Buffalo Sabres: 5 most heartbreaking road losses in 2022-23
By Sion Fawkes
3 – Sabres blow three leads to Washington
When you’re in the playoff hunt for as long as the Buffalo Sabres were, you can call yourself a good hockey team. But when you’re also a young hockey team, you’re also going to be a flawed group, and that was the Blue and Gold in 2022-23. Blowing two-goal leads was probably the most frustrating recurring theme with this group, and it was on notorious display on March 15th against the Washington Capitals.
Ilya Lyubushkin and J.J. Peterka scored in the game’s first nine minutes, and Tyson Jost scored at the 18:06 mark to give Buffalo a 3-1 lead. After a scoreless second frame, the Sabres and Capitals traded goals within the first six minutes of the third period, giving Buffalo a 5-3 lead.
But Alex Ovechkin and Tom Wilson scored at the 10:30 and 18:52 marks, respectively, to force overtime. Once again, we saw a scoreless extra frame, but the Capitals scored twice during the shootout, which prevented the Sabres from stringing together back-to-back wins for the first time in March.
2 – Devon Levi’s stellar performance wasn’t enough to beat Florida
After a successful NHL debut, Devon Levi started his first game on the road on April 4th in a matchup against the Florida Panthers, the team that drafted him. And you couldn’t have asked for a better game from Levi, who posted a 0.944 save percentage, stopping 34 of 36 shots on goal and showing the Panthers why it was a mistake to trade him.
Problem was, the Buffalo Sabres couldn’t score, despite logging 40 shots on goal. For the third highest-scoring team in the league, you would have thought that, with Levi holding Florida to a pair of goals, this would have been a win, but instead, the Sabres saw their playoff hopes take a major blow.