When the Buffalo Sabres shipped off Erik Johnson, Casey Mittelstadt and Kyle Okposo at the NHL’s trade deadline, it appeared they were raising a white surrender flag on their season.
Three straight victories followed, putting them right back in the Eastern Conference’s wild-card chase.
Despite a 4-1 loss Saturday in Detroit to open their five-game trip, the Sabres will try to continue their playoff push when they meet the Seattle Kraken, a team that took a somewhat different approach at the deadline and has since fallen off the pace.
Buffalo’s Tage Thompson opened the scoring Saturday before Detroit netted four unanswered goals. The defeat was especially difficult for the Sabres, who could’ve pulled within a point a Red Wings team that had lost seven in a row, for the East’s final wild-card berth.
Instead, Buffalo dropped five points back.
“I thought it was a hard-fought game by both teams,” Thompson said. “Obviously, the outcome’s not what we want, but we don’t really have time to dwell on it.”
The Sabres have 14 games remaining in the regular season, with stops in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary following Monday’s encounter with the Kraken.
“Turn the page quick,” Sabres coach Don Granato said of his message to his players after Saturday’s defeat. “Obviously this road trip, we know, you look at it, they’re all tough buildings, they’re all tough teams and we obviously knew that ahead of time. The urgency is the urgency at this time of the year for everybody. Big trip ahead.”
The Kraken straddled the fence at the trade deadline, sending forward Alex Wennberg to the New York Rangers for draft capital but keeping the rest of their unrestricted free agents and signing veteran forward Jordan Eberle to a two-year extension.
That approach has failed to pay off so far as the Kraken are 0-3-1 on their current homestand, which opened the night of the March 8 trade deadline, to drop 11 points back of the West’s final playoff berth.
The Kraken lost 4-1 Saturday to streaking Nashville, allowing three unanswered goals after tying the score on Andre Burakovsky’s power-play strike early in the third.
“We battled back at the start of the third period to make it a 1-1 hockey game on a good power play,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “We felt like we were in a good spot at that point.”
The oft-injured Burakovsky, who has just four goals this season — with three of those coming in the past five games — said the Kraken need to keep things simple.
“We make it hard for ourselves,” Burakovsky said of an offense that’s scored just six times in four games on the homestand. “A lot of times, instead of giving it to the guy that’s going to have the most time and space, we send it somewhere else and we get trapped and they’re coming the other way.
“Instead of just making the simple play and taking advantage of it and hanging on to it in their zone.”
It hasn’t helped that defenseman Vince Dunn, who leads the Kraken with 34 assists, has missed the past five games with an upper-body injury. Dunn has been skating with the team but his status remains day-to-day.
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