Game 4: A momentary feeling of relief
The Buffalo Sabres' 5-2 win against the Florida Panthers was a much-needed break from the stress brought about by the 0-3-0 start.
BUFFALO — It wasn’t exactly a must-win game for the Buffalo Sabres, but it wasn’t one they could afford to lose, either.
After going 0-3-0 to start the season, the mood and the vibes around the team were, to be blunt, rancid. They’d just come off a brutal 3-1 loss to the Los Angeles Kings in the home opener on Thursday in which they corrected a lot of the things that went wrong in their second game against the New Jersey Devils in Prague, but a couple of mistakes and a defined lack of offense coupled with a stellar goaltending performance by Darcy Kuemper had the Sabres room frustrated/annoyed/pissed off… downright ornery.
Doing things right and not getting rewarded for it or having those good things get overshadowed by bad plays, bad mistakes or bad luck is how things went and when events are going like that, ain’t no one going to be happy about it.
Facing the defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers on Saturday night brought a foreboding air to the situation. But the Panthers are without captain Aleksander Barkov for the next 2-3 weeks (lower body) and Matthew Tkachuk’s illness kept him out of action on Saturday. Those absences coupled with backup goalie Spencer Knight getting the start meant it was time for the Sabres to get off the schneid and boy did they.
A 5-2 win got the Sabres into the win column for the first time this season and all the while scored two more goals in one game than they had in the previous three and at last, for a night, the sour feelings evaporated.
“I think it speaks volumes that the start we had, everything that kind of went on, and we stuck to it,” Sabres forward Jordan Greenway said. “I don’t want to go to last game, but we’ve been building our game. We’ve been pretty happy about how we’ve been playing overall. Of course, there’s things that we can do better to build, but it was good that we went through what we did. We’re learning from it and we’re becoming a really good team.”
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