BUFFALO - One of the big talking points in Western New York this fall has been the fact that the Buffalo Bills somehow keep finding ways to win games despite their terrible defense routinely allowing 30 points. At some point, it’s going to bite them in the butt.
The same can be said about the Buffalo Sabres and their nasty habit of falling behind by two goals night after night, something that happened once again Wednesday, and it did indeed bite them in the butt.
The Sabres were about as flat as they could be in their return home from a three-game road swing through Montreal and Toronto and they lost 3-1 to the Philadelphia Flyers at sold-out KeyBank Center.
Rather incredibly, this was the ninth time in the first 10 games where the Sabres trailed
by at least two goals at some point. Yes, they found a way to come back and win three of those games and got two others to overtime to salvage a point, but like their Bills and their continual 30-point yields, it’s simply not a sustainable way to play.
“It's tough,” defenseman Owen Power said of having to fight back from deficits so often in the early portion of the season. “Luckily we're pretty good at it, but it's hard to win games when you're down two. So we gotta start better and start scoring first, or not having to trail behind every game.”
This was a Philadelphia team that lost its first nine games of the season - six in regulation, two in overtime and one in a shootout - which was the longest winless streak to start a season in franchise history. However, the Flyers came to Buffalo riding victories over two very good teams, home wins against Ottawa and Colorado, and they kept it rolling against the lackluster Sabres.
“We put them on their heels quite a bit, but I think we could have done quite a bit more of that,” said Jason Zucker. “I think we made it a little bit easy on them at times, and a lot of one and done plays. I think I had at least three or four that I wasn't really happy with myself. So I think we just need to shore that up a bit.”
Here are a few observations:
Sabres crumbled late in first period
Despite pouring 15 first-period shots on Flyers goalie Dan Vladar, including a few on a really active early power play, Buffalo had nothing to show for it, and after running around defending most of the time, the Flyers quickly pounced for two goals in the final 5:11 of the period.
The first came when Oliver Bonk fired a slap shot from the right point which Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen stopped, but he left a juicy rebound for Cole Knuble to backhand into the net as Rasmus Dahlin and Mattias Samuelsson were occupied on the other side of the crease and lost coverage.
Then with 53 seconds left in the period, after Noah Ostlund took a slashing penalty which killed a Buffalo power play, the Flyers eventually got to the man advantage and once again, Luukkonen made a save on a shot from the perimeter by Matvei Michkov but the puck popped into the air and Trevor Zegras bunted it into the net.
“Our net-front coverage again, we just handed them an easy goal,” coach Lindy Ruff said of the Zegras goal, though he could have been talking about both. “They won the net battle for a couple goals, we didn't.”
Jason Zucker scored in his season debut
Zucker has been out since the summer due to sports hernia surgery and he was active for the first time, playing on the third line with Josh Norris and Konsta Helenius.
He played a starring role in some late-second-period drama, a segment of the game where the Sabres fought through some referee-induced adversity, came out on the positive side of it and it seemed like they might use it to produce another third-period rally.
The trouble began when Zucker was called for a weak slashing penalty, and 47 seconds later, the officials made an egregious mistake and whistled Power for a high stick, even though replay clearly showed Michkov was hit in the face by a teammate’s stick. Because it was called a minor penalty, the play could not be reviewed and properly overturned.
“The official came over and admitted he made a mistake,” coach Lindy Ruff said. “I think when you put a team down 5-on-3, you've got to be right about the call. That was the point I made with him. I just said, ‘Listen, you got it wrong.’ He said, ‘We know.’ If you're going to make that call, you've got to be right so it was a tough call for us at that time of the game.”
However, the Sabres did a great job to kill all of it off as Luukkonen stopped two shots and two others were blocked by Louie Crevier and Beck Malenstyn. Six seconds after Buffalo returned to full strength, the Flyers’ Travis Sanheim high sticked Zach Benson, and with 34.5 seconds to go in the period, Jack Quinn moved in from the left circle and wristed a shot that caromed off Zucker’s shin pad and past Vladar.
“It's always nice to get something like that, but I'm not going to claim that it was some fantastic play,” Zucker said. “Quinn made a smart play kind of getting it there. I'm just trying to get my body in front of it. It happened to go in for me, but you know that's not something I'm going to look at and say I just played a great game because of it or anything.”
There was no third-period comeback
Whatever momentum the end of the second gave the Sabres, it died 3:03 into the third when Knuble worked his way behind the net and banked a shot off the back of Luukkonen’s pad to give Philadelphia a 3-1 lead, a garbage goal for sure, but they all count the same.
Power felt like the script flip at the end of the second would propel the Sabres in the third. “It was huge, it kept us in the game,” he said of the 5-on-3 penalty kill. “It was a huge point of the game, and they did a great job. They had some big blocks, and it was too bad we couldn't kind of capitalize off that momentum that they built for us.”
After those 15 shots in the first period, Buffalo had just 12 the rest of the way because way too many shots (12) either missed the net or were blocked (13).
“We’ve talked about missed nets, missed opportunities, I think we're like 31st or 32nd when it comes to missed nets,” Ruff said. “I thought we had some great looks in the first period, some good looks in the second period, too. I still think we missed the net too often.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for more than four decades including 37 years as the full-time beat writer/columnist for the D&C. He has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: 3 observations from the Sabres' lackluster loss to Flyers
