Buffalo let it slip again
Eight goals. That is what Tampa Bay put past Buffalo on Wednesday, and the worst part for the Sabres is that they had clawed their way back into it. Down 4-0 with roughly seven minutes left in the second period, they scored twice before the intermission and then again 33 seconds into the third. 4-3. Game on.
Then Nikita Kucherov took over. A natural hat trick, three straight goals from the same man, and the comeback was dead. Final score 8-3.
Rasmus Dahlin did not dress it up afterwards. The Buffalo captain pointed straight at the odd-man rushes, the 2-on-1s and 3-on-1s his team kept handing over, and said the Sabres were “beating ourselves”. He wants his group to take a hard look in the mirror before the puck drops in Chicago on Thursday, the first stop of a six-game road trip.
no renewal
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A pattern, not a one-off
This was not an isolated wobble. Sunday’s 4-1 home loss to Vegas looked much the same: breakaways conceded, a power play that went nowhere, and a third-period push that faded as soon as the Golden Knights scored again less than 90 seconds after Buffalo had pulled within one.
Tage Thompson thinks he knows the cause. When things start clicking, he said, the Sabres get comfortable and drift away from the structured, defence-first identity that served them so well last season. They had found that game again over a recent stretch. Two outings later, it has vanished.
Chicago are in a darker place
If Buffalo are wobbling, the Blackhawks are in freefall. Saturday’s 9-2 thrashing in Carolina was their sixth defeat in a row and leaves them 1-8-1 over their last ten. The players held a meeting among themselves after that one, no coaches in the room.
Connor Bedard’s diagnosis matched Dahlin’s almost word for word: too many free looks, too much pressure dumped on the goaltenders. Injuries are not helping. Defenseman Bowen Byram, who came over from Buffalo in a June trade, has missed 11 games with an upper-body problem, and Patrick Kane has been sidelined since November 2 with a similar issue. Both are practising and listed day-to-day, with no return date fixed.
Bedard refused to lean on that. Two teams desperate for a reset, one building. Something has to give.
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