The Sabres threatened to blow another big lead in the third but closed out the Hurricanes 4-2 thanks to a Ryan McLeod hat trick that exists in the theoretical realm.
BUFFALO — The Buffalo Sabres don’t like to make things easy.
After building a 3-0 lead on the Carolina Hurricanes after two periods, the Sabres saw the lead whittled away in the third down to 3-2 as they, to borrow an English football term, parked the bus.
The Sabres let the Hurricanes pepper away with 33 shot attempts in the final 20 minutes while only getting six of their own. In the end, Carolina only got eight of them on net while Buffalo got zero shots on goal.
And yet, Ryan McLeod completed his hat trick with an awarded goal with 24 seconds to go to ice the game and provide the 4-2 final score.
McLeod chased down a Tage Thompson shot attempt on the empty net that went off the post from long range and as he went to bury it, Hurricanes burly, bearded back-liner Brent Burns bashed McLeod’s stick as he went to shoot blowing it to pieces in the process.
Scoring a goal without a shot on goal in a period in which the Sabres had zero shots on goal is the kind of catnip trivia fans go wild for. They’re the first team to do that in a 20-minute period since the NHL data became available in 1965-1966.
“We, obviously of course, had to make it interesting there and nerve-wracking, but we found a way,” Dylan Cozens said.
More ahead from a game that existed on the ethereal plane.
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The Sabres never making things easy and also making sure it’s unique is almost their specialty. Yet after Saturday’s debacle against Seattle, this team has won three of its last four games and they’ve won six of the last 10. Of course, that run of having more wins than losses followed the nightmare 13-game winless streak.
From that initial perspective, it looks like things are turning around, although when you zoom out, the Sabres are a team that have won six of their last 23 games with a 6-13-4 record and, boy, that’s a really grim view of things because that losing streak started the day before (American) Thanksgiving.
Picture having the Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi “certain point of view” debate about who Darth Vader is but make it about the Buffalo Sabres winning and losing games and whether they’re turning a corner and coming out of things or if they’re just a bad team that wins occasionally.
The “dude, come on” expression on Luke’s face while Obi-Wan then talks his way around, yet practically discusses the relationship he had with his father, Anakin. It’s a great scene about the layers of nuance that existed in that fictional world. In the very real world of the Sabres, there’s less evil, less nuance, but twice as much drama involving a team that’s trying to figure out who and what they are again while trying to win more hockey games than they lose.
Talking about this team and the waves they’ve been riding for two years now requires the kind of philosophical approach one needs to understand that a team that struggles to score goals consistently can then score a goal without a shot.
It’s the sound of one hand clapping. It’s the solution to the query of whether or not a tree that falls in the forest makes a sound if no one is there to hear it. The ponderances of the universe all come forth when you’re trying to figure out if Ryan McLeod actually had a hat trick or Tage Thompson was the rightful goal scorer from a shot that went off the post on a net without a goalie.
You can ask “why” but I can respond with, why not? The Hurricanes attempted 91 shots in the game, a total not seen in what feels like forever against the Sabres. It’s the kind of gaudy total that evokes memories of the 2014-2015 team that bled chances against like that every game. This was more of a controlled detonation though.
Carolina tries to overwhelm teams by throwing everything at the net and get opposing teams running around and potentially panicked. Some of that we saw from the Sabres in the third period, but on the whole, they bent a lot but didn’t break. They broke against Colorado, and they disintegrated against Seattle. The seams held together on Wednesday.
“I thought our intentions were good,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “We didn’t have shots, but we had two breakaways, we had a two-on-one, we had Dahlin walk in that didn’t shoot. There was lots of good opportunities to get the puck on the net. I know a couple of flanked shots that got blocked, but the intentions and the way we played were good.”
When you factor into that an outstanding game from Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen in which he made 35 saves, that’s how a team that’s been down in the dumps too often like the Sabres beats a Hurricanes team that has Stanley Cup aspirations. It’s also a case of Buffalo beating a team they’ve had a horrible time with over the past few years.
Going into the game, the Hurricanes were 16-2-1 against the Sabres since 2016-2017, but now Buffalo has won two in a row against them going to back to last season. The short view is the Sabres are on a roll, but the big picture says this win, as good as it is for them, is a blip on the radar.
The Sabres want to have their minds on the big picture (playoffs) but they’ve gotten themselves down into a place in the standings where if they’re getting that far ahead of themselves, they’ll get lost in the distance. This is the non-cliché way of saying that taking things one game at a time is the best way to get things going in the right direction with regularity.
“I haven’t looked at the standings, I haven’t looked at point(s),” Luukkonen said. “In the end, that just – right now, we’ve dug our own hole. Nobody’s going to help us out of it. So, it’s up to us. It doesn’t matter what the other teams are doing, if they’re winning or losing. In the end, it’s up to us. I don’t think we gain anything from hoping and wishing some other team will win. It’s in our hands right now. It has been the whole season. We dug the hole ourselves, and nobody else is coming to help us out of it.”
The Sabres other goal of the game belonged to Dylan Cozens and as good as it is for him to keep scoring and keep the positives going, it’s definitely for the best he had that kind of contribution because even for all of Carolina’s “throw everything toward the net always” game plan, it was a tough defensive night for Cozens.
Individually, Cozens’ CF% was 18.75 (6 for, 26 against) and a 14.6 xGF% (stats via Natural Stat Trick). At some point in the second period, Ruff made a change in which Cozens and McLeod switched lines. That put McLeod with Jason Zucker and Tage Thompson while Cozens went with J-J Peterka and Alex Tuch.
As lines go, NST clocked Zucker-Cozens-Thompson for 4:34 ice time all together with a 20 CF% (3-12) and a 34.01 xGF%. In 4:58, Peterka-Cozens-Tuch had 7.14 CF% (1-13) and a 6.23 xGF%.
By comparison, McLeod with Peterka and Tuch in 5:37 had 61.1 CF% (11-7) and 84.86 xGF% while McLeod with Zucker and Thompson in 6:25 had 38.1 CF% (8-13) and 54.58 xGF%. McLeod’s offense and overall play certainly earned him the switch as well as the beefed-up ice time (17:06 when he averages 15:31) and Cozens’ rough night didn’t go ignored as he had 13:38 TOI when he’s averaged 17:25 this season.
One night doesn’t make a season, obviously, and scoring a goal helps make up for a tough night otherwise, but it’s not what you want to see—especially on home ice where you’re supposed to have the better matchups.