The Buffalo Sabres 3-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues highlighted many of the issues that have plagued them all season long.
BUFFALO — After getting goalie’d by Jake Oettinger and the Dallas Stars on Tuesday night, Saturday’s matinee against St. Louis offered the Buffalo Sabres the opportunity to show that, yes, what they’ve seemingly figured out over the past few weeks is real and that a different version of this up-and-down team had finally emerged.
Alas, the Blues took the game 3-1 and much of what the Sabres did during the game looked all too similar to other performances we’ve seen this season.
The Sabres again gave up the first goal of the game in the first period. They, again, battled back to tie it up only to lose the lead moments later which got the fully ensconced in a playoff battle Blues to lock things down and force the Sabres to decide if they were going to dig in or try to do things the “easy” way.
The Sabres chose the latter which sent them head long into a fully frustrating afternoon of hockey chasing the opponents.
“This game is different than the other night certainly in many respects and all of them from the foundation of just working and not working hard enough tonight and not working toward the front of the net enough tonight,” Sabres coach Don Granato said. “Simple. Any other thing you want to discuss after that, that’s the primary. We need to elevate work ethic, compete level, specifically to the net. Period.”
Granato is 100 percent correct in saying it was different than Tuesday’s game against Dallas. It was. But the result was the same and the road taken to that result was one well-traveled.
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The Sabres loss to Dallas provided a free-flowing kind of game in which shots were relatively easy to come by and gaining the zone wasn’t a 200-foot fight up the ice. Unfortunately for Buffalo, Saturday’s game was the polar opposite.
We’ve seen in more than a few games this season that when opponents opt to bottle up the neutral zone the Sabres grow frustrated with it because their desire to use speed and skill is put to the test. Trying to skate the puck through defenders who are both putting their bodies and sticks in the way is like taking the longest route to a destination with the most tolls to pay. The Sabres don’t want to dump the puck in and go after it, but the game sometimes forces that to be the only option.
“At the end of the day you have to make a read on what’s in front of you and if they’re backing up and their D have a pretty good step on you, you dump it in they’re just going to get it and break out,” Jeff Skinner said. “Every time those things happen you have to make a read so it’s hard really. Obviously in general we’re not doing a good enough job of getting in the zone and sustaining pressure, having zone time, so that could be part of it. But it’s hard to really sort of single out one thing like that.”
It was just one of a few problems the Sabres had on Saturday. The power play proved, again, to be yet another one. Buffalo had three power plays and came up with zero goals on the man advantage. While their first power play opportunity showed promise, their final two looked too much like many of their efforts this season where gaining the zone was difficult enough, never mind setting things up and generating chances. After a second period power play ran into problems, Dylan Cozens skated off on a change and smashed his stick against the boards before tossing the broken twig down the hallway. It was compounded frustration in an image but emblematic of the offensive issues they’ve run into in all situations all season long.
“I just think the assertiveness, the willingness to get to the net, the willingness to get second chances, third chances,” Kyle Okposo said. “Just putting the puck in, competing and grinding. We had all day in the offensive zone to kind of make plays and skate around, but the urgency to score, the jam that we need in our game, just isn’t quite there. It doesn’t mean we’re not playing hard. We have more gears than we’re showing.”
These have been issues all season long and, man, I get it. It’s been a frustrating season. The expectations were high coming into the year and the rest of the league was going to adjust to a lot of what they were doing. Hell, we saw a lot of those adjustments in the second half of last season. What’s more frustrating is they’ve, for the most part, improved in many areas they were very poor in last season, all the offense had to do was not fall in on itself.
Opponents defending the Sabres tighter and in more boring fashion is a key part of it. When you add to it that the power play turned to mush, key players got injured before and during the season, and shooting percentages returning to earth all conspired to turn their offense into a pedestrian one. Still, seeing and hearing about how compete level wasn’t there or they were lacking a will to work hard to get things done is maddening and yet deeply understandable.
The league is hard and every game is difficult, even against the worst of teams, and no team is ever going to be perfect in all facets for 82 of them. Still, a younger team going through fits of frustration is going to happen, but what’s been taught and shown repeatedly has to stick more regularly…right?
“Well, it’s not sinking in consistent enough,” Granato said. “You feel good about generating chances. Generating chances, it’s not natural. That takes time for guys to natural go all the time, make it a habit. We’re talking about something that needs to become a habit, an ingrained habit.
“You look at goals and you look at incidents before goals, there’s a lot of action around the perimeter. And the wiser players, the more experienced players know when to get up from the perimeter to the net. It’s not as easy as just go to the net. You have to go there – a lot of it is timed. And then again, the willingness to put it to the net for others, instead of look for a better play. So, the inconsistencies you see are part of, unfortunately, working to build it as more [of a] habit. But when you generate chances, sometimes you get the false sense of you don’t need to go there quite right now.”
It’s hard this whole hockey thing and it’s even harder with high expectations. That doesn’t mean standards have to slip when times get tough, however. That’s something the Sabres must be cognizant of as the already very slim hopes of the postseason get diced even further with each point-free result.
“I’m surprised. I mean, it wouldn’t have been where I thought we would be going into the season,” Okposo said. “Hindsight is 20-20, but I can sit back and look at things that we did or we didn’t do and there’s a lot of things that go into where we are. That’s gonna have a ripple effect, for sure, on our team. We just have to try to find another gear here because time is running out.”