be sky-high.
“It’s believing that, how you got there, you’ve got to continue to play the same way,” Ruff said. “There’s a discipline to that. Continue to play the same way. Even if you look at when we pulled the goalie. We’re gonna pass it back and forth five times and not – I haven’t looked at it yet, but I don’t think anybody was on the inside, and you need three goals.
“That’s just a mentality that – you’ve got to want to win it the hard way, and the hard way sometimes is you’ve got to win it on the walls, you’ve got to make sure you get it deep; you’ve got to make sure – I mean, you’ve got to make sure you have people back. We gave up a goal, when their goalie shot it around the wall, we gave up a full ice 4-on-2.”
This game was one in which owner Terry Pegula was on-hand for. Witnessing this meltdown makes you wonder what he’s thinking. He’s never wavered about the faith he has in Kevyn Adams and Lindy Ruff to get things going in the right direction and eventually get this franchise back to the Stanley Cup Playoffs, but hearing the guttural boos from the hardest of hardcore fans in the 300 level of KeyBank Center along with the chants of some of them to fire Adams or even for him to sell the team would’ve been hard to ignore.
Those fans stuck around to make sure they could be heard and with most of the fans having left earlier in the third period knowing full-well how that game was going to end, you wonder when something could happen that changes the mix on or off the ice.