With just one win in four games of their five-game road trip, the revived dream of the postseason is all but dead.
The Buffalo Sabres play since essentially the start of the new year has been encouraging at the least, inspiring at the most, but in the end the result will be disappointment.
After a 4-1 loss to Detroit that kicked off this five-game road trip that was virtually going to make or break their season, they followed that up with their first ever win against Seattle, 6-2 and a 3-2 loss to Vancouver in which they played 10-15 strong minutes and were nearly able to pull off a stunner.
But Thursday night’s 8-3 loss in Edmonton has the Sabres sitting seven points back of Detroit for the second wild card spot with 11 games left to play. They allowed six unanswered goals, five in the third period, but the game was in-hand after Edmonton made it 4-3 with a Darnell Nurse shot through a crowd. That was followed by a Mattias Ekholm blast on a virtual 3-on-1 to make it 5-3. After that, things snowballed, and Buffalo couldn’t get it back to within one on a power play with under 8 minutes to play. The final three goals of the period were salt in the wound in a night filled with terrible puck luck and some unreal shots from the home side.
Acceptance is how we’re going to handle things here. We’re accepting that however the final 11 games play out that playoffs are no longer a realistic possibility and it’s time to take stock of how this season has gone. Yes, they have one more game with Detroit. Yes, they have two more at home with Washington who sits just out of the playoff picture behind the Red Wings. But unless Buffalo wins out and the rest of the teams in front of them fall apart completely, it’s all but done.
So…how’d we get to this point? Let’s scope it out.
The content below was originally paywalled.
Doing a season post-mortem before a team is officially eliminated from playoff contention or the season actually ends is a bit gauche, but there are a few things that stick out about this year’s version of the Sabres that worth noting right now and to see how those things play out the rest of the way.
Power Play
If there’s leading suspect for what helped kill the Sabres chances to make it to the playoffs this year, the lack of success on the power play is it.
They’ve currently got the sixth worst power play in the NHL (16.6 percent). The teams keeping them out of the basement right now: Chicago (16.1), Pittsburgh (14.7), Calgary (14.6), Columbus (14.4), and Philadelphia (12.7). That Philadelphia is tenuously holding onto a playoff spot with a power play that bad is remarkable, but they also have the league’s third best penalty kill. It’s a complicated balance, but it’s how they’ve lived.
The Sabres penalty kill has been good of late, and it’s something they can take pride in, but the power play’s lack of punch is a major factor as to why scoring is down compared to last season and why there are a lot of games that have been on a razor’s edge that haven’t gone their way. It’s impossible to ignore and that it’s been a work-in-progress for the entire season is something Don Granato and Kevyn Adams need to have a long discussion about if they don’t stumble upon the answer in the final few weeks.
With the over-abundance of offensive talent they have and can ice in a given power play situation, there is no good excuse for why the power play has struggled so much, so often.
Injuries
Another major suspect for the team’s inconsistency this season is health. In retrospect, it was deeply ominous when they lost Jack Quinn over the summer to a torn Achilles’ tendon. It’s also a moment that Adams would like a do-over on as well for not finding a more game-ready forward to take his place while Quinn rehabbed to return.
The loss of Mattias Samuelsson for times this season and then ultimately losing him for the rest of the season hurt them. Losing Alex Tuch, Jeff Skinner, and Tage Thompson for different parts of the season also affected them by not having them on the ice, obviously, but also getting them back early but clearly still affected by their ailments which meant they weren’t getting the best version of those players.
NHL Injury Viz highlighted this by pointing out that of the players injured around the league this season, the Sabres lost the most production and value using WAR+ as the measurement. It goes without saying that it’s hard to win without your best players, but it’s hard to play consistently well when your best players are also playing through injuries to try and help the team and save the season.
Keep in mind, any one of Tuch/Thompson/Skinner etc. at 75-to-85 percent are exponentially better out there than guys out of the AHL whose talent doesn’t match up or aren’t ready for those kinds of responsibilities. It’s tough. I know everyone is champing at the bit to see Jiri Kulich and Isak Rosén more in the NHL. Their time is coming, eventually. They just have to be better and more consistent in Rochester. They’re young and the Sabres don’t necessarily need to be any younger.
A few words on goaltending
A lot will be (correctly) made of Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen rising to take over the No. 1 job and (seemingly) securing the position after many years of upheaval and turnover and overall poor play at it. And that’s right to do so because Luukkonen has earned each and every bit of praise and accolade he has gotten and will get for his performance this season. He’s focused, he’s playing smart, and he’s playing the position like someone who belongs in the No. 1 job.
