The Sabres fall 2-1 in overtime to the Rangers after playing one of their best games of the season.
BUFFALO — When you lose a game 10-4 at home, there’s really nowhere else to go but up and for the Buffalo Sabres, they corrected virtually every issue they had in that embarrassing loss to Dallas on Thursday night against the New York Rangers Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, it proved to be an example that you can do everything correctly and not come away with the win.
The Sabres dropped a hard-fought 2-1 overtime decision to the Rangers and while they nabbed a point from the game, it’s not the two points they should’ve come away with. They deserved a victory, but deserving doesn’t mean anything in sports.
The Sabres outshot the Rangers 33-26 and had 62 percent of the shot attempts at 5-on-5 and 69.6 percent of expected goals. It was the sort of game that should’ve been 3-1 or 3-2 in their favor, but it wound up being their fourth consecutive loss and sixth in the past seven games.
“We needed to play that way, especially last game, but we need to play that way period,” Sabres coach Don Granato said. “Tighter defensively. … More structure that way.”
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If you had a wish list of everything you wanted the Sabres to do better over the past week or so, you got just what you wanted on Saturday. Forechecking was outstanding, they created chances consistently through the game, and they had the Rangers on their heels more often than not and they had each of their lines going well, particularly the reunited young trio of Dylan Cozens, J-J Peterka, and Jack Quinn.
They got a fantastic one-timer goal from Jeff Skinner after a brilliant cross-ice pass by Ilya Lyubushkin and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen played brilliantly. It’s still a point lost in the standings at the time when they need all of them. Sports is never about being fair.
“It gives you confidence (matching up well against Igor Shesterkin), but in the end, it doesn’t matter at this point of the season who we’re playing against, or who I’m playing against, it’s that we have to win games if we want to make the playoffs, it’s as simple as that,” Luukkonen said.
In the past four games, it’s arguable they’ve been goalie’d three times. Stuart Skinner was fantastic against them on Monday, Ilya Sorokin was equally difficult to crack on Tuesday, and now last season’s Vezina winner and MVP finalist Shesterkin showed exactly why he was able to do that Saturday. It’s harsh to say, “them’s the breaks,” but when the margin of error is so slim as the schedule winds down, it’s the most direct truth and the truth can be painful.
“We generated probably enough to score more than one,” Skinner said. “But we’re right back at it on the road here coming up next week. There’s some good things in our game. Obviously, the last few we haven’t been happy with. The way we’ve played, I think that one has got a lot more good things in it. We just keep building on that.”
The scene in a locker room postgame always goes as the decision of the game goes, but Saturday’s defeat had a couple players seated at their stalls simmering in frustration and disappointment over the outcome. It’s easy to understand why. They’d played one of the most complete games they’ve had in a couple weeks and still had to take a loss on the chin that came way of a fluky bounce while trying to kill a penalty in overtime. A classic A-for-effort performance that doesn’t exactly help the situation.
It’s not to say reality is setting in on this young group but given how aware they are of the standings and the situation and everything that goes into it, it’s something at the front of their minds. On Saturday, they didn’t overthink and spent most of the game reacting instinctively and it showed how much better they are when they do that.
Consistency is one of the last things to come along with a young team and if that kind of effort becomes the norm, the Sabres will be just fine. But now they hit the road for three games in Toronto, Washington, and Philadelphia. It’s not do-or-die, but it’s pretty close to that when it comes to keeping playoff dreams alive.