The Sabres won their third straight game with a 4-3 decision over the New Jersey Devils in which they were bullied and left more questions to be answered.
When last the Buffalo Sabres met the New Jersey Devils, it was the second game of the season in Prague and J-J Peterka made it less than two minutes into the game before he was knocked out of the game by a high hit from defenseman Brenden Dillon that, incredibly, resulted in just a minor penalty.
The hit cost Peterka the next two games as he recovered from a concussion while Dillon went unpunished for the highly questionable hit. Even though that happened at the start of October, there was some wonder if retribution would be doled out for the play. After all, when Connor Clifton injured Devils captain Nico Hischier last season with a high, hard hit, New Jersey made it a point to get after him the following two games against Buffalo to get their own pound of flesh.
It’s not written into stone that such things happen but it’s the unwritten code that generally gets followed and that’s how it goes. That’s why when Jack Quinn took a heavy hit at the blue line from Kurtis MacDermid with Dillon right next to him just more than five minutes into the game that you felt that would be the reminder the Sabres would need that, yes, this will be a rough day and they’d need to be ready.
That’s what made the sights of Jason Zucker scoring to make it 4-1 late in the second period only get checked from behind by Stefan Noesen and into the Devils net (with no penalty called). With the score 4-2 in the third period, Noesen stuck again with a brutal late and high hit on Tage Thompson that put the alternate captain down on the ice and out of the game so difficult to comprehend.
There was no physical pushback, no score-settling fight, no line brawl or even a nasty scrum. There was a Sabres win in which they held on 4-3. The win came after they gave up a shorthanded goal to Jack Hughes while on the major power play when Noesen was assessed a match penalty.
At 4-3, logic in how the NHL is played today dictates that looking for payback might be the fastest way to handing the opposition the opportunity to tie or win the game. The Sabres, who entered the day 13 points out of the second wild card and last in the Eastern Conference, wanted the win.
“Our response is we won,” Zucker said. “He can hit me from behind – we scored a goal. So, I mean, (Noesen) made two plays that cost their team a win, so we’ll take that all day. We can talk about responding, but you’re not going to go do something that’s going to cost our team a win when you don’t know what happened. So, I could’ve dropped my gloves and tried to fight someone, but I’m going to get a two, five and a 10 for instigating. I’m going to get kicked out of the game. If I respond differently after he hits me after my goal, I’m going to take a penalty and that’s going to cost us, possibly. So, a lot of the time, the best response is to not do anything.”
Turning the other cheek is noble and in the world outside the hockey rink. But this was on the ice and reactions were seemingly muted. Noesen’s hit wasn’t seen by any of the Sabres on the ice and although guys on the bench were able to call out who did it, and some wanted to get out there and get their own pound of flesh, it didn’t happen today.
Many fans wanted to see the team’s star player avenged for the hit despite the culprit not being available to pay for his sin. For those fans, it was another glaring example of the Sabres being unable to stand up to a team bullying them.
“Bullshit,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “That’s bullshit. Let’s go. Next question.”
A day to celebrate a win is tinged with the desire to fulfill the bloodlust that runs through the sport but opens up a philosophical debate of sorts. When is the right time to answer back? Is there a correct time to deliver what’s believed to be owed? Is discretion the better part of valor in a sport that’s often controlled by emotions that run hot?
Let’s examine this further.
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Forgive Sabres fans if they’re eager to see an opponent get what may or may not be coming to them when one of their favorite players is endangered by a dangerous, reckless hit.
The memories of Milan Lucic steamrolling Ryan Miller in November 2011 linger. Slightly lesser slights that went without some form of retribution or even someone standing up for them (Jack Eichel getting smoked by Nikita Zadorov in Denver; Rasmus Dahlin taking a head shot from Erik Černák in Tampa) hang in their memory.
Remembering how Paul Gaustad and other Sabres stood by while Miller was laid out while Lucic went uncontested is an image that made then GM Darcy Regier responded by adding John Scott and Steve Ott the following year to protect everyone and give them a more physical edge. While toughness was addressed, the Sabres were never the same after that and things have spiraled out ever since. That moment is refreshed every time there’s a questionable hit against a Sabres player and there’s no one there to make the opponent answer for doing it.
I’m not all about fighting aimlessly, but my toxic sports trait is that the Wild West days of the 80s and early 90s served a purpose and kept a lot of people a lot more honest knowing that if they did anything really deeply slimy, especially against a star player, they’d have to eat shit for doing it and potentially in perpetuity if it was egregious enough. There’s also the old competitor in me that if someone did that to a teammate or friend of mine, there’d be hell to pay by my own hands for it.
