The Sabres need to make a run to get back into contention after losing for the fourth time in five games against the Edmonton Oilers on Monday. Like two of the three losses that preceded it, the Sabres could trace their lack of success to a five-minute span in the second period.
Edmonton scored three goals in 3:26 to turn a 3-1 deficit into a 4-3 lead. The game prior, in Toronto on Saturday, the Maple Leafs broke a 2-2 tie with two goals in the last five minutes of the second. The same goes for last Monday at Scotiabank Arena when the Maple Leafs scored three goals in a span of 2:04.
The Sabres outshot their opponents in all three of those contests but came away with no points to show for them.
"You look at the game last night, I don't think there's any doubt who the better hockey team was in that game," Okposo said. "But in saying that, we didn't get the result that we wanted. At this point, there's no moral victories. At this point, we need results. We need to win. We've got to find ways to get those."
Sabres coach Phil Housley has stressed the importance of consistent checking throughout this season, crediting it as a primary reason for their early success and citing it as the difference in close losses, including the game against the Oilers.
Okposo said the Sabres understand their defensive responsibilities within the system and stay true to them for long stretches, but lapses prove costly.
"I think that when we talk about something, it gets implemented in the game," Okposo said. "It's little, just mental mistakes and part of maturing, part of growing as a team.
"Look, nobody's a perfect player. Everybody's going to make mistakes. It's covering up for a guy if somebody gets beat, it's the next guy being in position and helping a teammate out. It's that kind of thing we're just lacking a little bit right now, just a situational awareness I think."
Coincidentally, it was Oilers coach Ken Hitchcock who offered a similar sentiment regarding his own young team when speaking to the media prior to the game on Monday.
"You have to have maturity in your game," Hitchcock said. "Maturity is checking. Man, that's hard to do. It's really hard to do, and you need a certain level of maturity. It's not based on age. It's based on the disposition of your hockey club. If you have that, you can win for a long, long time.
"That's what everybody's trying to incorporate. … But man, it requires an unbelievable amount of focus and effort to do that and we're all trying to get there. As your team's growing - we're growing, Buffalo's growing - you feel like you grabbed it and then it leaves you for a little while."
To that end, the Sabres will look to continue to grow moving forward, keeping the same game-by-game approach that captain Jack Eichel described after the game on Monday. They begin a two-game road trip in Chicago on Thursday, followed by a visit to Denver on Saturday.
"I think for us it's just focusing on the next day, next game," Eichel said. "It's all you can really do. I think that the better we do at narrowing our focus, the better it will be for the group. We're a competitive team every night. That's our mindset, that's our goal. Win every night we go out.
"It doesn't matter what point of the season it is. Every night we go out on the ice, we're trying to win."
