After a 7-0 loss at home to the Bruins, the Sabres are showing their youth and inexperience and the anxiety of the situation takes a toll.
BUFFALO — Before this afternoon’s game, Buffalo Sabres coach Don Granato spoke about how the experience of the team is changing late in the season from a psychological standpoint. The team has been battling for a spot in the playoffs and as the number of games on the schedule have whittled down, the pressure both inside and out has increased dramatically.
“Lots of guys are feeling that heat and that pressure, and that’s a privilege to be in a situation where you have to deal with heightened pressure,” Granato said. “It’s what we hoped would happen when we started the season, that we would be in a position that, being as young as we are and thrusting guys into positions with that heightened expectation, that we know it takes experience. To have them gain the experience they’re going through right now, having to battle through physical adversity, psychological adversity, through the long run is going to be healthy for us, it’s going to move us forward, but it is a battle right now.”
That pressure is a talking point because of how their 5-4 shootout loss to Washington played out on Wednesday and how their 5-2 loss to Philadelphia went on Friday. Sunday afternoon offered an opportunity to right things. It was a home game against the Boston Bruins that was the final game of a five-game road trip for them and came a day after playing in Minnesota. Sabres fresh legs against a veteran team (granted the best team in the NHL) that could be road weary and tired after a hard 60 minutes in a different time zone was the perfect setup to get back on the winning side.
It proved to be another opportunity in which the size of the situation proved to win again. The Sabres were humbled by Boston 7-0 and for large parts of the game they played a sort of panicked brand of hockey. It’s the kind of hockey that spoke to how the team is handling the situation with nervous hands and when it spills out in the moment, the puck is in the net and the snowball starts downhill again.
This isn’t an indictment of the team and how it’s been built and how things are going at the moment, it just shows how inexperienced this group is as a whole in dealing with the stress of a playoff race, one which no team seems to want to grab and run away with, and what it’s like to have every game mean a whole hell of a lot more than they seemed to earlier on in the season.
The psychological stress on a young team can manifest itself in the sense of fragility that played out on Sunday.
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It’s three straight losses and the fumbled lead and loss to Washington seems to have produced a bit of a hangover effect. They had a two-goal lead with 10 minutes left to play and, as Granato made note of Sunday morning, they played for goals rather than play for the win. Again, youth feeling good, and to a degree cocky, will play like that. We’ve seen the Sabres do it many times this season in which a two-goal lead turned quickly into a four-or-five-goal lead in the end because they stunted on a team that packed it in for the remainder of the game.
Going from thinking you’re going to roll through to having to defend like your life depends on it is jarring, particularly on the road.
That was never a problem against Boston because they were down, and ultimately out, after 15 seconds when Patrice Bergeron finished a Brad Marchand pass that went through Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen’s legs as he, Owen Power, and Henri Jokiharju lost sight of the puck. As far as ominous starts go, that one cast a shadow over the Sabres they were unable to get out from.
Nearly nine minutes later, Garnet Hathaway made it 2-0 when a home run pass by Jakub Zboril connected and Hathaway blew a shot past Luukkonen. It was a classic “he’d like to have that one back” kind of goal because he had full view of it and the shot came from near the middle of the circle. It was also one in which Rasmus Dahlin and Kale Clague were caught off guard as they appeared ready to make a change. Dahlin tried to pull the pass that banked off the wall and it opened up a wide lane for Hathaway to fly through and have room to rip a slap shot.
Since Dahlin has returned from missing three games with an injury, he has one assist and is a minus-13 in nine games. By all appearances he’s playing through injury, and while that has nobility in that he doesn’t want to leave his team hanging, he doesn’t look like himself at all.
“Dahls battles, he battles,” Granato said after the game. “Lots of guys aren’t 100 percent, I will say that. And we know that each step in Dahls’ career, he battles and pushes further, there’s always that bout with frustration and pressing and trying to do more. We’re seeing that out of Tage, we’re seeing that out of Tucher at times since he’s come back. And that’s part of it, part of learning to deal with that. Is he or other guys 100 percent? Probably not.”
