What a difference a day makes.
Heading into last night, the Sabres were 0-3-0 on the season and the talk around the NHL was already about when General Manager Kevyn Adams would get fired and which players would be sold off at the trade deadline. That talk has stopped (for now) following a strong 8-4 win over the division rival Ottawa Senators.
Zach Benson contributed a career-high, four-point performance in his season debut after missing the first three games of the season due to facial injuries from a puck, while Josh Doan potted three assists of his own in only 13:55 of ice time. By the way, those three points for Doan are equal to JJ Peterka’s current three points in four games for the Utah Mammoth, for those counting at home. That has to feel good to the beleaguered front office.
The game was heading in a precarious direction for Buffalo early in the second period as the Senators took a 2-1 lead on a goal that Lindy Ruff rightly, but unsuccessfully, challenged for goaltender interference. The ensuing powerplay for the Senators awarded due to that unsuccessful challenge had the potential to lead to a 3-1 lead for the Sens, but a funny thing happened instead: the penalty energized the home Sabres crowd and the team responded with a shorthanded goal by Ryan McLeod.
Talk about a turning point.
A couple things on that series of events: first of all, it’s hard to believe that the Senators goal was allowed, not so much because of the interference, but because the play should have been blown dead a good 5-7 seconds before the puck actually crossed the goal line. Goaltender Alex Lyon had the puck trapped under pad based on the overhead camera view, and then it was dug out by a Senator and slapped around the crease. That moment galvanized a good-sized Wednesday night crowd against the refs and Lindy Ruff’s team responded to that on the penalty kill. The Sabres had a mere four shots on goal compared to Ottawa’s 19 just prior to McLeod’s tally, but what followed was a 10-1 shot advantage for the Sabres that yielded the team three goals and 4-2 lead halfway through the
It was frankly a little surprising that the turnout was as good as it was considering the start that the Sabres have had in October. The Sabres desperately needed that energy.
The second turning point came later in the third period as the Sabres had allowed the Senators to claw their way back to a 5-4 deficit from a 5-2 deficit before Lindy Ruff wisely used his timeout to rally the team back. The Sabres would go on to score three more unanswered goals and the rest is history. Good use of the timeout by Ruff, and good job by the team to not implode and lose the game.
So what does the win mean? Well, in the short term, the vibes around the team improve immensely and the talk of an imminent fire sale will stop. Unfortunately, the Sabres don’t play their next game until Saturday when they host the Florida Panthers for a 1 p.m. matinee, so carrying over momentum from this game to then will be a trickier task. If there is something to be taken from the win, though, it’s that fans should realize that they do have the ability to shift momentum within the game with crowd noise.
In the long term, it remains to be seen if this win is an aberration or a sign of things to come. The team only scored two goals in the three games prior to this eight-goal explosion and it’s still too early to say whether the team can find a decent offensive output on a nightly basis, while acknowledging that eight goals is only going to happen a few times a year at most.
That said, the team is going to start getting some more pieces back in Jordan Greenway and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen in the coming days, so there is optimism that the team could get back to .500 before Halloween. It’ll be fascinating to see how Ruff opts to use UPL with Lyon playing so well during the first part of the season. Will it be a 50/50 split? Does Lyon maintain the crease until he has a bad game? Only time will tell.
For now, it’s enough to have some much needed hope back in the building.