Again with Sabres injuries
First it was Mattias Samuelsson done for the season, then it was Jack Quinn going down a second time. Now it's Owen Power out week-to-week.
Something Don Granato said recently when talking about various misfortunes that befell the Buffalo Sabres this season was about how he dislikes talking about injuries because it comes off as making an excuse for losses and general inconsistency.
Granato doesn’t want to make excuses and he hates to do things like that because no one wants to hear it. The fans, us in the media, hell, even he hates to hear it.
But it’s hard to ignore the reality of it all. And, unfortunately, the reality is they’ve lost various important players for swaths of games this season. From Jack Quinn and his offseason Achilles injury and his in-season lower-body malady to Mattias Samuelsson getting beaten up blocking shots and ultimately going out for the season with an upper-body issue and now Owen Power who’s out week-to-week with an injury sustained during practice on Monday.
Those are the big injuries and there have been various other short-term injuries that interrupted the lineup and made life difficult to get chemistry going on the ice or finding a proper workflow for the lineup.
It’s a lot and no one wants to hear any of it. Even writing about it is tiresome to a degree and it stems from having high expectations for the season getting waylaid daily by, yes, injuries but also from inconsistent performance that occasionally is caused by said injuries.
With Power out for the next little while (ideally, at least) trying to maintain cool and perspective on what this means for him is necessary.
“Injuries are very unfortunate,” Granato said. “This happened when competing hard enough in a practice—which is even more unfortunate—but you have to do that, you have to compete hard when you put the skates on and now that it's happened, he is going to, unfortunately, sit back and you hope that that's an opportunity to absorb different things.”
On injuries, learning, and the frustration within…
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