I’m not going to break down any of the other goals in this game, it’s silly to do because I don’t want to go over it again and you all most certainly don’t want to hear about it. But there were some moments that stood out to me that stressed the point about how this team is super tight (in the negative way) right now.
— I know the Sabres aren’t an overly physical team. You could argue pretty convincingly they’re not a physical team at all. Early on in the game, their forecheck was able to get Boston to back off a bit into their own zone but with fly-by coverage. Instead of getting right on the puck carrier, it was more of a constant motion rotation to ensure they were able to keep players up ice and try to force turnovers.
This presented a problem because at no point did the Bruins have their possession genuinely challenged by the forecheck nor was there a threat they’d be played off physically. Compare that to how Boston played similarly high-pressure on their forecheck but hounded the puck carrier at any turn and finished checks along the wall when the opportunity was there.
The Sabres obviously don’t want to get caught up ice and give up odd-man rushes all game long, but coverage got lost often in the neutral zone and even more so once they gained the zone with possession. The Sabres got caught chasing the puck and didn’t pick up their assignments on the backcheck and that allowed goals like the ones to Bergeron (1-0) and Hampus Lindholm (4-0). Puck-chasing stung them on Jake DeBrusk’s goal in the first that made it 3-0, because the Bruins used quick passes as the Sabres defenders all chased after the puck because the coverage was blown. Turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as DeBrusk was by himself at the side of the net when Coyle made a fantastic pass to him.
Getting the combo of poor coverage and great plays makes everything look a little worse and that felt like how most of the game played out, goals scored and otherwise.
— Let’s talk for a moment about toughness. A key reason for bringing in Riley Stillman and Jordan Greenway was to ensure guys like Dahlin, Thompson, and Dylan Cozens wouldn’t need to spend their time tussling with the sandpaper types across the league. Boston has plenty of those kinds of players, and Trent Frederic was able to get under everyone’s skin throughout the game, including one moment where he nearly came to blows with Dahlin. Dahlin came away from that scuffle looking rough and the wear and tear he’s playing through appeared evident. Not great.
Frederic wound up fighting Cozens later on in a play which Cozens said he wanted to finish his check and take it out on him for going after Dahlin. Stillman lamented after the game that he wasn’t able to get after Frederic sooner but didn’t wind up on the ice against him too much until too late.
“I think we need to respond before,” Stillman said. “I need to do a better job of trying to bring energy the way I bring it, me and Bush (Ilya Lyubushkin). I would have loved to have done that earlier, it was just my first opportunity to do so. I think we have to find a way to start and get the lead and play with the lead and grow that way.”
I am certainly not a pro-fight advocate but I’m also aware that sometimes guys have a price to pay when they go too far. Owning up for transgressions is part of the game and it doesn’t even need to be a fight. A big check can do the same thing as a fight because the bench and the fans will respond the same way. But you have to do something, it doesn’t need to be your top players doing it. Instead, it’s a case of being bullied and allowing it to happen. Scut Farkas can’t win every time, sometimes you need to have some Ralphie in you to turn the tide.
Buffalo will get there eventually to give other wannabe bullies their comeuppances by the Sabres’ hands, but in the grand scheme of things, and the underlying theme of all of this of late, says it’s part of the postseason pressure process and something this group is learning about on the fly.
Playoff picture
The Sabres are eight back of the New York Islanders in the first wild card position and six behind Pittsburgh who sits in the second spot. They’re even in games played with the Penguins and have two in hand and one more head-to-head with the Islanders.
More troubling, however, is they have two teams between them and the wild card holders. Florida leads them by five points and Washington has a one-point advantage. That shootout loss stings a bit more seeing that.
The flame of hope for the playoffs isn’t extinguished, but it’s flickering low and the oxygen to keep it lit is nearly gone.
It feels more and more like the losses to Washington and Philadelphia functioned all the more like a direct shot to the solar plexus. The wind has been knocked out of the group but they’re not down for the count. Let’s call it a standing-eight count as the clock winds down.
Is that enough metaphors for everyone? I can try for more, but just know that anything else you might think of that’s out of the same vein also applies.