At this point in the history of professional sports in Buffalo, you have to ask yourself when is this forever curse going to end, and how much heartbreak is simply too much?
Seriously, there is no fan base that has dealt with more gut-wrenching, soul-crushing, utterly sickening postseason losses than the two teams who mean so much to western New York, the Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Sabres.
Don’t even attempt to make an argument for another city because there is not one that has had to swallow the level of disappointment and despair that has been heaped upon Buffalo, and Monday night another chapter was written in this long and horrifying novel.
Alex Newhook’s somewhat harmless-looking shot from the left faceoff circle found its way past Buffalo goalie Ukka-Pekka Luukkonen 11:22 into overtime and just like that, the Sabres are done thanks to this 3-2 loss to Montreal in Game 7 of the second-round series.
“One shot decides the whole season. It [expletive] sucks,” Rasmus Dahlin told reporters.
It really did suck because for most of the last 2 ½ periods the Sabres were the better team, the more dangerous team, and certainly the team that deserved to be smiling in the handshake line at night’s end. But it’s Buffalo, and of course it wasn’t meant to be.
“I don’t think anyone in this room felt like we were done yet. Just disappointed,” Tage Thompson said.
The Sabres were trying to become just the fourth team in NHL history to earn consecutive multi-goal comeback victories when facing elimination in both games. Instead, they lost at KeyBank Center for the fifth time in seven games, and they remain stuck on one Game 7 victory in their 56-year history, the Derek Plante game against Ottawa in 1997.
Now, on the positive side, when the tears dry and the anger and vomiting subside in the next few days, this will be a season that will be looked back on fondly because you must remember where this team was in early December, dead last in the Eastern Conference and seemingly headed for a 15th straight absence from the postseason.
However, they won a dramatic overtime game at Edmonton on Dec. 9 which started a season-altering 10-game winning streak and the Sabres wound up producing more points from that night through the end of the regular season than any team in the league as they won their first division title since 2010.
“It was a giant step for us,” coach Lindy Ruff said of the Sabres’ third season in which they won at least 50 games. “When I took the job, I wanted these guys to like being a Buffalo Sabre. I think they like being a Sabre and I think they made our city proud. It wasn’t the result we wanted and to a man, they’re all disappointed. But they gave them everything they had.
“I’m so proud of our fans and I know this hurts them as much as it hurts us. It hurts, I told the team it hurts. That pain will go away. But I won’t let this one game define the season we had. I told them how proud I was of them.”
Here are my observations on another sad night in Buffalo:
The game-winning goal was brutal
For as tremendous a season as Dahlin has had, his misplay at the Canadiens’ blue line, led to the rush that ended in Newhook’s goal. I don’t really know what he was doing and he’s going to be replaying that moment for the next few months.
Josh Norris won an offensive zone faceoff and steered the puck back to Dahlin at the left point. He wound up for a slapshot but changed his mind and tried to stickhandle to the middle but Ivan Demidov poked it off his stick. Thompson had a chance to bail out Dahlin but he couldn’t regain possession and away the Canadiens went. Alexander Carrier skated to center and fed Newhook on the left wing and he moved to the top of the left circle and snapped a shot that went under UPL’s left arm and above his left pad.
“It boils down to one game and one moment, and yeah, it doesn’t feel good,” Luukkonen said.
It was such a terrible result on what was pretty much a nothing play, especially given all the scoring chances both teams had in this game that were turned aside by the goaltenders, far more of those, however, by Montreal rookie goalie Jakub Dobes.
UPL played well, but the goal that ended the season is one that he should have stopped, and there is one thing that will never change in the NHL: You can’t win a championship if you don’t have a dependable goalie and in this series, both UPL and Alex Lyon were terribly unreliable.
For Newhook, he has now scored the game-winner in two Game 7’s this month as he also beat Tampa Bay in the first round, thus becoming just the second player in Stanley Cup playoff history to do that in one postseason.