But after the numerous times seeing this stuff happen to Sabres players and to not see anyone step up for it happening on top of the countless times the Devils delivered hard hits that toed the line between being too much, I kept waiting for someone to say, “Forget this, I’m getting this guy.” After seeing Noesen take out Thompson, I expected it. Of course, the other guys on the ice have to see who did it and what happened, too.
“That’s definitely on us,” Mattias Samuelsson said. “I was on the ice, I take some responsibility for that, I didn’t really know what happened or who did it. It’s bullshit, too, when the guy gets kicked out and you can’t respond afterwards. Yeah, I do think, myself included, needs to do something about it. I think there was a lot of confusion and stuff going on.”
Alex Tuch made it a point to rough up Devils defenseman Jonathan Kovacevic well away from the play after the major power play was up. It was Tuch who also confronted Dillon in Prague after he brained Peterka. It shouldn’t have to be Tuch to do the enforcement and him wrestling Dillon in October was not a fight he, nor Sabres management, wanted to see.
Samuelsson delivered a big hit later in the third on Nathan Bastian as well and the Sabres were notably much more physical in the final six or seven minutes, but there was no fight. There wasn’t even a scrum. But there was a win, two more points in the standings and a defiance on the part of the players to say it was more important to get payback on the scoreboard, not the penalty sheet even though there’s an understanding that being bullied should not be an option either.
“What’s most important is to win and get two points,” Dahlin said. “But I agree with you, we need more of a pushback for sure, but all we wanted to do was get those two points, and tomorrow we can focus on the other things.”
The memories fans carry with them aren’t necessarily the ones the players share. Some of them were there for Eichel getting crushed against Colorado, more of them were there when Dahlin was injured against the Lightning. Casey Nelson, who stood by idly when Eichel was hit, was never the same player again after he felt like he let the team down.
The Dahlin play had reverberations that went further because coach Ralph Krueger did want payback. Tough guy Dalton Smith was called up from Rochester to get after Černák. Evan Rodrigues was scratched for that matchup against Tampa Bay for Smith to play and immediately requested a trade. Smith played 1:26, was on-ice for a Sabres goal and got into a shoving match with Luke Schenn that resulted in a roughing minor. No fight with Černák, no payback for Dahlin, and the Lightning roared back after being down 4-1 to win 6-4 on New Year’s Eve 2019. Of the many low nights over the past 14 years since the Sabres last made the playoffs, that night is among the worst because of the layers of face-palming it provided.
Even when the intent is to do right by “the code” so to speak, it went so sideways that doing nothing at all would’ve worked out better in the end. And who knows, maybe they don’t blow a 4-1 lead against Tampa and get two points out of that game instead of zero. If they had, the Sabres would’ve wound up in the postseason bubble showdown when the league resumed to finish the season during the Covid shutdown. Whoops.
There’s a balance to be struck through all of this.
Yes, the Sabres needed to put the game away and not blow what was a 4-1 lead at one point. They had to do that. Blowing a three-goal lead (twice) in that game after what happened would’ve been the real unofficial “Game Over” moment for the rest of the season. There would’ve been no way to stomach all of that after all the other games previously that they’d lost in similar fashion that didn’t involve their top scorer getting knocked out of the game on a dirty hit. It would’ve been a lesson learned, sure, but it would’ve been one that made all of the players taste bile for years to come because of it. No thanks.
There’s also something to be said about standing up for teammates and standing up for yourselves. The Devils got increasingly more physical and approached and crossed the line with more regularity as the game went on and there was no return of that serve. The line between turning the other cheek and getting bullied was blurred. Walking away with a win and knowing that Thompson passed the concussion tests and would be available to practice on Monday (although he’ll probably get a maintenance day) allows the Sabres to say they did the right thing and got the job done.
That said, teams that play a more similar roughneck style the way the Devils did on Sunday know full-well they can play the role of shitheels for a game and suffer little to no consequences for it. Chances are they already knew this, but after seeing Thompson get rocked with a dirty hit and nothing happened to the offending player only hammered it home and that’s not a reputation you want hanging around your neck as a team.
Thompson is doing well and that’s good. The Sabres won’t get to meet the Devils again this season and if they had any designs on getting payback, it’s tabled until next season and that’s a long time to take a number.