Sabres to log frequent flier miles
Buffalo Sabres defenseman Jaroslav Spacek knows all about marathon road trips from his days in Edmonton and remembers his longest one as a 17-day adventure. Teammate Craig Rivet learned in San Jose that trips of two to three weeks were not unusual. Teppo Numminen lived a similar tale in Winnipeg and Phoenix.
Teams out west do those kind of things all the time with few chances to come home. At least the Sabres’ Sea to Shining Sea tour will get broken into three segments. Between now and Feb. 4, the Sabres will have just one home game (Saturday against Carolina) and will make eight stops on the road.
It begins in earnest when the team leaves for Chicago today to meet the Blackhawks on Wednesday night in the United Center, their first matchup with ex-teammate Brian Campbell.
The next night, there’s a game in Dallas. Next week, there’s the second trip of the year to Florida and Tampa Bay. After the All-Star break comes the big whopper — a seven-day, what-do-you-pack journey that opens with Edmonton and Calgary before moving to the warmth of Phoenix and Anaheim. The Sabres, by the way, haven’t been to the Canadian Rockies since 2006 and those destinations pump the total mileage for all this travel to nearly 10,500.
“You’re looking at lots of team dinners,” Spacek joked after practice Monday in HSBC Arena.
“Sometimes it’s good to go away for a while as a group of guys. We have a lot of short trips. One day, two days and it’s nothing. But a long trip can really bring you together.”
“You switch yourself to road mode, do your routines on the road, go a day at a time and stay focused,” Numminen said. “We’re confident on the road. . . . Every year there’s a crazy trip and this is the one for us. The schedule is never perfect. You go a day at a time, make sure you’re in the moment and don’t look ahead. Soon enough, everything is behind you.”
This season the Sabres have been nearly as comfortable on the road (9-7-3) as in the arena (12-9-2). They have won this month at Toronto and Boston and were 2z minutes from getting at least a point Saturday before Detroit pulled away for a 3-1 win.
“We want to play real solid, tight, stingy defensive hockey and look for opportunities offensively,” Rivet said. “That’s been our mentality playing on the road. It’s kind of worked for us so far. [The Red Wings] kept on coming in waves and when we did have the puck, it always seemed like they had four or five guys back defending. We tried our best to hold on there.”
The wild travel won’t leave the Sabres much meaningful practice time in the next week, so coach Lindy Ruff kept the team on the ice for 90 minutes Monday in one of the longest workouts of the season. He even took the unusual in-season step of having the team leave the ice and then come back on for a half-hour of scrimmaging.
“We decided that with three days [between games] and after a day off [Sunday] we wanted to get a good practice in,” Ruff said. “That’s about as tough as we could make it, and we thought we accomplished what we wanted to get done.”
“He wanted us to stay in game tempo situations,” Spacek said. “He wanted to make sure we stayed mentally sharp and ready for the games. We played two lines [on each team] so that made it tough but it was fun too.”
Ruff said he was frustrated by Saturday’s loss because the Red Wings were able to pick the Sabres apart with their puck skills, producing 48 shots on goal overall and 23 in the third period. Still, Buffalo was less than three minutes from getting a point.
“The biggest thing that’s going to help us moving forward is learning a little bit from the Red Wings game,” said goaltender Ryan Miller, whose 45 saves went for naught. “We hung with a tough team on [the second half of] back to back nights and weren’t that far off.
“We have to go into the other team’s building and stick to a game plan. You have to be patient. Let the other team try to entertain the crowd while we stick to the game plan and stick together.”
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