“We said at the start of this series, it was going to be two really good teams playing,” Ruff said. “You get to overtime, we had a couple really good chances. We had chances in our hands. Those are the opportunities that you hope you get. We just didn’t finish.”
Jakub Dobes stole the game for Montreal
Two days after getting blown out of his goal crease when he allowed six goals in Game 6, Dobes was the lone reason why the Sabres are packing their equipment bags and heading home.
He was handed a 2-0 lead on first-period goals by Phillip Danault and Zach Bolduc and he blanked the Sabres for the first half of the game before a Mattias Samuelsson shot that he never saw glanced off Jordan Greenway’s pants and into the net at 13:19 of the second period.
The Sabres had already started to take control of the game by then, and once they scored, they ran Montreal all over the ice and dominated play. The Canadiens were fortunate the second period ended because they were dragging when the horn sounded and if there had been a few more minutes, Buffalo probably would have tied the game.
That didn’t happen until 6:27 of the third when Dahlin skated through the left circle and beat Dobes just inside the near post, and Buffalo continued to put pressure on but Dobes stood tall. He made 22 saves in the second and third periods, then stopped all six shots he saw in overtime, finishing with 37 saves.
According to metrics site naturalstattrick.com, the Sabres generated 42 scoring chances including 20 high danger chances compared to 31 and 15 by the Canadiens. Buffalo’s expected goals for the game was 5.1, Montreal’s was 2.85. Of course, the only thing that matters is actual goals: Montreal 3, Buffalo 2.
Dobes became the second rookie goalie to win two Game 7’s on the road in one postseason, joining another Canadien, the great Ken Dryden.
Another disappearance by Tage Thompson
Thompson has caught a lot of heat in this postseason, yet through two rounds he had scored the second-most points of any player in the league. But in all honesty, sometimes the box scores don’t tell the whole series and Thompson just wasn’t a superstar in this series, something the Sabres needed him to be.
That was particularly true in this game as he just didn’t have it. He wound up with five shots on goal, but he couldn’t finish on any of them, and he had a couple golden opportunities, one from just outside the crease in the second period, and then one that would have won the game early in overtime.
He raced in on a 2-on-1 early but rather than rip a shot from the right circle he tried to get too cute and never even got a shot off.
In the first period he committed a terrible turnover that led to a breakaway by Alexandre Texier and if UPL didn’t make a great save there, it would have been 3-0 and perhaps over for the Sabres. And of course, his failure to secure the puck on the game-winning goal.
Of course, at least Thompson wasn’t Alex Tuch who finished with a stunning bagel on the scoresheet. Seven games, zero points,
The Sabres’ fourth line did its job
While the Canadiens shortened their bench much of the game and played 11 forwards, Ruff rolled his four lines continuously and the trio of Greenway, Beck Malenstyn and Peyton Krebs turned in a stellar effort.
They were a constant problem for Montreal on the forecheck and combined for nine of Buffalo’s 21 hits, and their excellent pressure during the Sabres’ second-period domination resulted in Buffalo’s first goal.
Greenway did a nice impression of a wall in front of Dobes and he never had a chance of seeing Samuelsson’s shot from the slot, and the bonus for that hard work was the shot skimmed off Greenway’s pants so he eventually got credit for the goal.
And midway through the third period, the fourth line nearly struck again. Krebs won a puck battle below the goal line and sent it to the left point to Bo Byram who fired a slap shot right on Dobes. He made the stop but the puck dribbled underneath him and then suddenly was lying there in the crease and Malenstyn pushed it across the line.
As the building erupted, referee Wes McCauley was already waving it off. He felt Dobes had control long enough and he blew his whistle a millisecond before the puck appeared. It definitely felt like a quick whistle, and now are we going to add “Quick Whistle” to the long list of nicknamed Buffalo sports losses?
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for more than four decades including 37 years as the full-time beat writer/columnist for the D&C. He has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: 4 things that stood out in Sabres crushing Game 7 OT loss to Canadiens
Reporting by Sal Maiorana, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
