Sabres keep digging out of early holes, and Lindy Ruff wants them to stop digging

By Staff Reporter

BUFFALO — Nine games into a season that started with Stanley Cup talk, the Buffalo Sabres have found a habit. They fall behind, then come back. It has earned them points. Their coach would like them to stop needing it.

The latest example came Saturday night in Montreal. The Sabres trailed the Canadiens 3-1 in the second period, tied the game in the third and then lost 4-3 when Cole Caufield scored 54 seconds into overtime, NHL.com reported. Buffalo is 4-3-2.

“We left quite a few plays out there,” coach Lindy Ruff said after the game. “We didn’t execute. I didn’t think our passing was near as sharp tonight. You get that chance on the late power play, where we controlled it pretty good, missed a couple of opportunities, and get the great opportunity in overtime. We could have made them pay but instead it goes the other way and they made us.”

Caufield’s winner started with a hard rebound off the end boards from a Josh Norris shot. Caufield chased the puck down at the blue line and beat Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen on a breakaway. Luukkonen made 30 saves.

A pattern, by the numbers

Saturday’s game capped a week that followed a familiar script. On Tuesday, also at Bell Centre, Buffalo managed just 16 shots, came back from 3-1 down in the third period and lost in a shootout. On Thursday in Toronto, the Sabres rallied from 4-2 down and won 5-4 when defenseman Owen Power scored in overtime.

Before Saturday’s game, the team’s own website laid out the trend, citing league numbers:

• Buffalo had climbed out of two-goal holes in four games and collected seven points from them.
• It had three wins when trailing after two periods. No other team had more than one.
• It ranked last in the NHL, 32nd, in second-period goal differential at minus-10, and second in third-period goal differential at plus-7.

“We don’t like playing from behind, but obviously we’ve fought our way back, clawed our way back into games down by a couple goals,” Ruff said Friday. “We’ve got to fix the start, obviously.”

Belief, and the bill for it

The players describe the comebacks as a strength. “Just a lot of compete and the belief we have in here that we can come back in games,” forward Jack Quinn said Saturday. Quinn scored the Sabres’ first short-handed goal of the season and has seven points in his last four games.

Center Tage Thompson, whose third-period goal tied the game, pointed to a smaller moment as the turning point. “I thought our start was good,” Thompson said. “We give them the power play, they score on it and they get a little bit of life. You can’t do that to good teams.” The goal was Thompson’s 218th as a Sabre, moving him past Jason Pominville into 10th place in team history.

Montreal coach Martin St. Louis offered the opposing view of Buffalo’s style. “Buffalo is not an easy team to play when you have a lead,” he said. “They open up their game a lot and you have to be calculated with your decisions. Even in the offensive zone, you can’t make ‘almost’ plays. The ‘almosts’ are the plays that they live for.”

The power play is the other open question. Buffalo went 0-for-4 on Saturday, The Sporting Page reported, including the late chance in regulation that Ruff mentioned.

Missing their top defenseman

Much of this has come without Rasmus Dahlin. The star defenseman has an upper-body injury and was “feeling better today than yesterday,” Ruff said Friday, but he did not play in either game in Montreal. Goaltender Alex Lyon, defenseman Conor Timmins and forward Jason Zucker were also listed as injured, according to NHL.com’s projected lineups. Zucker, recovering from a sports hernia, could make his season debut Wednesday against the Philadelphia Flyers.

The expectation they set

The context is the bar the Sabres set themselves. Last season they won the Atlantic Division and won a playoff series for the first time in nearly two decades. At training camp, general manager Jarmo Kekäläinen warned about the danger of feeling satisfied.

“Complacency is the biggest pitfall right now for our team, thinking that we were pretty good last year – pretty good’s not good enough,” Kekäläinen said in September, according to Sabres.com.

Ruff struck the same note before the opener. “We’ve had meetings and talked about that we’re not going to surprise anybody,” he said. “Nobody’s going to take us for granted.”

Nine games is a small sample. A team that keeps coming back is showing some resilience. But points earned in overtime and shootouts are not the same as wins, and the Atlantic was expected to be tougher this year. The Sabres face the Flyers on Wednesday. The question is whether they can play from in front.

Featured photo: The Sabres host the Chicago Blackhawks at KeyBank Center in December 2024. Photo by Michael Barera via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.