It’s been five weeks since his injury during the Prospects Challenge and his conditioning assignment in the AHL offers him a chance to shine.
ROCHESTER — This wasn’t the way Matt Savoie’s month of October was ideally supposed to go, but there’s an old cliché about best laid plans that fits well here.
Savoie was injured September 18th in the opening minutes of the Prospects Challenge finale in Buffalo against Pittsburgh, a shoulder injury that caused him to miss training camp and opened the door for his WHL junior teammate Zach Benson to force his way onto the Buffalo Sabres roster.
On Wednesday night, Savoie made his season debut with the Rochester Americans, five weeks exactly after he was injured. He played on a line with fellow top prospects Isak Rosén and Jiri Kulich and assisted on Michael Mersch’s power play goal in the first period to help the Americans to a 4-3 come from behind victory against the Charlotte Checkers.
The result of the game was good for the team and Kulich continued his torrid goal scoring to start the year—he scored his fifth goal in five games to kickstart the Americans’ third period rally—but all eyes were on Savoie to see if his time to claim a spot in the NHL is coming when his conditioning assignment ends late next week.
“I like him a ton,” Americans coach Seth Appert said. “He’s a guy that you feel good when you call his name and put him out for a shift because whether the shift is great or it’s just OK, he’s going to play the right way, he’s going to play fast, he’s going to be competitive, he’s going to hunt pucks and try to be an honest, winning hockey player. He just drips of a hockey player, he really does.”
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Savoie’s next two weeks with the Americans, in which he’ll ideally play in six games with the team, are an in-season preseason slate for him with the exception being that the games will be intense and life in the AHL is a fair bit tougher than in the NHL.
Appert set up Savoie with Kulich and Rosén because he asked Savoie where he’d be most comfortable playing. His choice was on the wing.
“There’s a bigger picture of what position will he play in the NHL,” Appert said before the game. “I don’t have that answer. That’s my not call to make. So, think it was more important what are you most comfortable with?”
Having him play with the Sabres top two forward prospects in the AHL gave the appearance of loading up a line and letting them run free to go try to score goals and frustrate Charlotte with speed and skill. While those components are strengths to all three players’ games, Appert cautioned them in advance that if they chased the offense, they’ll wind up getting buried in chances against and probably not play the kind of game they’re hoping to play.
Instead, they played it the way that got the results they were looking for in the end.
“They had an honesty to their game,” Appert said. “For young skill guys, there’s a real honesty to their game collectively. They were winning puck battles, they weren’t turning pucks over, they were playing behind the defense when it was time their defense. So overall it was a pretty good game for those three.”
By no means was it an easy first game back for Savoie.
The Checkers played a “smothering” kind of game according to Appert which necessitated smart puck decisions and coverage. He had two shots on goal to go with the slick power play assist in the first period. He also took a questionable slashing penalty in the second period that was followed up by an even more dubious interference penalty against Filip Cederqvist as Tyson Kozak was on a shorthanded breakaway. That led to a very brief 5-on-3 power play for Charlotte and an eventual power play goal by Michael Benning after Savoie was released from the box.
In the end, it was Savoie’s linemates that keyed a comeback in the third when Rochester scored three times in 2:42 with under six minutes left to take it from a 3-1 deficit to a 4-3 lead. Kulich’s goal made it 3-2 which was followed by Aleksandr Kisakov batting one in 58 seconds later to tie it 3-3. Rosén’s bizarre turnaround slapper that went through Checkers goalie Spencer Knight proved to be the game-winner. Their effort and responsibility landed them ice time in the closing minutes to hold down the lead.
It’s one thing to spark the offense, it’s another to earn the shot to shut it down late and come away victorious in the end.
“It’s a big thing to be a good two-way player, be good defensively at the pro level,” Savoie said. “I think that’s one of my biggest adjustments I’m going to have to make coming from junior. In junior, I was always out there with the lead or protecting the lead so I feel pretty comfortable out there. Yeah, we shut it down, didn’t give them too much.”
It may seem like a ho-hum moment in a mid-week AHL game, but it’s all part of the testing process for Savoie and the others. It’s educational and it’s competition for guys that age at this level. It’s important to win, yes, but it’s also important to learn from potential failures and mistakes, too. For a first game of the season and to earn his first professional point in hockey, it was a good first look at Savoie, particularly after his debut during the AHL’s Eastern Conference Final made for a rough introduction to the pros.
“I was kind of thrown into the fire a little bit, just how heavy the competition was in the Conference Finals last year and how veteran that team was, but felt more confident, more comfortable today,” Savoie said. “There’s obviously things I can clean up in my game to play better but felt pretty good out there.”
It’s one game down and five more to go in Rochester and while it feels like there’s a lot of time to figure out what exactly to do with him when the time is up, where he takes things from here is going to be very interesting.
“There’s a lot of good veteran guys on this team that have been playing pro for a long time,” Savoie said. “And it’s a good mix. There’s also a lot of good young guys. So just taking it in, being a part of the group, being a part of the guys, and just working hard and getting better.”