After a four-game losing streak, a Sabres 5-4 win provides an example of what it means to use positive reinforcement on the ice.
BUFFALO — It hasn’t been a fun time for the Sabres over the past…month or so, but when you get a game where, for the most part, everything seems to click, and you come away with a win it’s a great night. Such was the case for the Buffalo Sabres in their 5-4 win over the New Jersey Devils.
Was it a perfect performance? No. Did we see the high-octane offense come back from dormancy? We did. Was their offensive skill on display throughout the game? It damn sure was.
It’s not all sunshine, of course. There was some classic goaltending from Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen with great stops and head-scratching goals allowed, both ones that counted and did not. The confidence dropped significantly in the third period when the Devils, thanks to Jack Hughes, clawed back to within a goal. But unlike previous games, they bent and didn’t break.
What was important for Buffalo is that they not only got the opening goal of the game, but they were able to punch back any time New Jersey was able to get back to within a goal early on and extend the lead. When you head into a game against an elite NHL team after losing 10 of the previous 12 games played, it would be easy to fall back into old habits and allowing negativity to rule the day. But it didn’t happen on Friday night, even if it may have been trying to take over.
“This is a psychological game,” Sabres captain Kyle Okposo said. “When you’re playing in the NHL, it’s not like you’re playing one or two games a week. When you play three, four games a week, your body and your mind break down and as a young team I think we did a really good job up to this point, but we just had that lapse at the wrong time. I thought we just broke a little bit psychologically in how we play and how we think about the game and how we play together, and it can turn around like that. A night like tonight is a step in the right direction.”
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The Sabres aren’t technically out of the playoff race yet, they’re hanging around but seemingly by a thread. There’s the Pollyanna idea they could get hot, win out and possibly go screaming into the playoffs. But reality says that’s not likely, especially after Tage Thompson, who scored his 44th of the season, had an awkward collision with Timo Meier and is questionable for Saturday’s late-afternoon absolutely-must-win-in-regulation-at-all-costs game against the Islanders.
Keeping that kind of reality out of mind is really difficult. It’s even tougher when knuckleheads like me start framing questions to players about what they want to accomplish this season to take into next year. Pessimism vs. reality and all that, but the reality for the players is they’re still in it until they’re not. The idea they’re free from the pressure of the race could be freeing, I suppose, but we’ve seen enough past Sabres teams that only got worse when that happened.
That’s what made what we saw on Friday a bit of a relief. The Sabres attacked the Devils, pushed the pace on them, pressured them up and down the ice, and took advantage of their mistakes and blown coverage. They were also feeling it:
“I didn’t quite expect that to happen, but he put it right on my tape,” Cozens said. “It was an incredible pass; I was a little shocked to get that. That’s as good as it gets.”
They hadn’t scored the first goal in a game since the 5-4 shootout loss to Washington a week ago. That loss kicked off this latest four-game losing streak and took the air out of their playoff-desiring tires. Getting the first goal leads to success more often than not, but it also gets a team that’s in their heads to get out of their mind and into their game.
“We haven’t had the first goal in a while, that was big for us,” Rasmus Dahlin said. “That’s what we needed. Today I felt like we had the swagger back and we just have to go out there and play. We’ve been thinking too much, and today, we just played. We played hard.”
They’ll need to do it against the Islanders for sure and even though getting the first goal every game is sort of an unreasonable task, it’s what this group needs to do so they can get focused. Cozens’ opener led to Thompson’s electric goal in which he pulled away from Ryan Graves in the neutral zone and cruised in to beat Akira Schmid.
The other sign you know the team is feeling it is when Dahlin is being creative offensively and lighting a fire elsewhere on the ice.
Dahlin’s defensive idol is Nicklas Lidström and he told me he was a huge fan of Niklas Kronwall as well. Clearly, he took some notes from the Swedish king of the reverse hit. Nico Hischier was hyper-pissed about the play (perhaps for good reason) and took a penalty out of the dust-up that followed. But that’s part of the swagger Dahlin mentioned. Confidence creates swagger and the Sabres were oozing with it for about 50 minutes against New Jersey.
Reclaiming these feelings and attitudes is both good to see and necessary to a degree. No team wants to go into the final stretch of the season playing hot and cold and feeling down about things. Last season’s Sabres closed out the season with a load of good feelings and it created buzz headed into the offseason and the regular season. This team will want to have that as opposed to the “same old Sabres” discussion that’s already popping up around the internet.
That they got the win thanks to key performances by Cozens, Quinn, and J-J Peterka exemplified something Granato has talked about often this season: Playing without fear. Doing that is a different kind of confidence because it’s straight forward belief in their own abilities.
“Their car hasn’t crashed a thousand times,” Granato said. “It’s true, you go through life, you’re more observant, you see more of what can happen negative and hockey’s no different. For those guys, they played more fearless than maybe others the other night and obviously at the start of the game (Friday night). They were very good for us. That’s the risk of when you talk to players, and you’re trying to develop offense and skill and get these guys acclimated to the NHL is to tell them all the ways the car can crash from day one in their NHL entry. You start tensing them up and tensing them up and tensing them up and never see their skill until they’re skating for another organization. We need to keep those guys fearless and that energy and that life, they need to see opportunity and identify that, not identify with how they could get burned. It’s a juggling act, it’s tedious, but that’s our approach and we need to develop skill and they’re doing a darn good job of it.”
I mentioned the Devils as this Sabres team’s contemporary blueprint of what it takes to come out of darkness and go up the ladder. I’d argue the Sabres are ahead of where the Devils were last season, but that sets expectations really high for next season and, well, that’s tricky when five of the six best teams in the NHL reside in the Eastern Conference. It’s a crowded pack to bully through.
Still, that they snapped out of it for a night (remember, they’ve lost 10 of the past 13 games and snapped four-game skids twice during that stretch) against the Devils is noteworthy for potential future purposes. If that carries over into Saturday’s game against the Islanders would be another big step.