However.
It cannot be forgotten how haphazard and bizarrely treated this position has been over the past few years. Essentially since Linus Ullmark signed with Boston, goaltending has been a position where management has been trying to juggle chainsaws.
We’re not going to re-litigate decisions of the past, but we are going to make sure to point out that the Sabres had no Plan B in case Ullmark left and the only reason the position battle has been quelled is because of Luukkonen’s outstanding play. They’ve made no other decisions that showed they’ve had a proper handle on the situation or had a feel for how things would go.
From when Ullmark departed, they opted to go with Craig Anderson and Aaron Dell. Anderson, who many thought was going to retire after his brief stay with the Washington Capitals, was happy to land somewhere he could play and play and play often. Dell infamously flamed out in training camp and had the No. 2 job in Buffalo taken away by Dustin Tokarski. Anderson was steady, but he was also older than most everyone else in the NHL at any position. Injuries forced Dell, Luukkonen, Malcolm Subban, and Michael Houser into games in Buffalo.
That they stuck with Anderson last season and signed Eric Comrie as a bit of a lottery ticket after he played well in Winnipeg while Connor Hellebuyck was injured the year before. They thought it was his time to ascend and become a No. 1-B to help make sure Anderson didn’t have to shoulder most of the weight at the position at age 40. Instead, Comrie got hurt for the first time in his career and Luukkonen was pressed into the situation out of Rochester after he had a rough training camp.
Anderson was good when he could play, but both Comrie and Luukkonen went through fits and starts. Luukkonen played fantastic for a stretch in November and December but struggled after that. Eventually, Devon Levi came out of Northeastern and played well enough in goal to unseat everyone late in the season and nearly take them to the playoffs.
That led us into this season when the plan as to who was going to play the most was very unclear. The assumption was the job was Levi’s to take hold of unless he wasn’t ready to take it and run at 21 years old. But with Comrie and Luukkonen also in camp still, and how they were not eager to carry three goalies again this season after doing it the year before, the wound up carrying three goalies anyway due in part to Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy having back surgery during training camp and not wanting to put either Comrie or Luukkonen on waivers to, more than likely, be snatched up by the rival Lightning.
The three-goalie set up proved to be brutal yet again as guy were unable to get the kind of game action needed to get into a rhythm and all it does is piss off all three goalies, even if they do put on a good face about it. Levi and Comrie struggled, and Levi was eventually sent to Rochester but was back a week later. Levi and Comrie swapped time in Rochester for a bit to start 2024, but eventually Levi went back to the AHL to play games he desperately needed to play as opposed to sitting and watching Luukkonen play outstanding.
The big “What If?” here is what would this situation have been like if Luukkonen wasn’t playing like one of the five best goalies in the NHL? Would they have been trotting all three goalies out there again the whole season splitting starts hoping someone caught fire to give them the majority of games?
Everyone is saying now that this is how development is supposed to work when it comes to Luukkonen and how he’s stronger for having dealt with the messed-up path to the No. 1 job dealing with the constant ups-and-downs from the ECHL to the AHL and the NHL, injury, COVID — all of it. And yes, he is mentally tougher and he’s in better shape than he’s ever been. But he’s also like this because he’s been motivated by seeing Levi seemingly having the golden road set ahead of him to the No. 1 job as well.
It was Adams who acquired Levi and it was Botterill who drafted Luukkonen and GMs always love their guys. Adams has said all the right things about Luukkonen, and he made sure to mention to us last summer about how he invited Luukkonen to his house to watch playoffs and talk about the future with the team. There should be no hurry to move Levi up the ladder although it seems certain he’ll be the backup to Luukkonen next season.
You can have success with two excellent young goalies, but now Adams has to figure out what kind of contract to give Luukkonen this summer since he’s a restricted free agent. Figuring out how much to pay him and how many years to give him.
There’s a discussion to be had about Don Granato but I feel it’s best to save that for the very end of the season. I understand there are a lot of fans eager to see a coaching change to move this group ahead to the next stage in their development to becoming a playoff team, but after having a seat front-and-center for many coaching changes before this, I’m very much leery of change for change’s sake.
That said, some of the points we’ve gone over before this play into that assessment come end of the year. I understand that the goal was to make the playoffs and they’ve fallen short of that, but sometimes that goes deeper than the guy calling the lines.