Storylines
1. Moving forward
The Sabres will need to bounce back quickly from their loss to the Avalanche. Tonight continues a demanding stretch of the schedule featuring five games in nine days.
“It's my job not to let it snowball,” Ruff said. “We'll address it. We'll deal with it. We'll go over it.”
They don’t have to look far to find a template for success. The Sabres were 7-2-0 in their nine games prior to the current winless streak, a three-week span that saw them allow the sixth-fewest goals per game in the NHL and score on 26.7 percent of their power plays.
“We know we can win,” alternate captain Dylan Cozens said postgame on Tuesday. “We know that this is absolutely not good enough. We just can’t hit the panic button. We’ve been through this before where we just panic, and then we keep losing. We end up being so close at the end of the year.
“We can’t worry about it too much. We got to take what we can from this game, which is not much, but then we just got to focus on the next one. There’s a lot of season left, and we just got to get back to doing what works for us.”
2. The power play
The Sabres are 0-for-16 on the power play over their last six games following two unsuccessful opportunities against the Avalanche.
Cozens stressed the need for simplicity as they work to steer the power play back on course. Much of their success with the extra man in November stemmed from net-front traffic on shots taken from the point.
“We’ve just got to stick to what was giving us success a few games ago, and that was just keeping it simple, getting it to the net and recovering it,” he said.
3. Scouting the Jets
The Jets are 3-7-0 with a minus-11 goal differential in their last 10 games after starting the season 15-1-0. They’ve scored just 1.62 goals per 60 minutes in that span, the second lowest mark in the league.
Still, Winnipeg’s scoring talent, 200-foot defensemen and top-end goaltending present the Sabres with plenty of challenges.
Linemates Mark Scheifele and Kyle Connor are tied for the team lead with 13 goals. Their right winger, Gabriel Vilardi, has added nine goals, as has veteran forward Nino Niederreiter.
Speedy winger Nikolaj Ehlers, third on the team with 25 points, is on injured reserve with a lower-body injury and will miss Thursday’s game. Blueliner Dylan Samberg, averaging 20:17 of ice time per game, is also unavailable – a Steven Stamkos slapshot broke his foot on Nov. 23.
Ten NHL defensemen have recorded 20 or more points this season and Winnipeg boasts two of them. Both Josh Morrissey (23 points) and Neal Pionk (22 points) drive offensive production and man the blue line on the Jets power play, which ranks second in the league with a 30.7-percent success rate.
But Winnipeg’s greatest strength remains its goaltending. Reigning (and two-time) Vezina Trophy winner Connor Hellebuyck owns a .927 save percentage, third best among goalies with five or more starts this season. The 31-year-old workhorse has played 20 of the Jets’ 26 games and leads the NHL with 15 wins; on Sunday, he was named the NHL’s Third Star of the Month for November.
Backup goalie Eric Comrie has gone 3-3 with a .903 save percentage in the other six games.
“We’re going to be playing against one of the best goalies in the world,” Sabres forward Alex Tuch said Tuesday night. “They have a lot of firepower. They play a really good, hard team game and we have to be our best.” – Justin Alpert
