Buffalo Sabres: What made each overtime win special in March?
The Buffalo Sabres have done something few NHL teams accomplished this season: They won three straight games in overtime
The Buffalo Sabres knew this season would be nothing special and for a while there, they toiled in the league’s doldrums. Then they turned around and won seven games in March, with their previous three wins occurring in overtime.
One was a shutout win, the team’s first since October 25th, 2019. The second, against the Vancouver Canucks, concluded a mini-road trip in which they finished with a winning record. The third and most memorable was a classic heavyweight duel with the Pittsburgh Penguins that ended in a shootout.
Not only have the Sabres knocked off three playoff contenders; they did so in games they probably would not have won earlier this season. The recent slate of overtime wins shows how much this team has grown since the All-Star Break, where the Sabres could not get over the injury bug and bouts of COVID-19.
Finally a healthy team, the Sabres have put the NHL on notice. No, they won’t embark on a miracle run or anything, though it’d be cool if they did. But they can at least finish the season with a winning record in March and April. And that will bring momentum to the team heading into the offseason.
And better yet, marquee players may look at Buffalo, New York, and say, “Hey, they’re building something special up there, and I wanna be a part of it.” It only takes a few memorable wins for a league to take notice. And while the Sabres have had a few of them, nothing has quite compared to their current winning streak.
So let’s relive the last three games and reflect on what makes them so special. Starting with the epic in Calgary.
Shutting Out Calgary
In previous outings, the Sabres struggled with puck aggression, often finding opponents outshooting them by a significant ratio for at least one period of play. That didn’t happen against Calgary. In fact, the Sabres took full control in overtime and it eventually led to their 1-0 victory.
But before that, they outshot the Flames in all three periods. And while they didn’t manage to score, they did win the battle in puck aggression. They also fared better in the face-off department, winning 49% of them.
The Sabres displayed offensive prowess against Calgary, despite their lack of goals. However, their power play unit continued to struggle, finishing 0 for 3.
Defensively, the Sabres were vigilant, forcing the Flames into committing 17 giveaways. This shows the Sabres took advantage of Calgary’s mistakes. And the Flames’ biggest mistake came in the final seconds when goaltender Jacob Markstrom left the net wide open, allowing center Tage Thompson to notch the W for the Sabres.
Concluding the Road Trip
The biggest test for the Sabres heading into the mini-road trip was to put recent wins behind them and to focus on the current contest. They failed miserably against the Edmonton Oilers in a blowout loss. However, the win against Calgary gave them their first shutout win since 2019, and it was easy to wonder whether the win would distract them against Vancouver.
For a second, it looked like the case, with the Canucks outshooting the Sabres 12 to five in the third period, but goaltender Craig Anderson held his own. The Sabres also looked like the same old Sabres for most of the contest, blowing a narrow lead, lacking physicality, losing face-offs, and once again, failing to convert power plays.
Fortunately, they also played a clean game, committing zero giveaways while taking advantage of puck miscues from the Canucks. It was also a game where Casey Mittelstadt came into his own, logging two points and playing like the first-round pick the Sabres thought they were getting.
This was the kind of game the Sabres would have lost in February. It’s probably the kind of game they’d have lost over much of the previous decade. But if there was any game that showed growth, it was this one. The Canucks outplayed the Sabres, yet the blue and gold still found a way to win thanks to Rasmus Dahlin’s game-winning goal off of assists from Alex Tuch and Tage Thompson.
Knocking off Pittsburgh
The Pittsburgh Penguins have been the NHL’s most stable franchise for over a decade while the Sabres served time as the league’s most unstable. And that’s with two expansion teams joining the NHL.
Like the Canucks game, a back-and-forth affair against a team with arguably the best NHL player of the 21st century was once upon a time a guaranteed loss for the Sabres. Especially after franchise cornerstone Kris Letang knotted the game at three thanks to assists from Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
When overtime hit, most in the KeyBank Center held onto hope the Sabres could, somehow, win this thing. Overtime came and went, and the game remained knotted at three. Then budding cornerstones Tage Thompson and Alex Tuch had other ideas.
Like the previous contest, knocking off the mighty Pittsburgh Penguins in a nail-biter also showed growth. Tommers and Tuch proved it, but overall, it was a team effort to take one of the NHL’s best into overtime, match them blow for blow, and come away with the W.
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While their power play and penalty kill still need a lot of work, the Sabres outshot the Penguins, and won the face-off battle 52-48. They weren’t aggressive, but they also showed that even a so-so day on defense no longer guarantees a blowout loss.
(Statistics provided by NHL.com)