Alternate captain Ryan O'Reilly said the physical practice was a means to the end of regrouping from a 4-1 loss to the Washington Capitals on Friday night.
"I think we had a good day off. Obviously that was a tough loss," O'Reilly said. "We needed a good practice, we needed to regroup here, and I thought it was a good one. A lot of compete drills and battling, and that's what it comes down to at the end of the day is winning battles. The team usually that wins the most battles wins the game and it was just a good practice to get us physical and get us back into that mindset."
With 27 games under their belt, the Sabres are now nearly one third of the way through their regular season and sit in last place in the Eastern Conference with 26 points. They also rank last in the League with 55 goals scored.
Having said that, they're still only six points behind Boston for third place in the Atlantic Division with two games in hand. The Sabres and Bruins still have two head-to-head games remaining, both of which will take place at the end of December.
"I think we're a little bit disappointed right now," O'Reilly said. "We've lost a lot of games that we easily could've won, it's the small little details. For myself, scoring's been down and that's frustrating, that's something I have to be better at but we aren't happy with where we are. We want to be better and we want to be back in this race. Look at the teams ahead of us, it's there. We get on a bit of a roll we can get back into. That's our focus here and we have to start soon."
The Sabres next game is at home against Los Angeles on Tuesday night.
