Buffalo Sabres Are 20 Minutes Away From Being A Solid Team
The Buffalo Sabres spent the majority of Tuesday night’s tilt with the Pittsburgh Penguins – 45 minutes, to be exact – going toe-to-toe with a playoff team.
The Sabres outshot the Pens 17-14 in the third period and overtime, and outscored Pittsburgh 4-0 in the first and third periods. If that sounds like a recipe for winning, you are ALMOST right!
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Just like the Sabres are ALMOST a good team.
As every Buffalo Sabres fan knows, the Penguins wound up winning Tuesday night 5-4 in a shootout, despite being shutout in the first, third and overtime periods. How did the Penguins manage to walk away with two points under those circumstances? They took advantage of Buffalo’s inability to play a full 65-minute game.
No one is arguing that the Sabres totally out-played the Penguins in the first and third periods; Pittsburgh did outshoot the Sabres 18-9 in the first 20 minutes, after all. Still, Buffalo managed to do what Pittsburgh could not in those periods – take advantage of scoring opportunities and find the back of the net.
That second period, though. . . .
Hats off to the Sabres for coming out and getting the equalizer in the third period – clearly, the team could have thrown in the towel and succumbed meekly, on the road, to a team fighting to improve its positioning as the playoffs approach. I have already given this young Sabres team props for their refusal to give up, both during games and on the season in general. And lest you think I am arguing that every playoff team generates 60 minutes of pure perfection every time it takes the ice, consider the Anaheim Ducks last season. I started covering the Ducks toward the end of the 2014-15 season and continued watching them throughout the playoffs, and the Ducks were so notorious for playing like garbage during the second period that their fans consistently referred to those 20 minutes as a dumpster fire. Anaheim lived on the edge last season, producing more third-period comebacks than any other team in NHL history, and that team made it to Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals, so no, I don’t expect a flawless 60 minutes every night from these Sabres.
Still, if the Ducks gave their fans a dumpster fire most nights, the Buffalo Sabres treated their fans to a nuclear meltdown during the second period Tuesday evening, right down to Chad Johnson‘s so-bad-you-wonder-how-he-went-pro turnover behind the net to Carl Hagelin:
Ugh. Just . . . ugh.
(And that is not the first time that Johnson has been 100% responsible for a bad goal this season. I was sitting in some box seats in the Verizon Center on December 30 when Johnson decided to pass the puck right at Washington Capitals right winger Justin Williams for the Caps’ first goal of the game.)
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Sure, giving up four goals in one period is not an everyday occurrence for these Buffalo Sabres, so we can’t over-react to this latest loss. What we can admit, though, is the fairly obvious fact that this team is good enough to give a quality team like the Pittsburgh Penguins 2/3 of a fight . . . but not good enough to actually, you know, win. This is not a bad thing – I’ll take embarrassing the Pens for 20 minutes and then playing them pretty much even for the final 25 over anything I saw last season! There were plenty of games last season that were 100% unwatchable, for I should not hear too many Sabres fans complaining that this team fell apart for 20 minutes.
Overall, you have to take last night’s game as both a sign that progress has been made by the Buffalo Sabres organization, and a reminder that there is still work to be done if this team wants to become a perennial playoff team. Buffalo still has hard questions to answer when it comes to its goaltending, and holes to fill in both its top-six forwards and top-four defensemen. If the front office doesn’t spend the offseason shoring up those weaknesses, we can expect to see another team good for 40, rather than 60, minutes of solid hockey next season.