The Buffalo Sabres are starting to find their way on the ice. With wins in four of their past five games, they’ll look to keep that success going and improve their ways on the road when they visit the Pittsburgh Penguins on Wednesday.
The Sabres are coming off a 4-1 win against the Eastern Conference-leading Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday, an outing in which they stayed true to their game for 60 minutes and never wavered. It was their second consecutive strong effort after a disappointing 6-2 loss to the Calgary Flames on Nov. 19.
“These are going to be hard games. This has to be our minimum,” said Buffalo captain Rasmus Dahlin. “This is how we have to play every night. It’s competing, it’s skating, it’s doing the little things right, work for the team. That’s got to be our bare minimum. Then we can improve some other things.”
One of those is their record away from home, where they are 1-5-2. The Sabres picked up their first and only road win Nov. 15 at Detroit, when they rallied from a 4-1 deficit to win in overtime.
Tage Thompson enters Wednesday’s tilt on a career-high six-game goal streak after adding an empty-net tally Sunday. After scoring just once in his first seven games, Thompson has 11 goals in his past 15 games.
He leads the team with 12 goals, and his 21 points share top spot with Alex Tuch.
“He’s just flying up and down the ice,” Tuch said. “He’s been good defensively, he’s been really bearing down on the draws, too. I think he’s really working on it trying to get better at it, and that’s been good starting off with the puck right off the face-off there really helps a lot. I just think it frees him up a lot to kind of play his style and his game and he’s working out there, which is really good,”
The Penguins head into the matchup looking to snap out of a November funk that’s seen them go 2-4-3 this month. Their most recent setback came Saturday with a 3-2 overtime loss to the visiting Seattle Kraken. That was preceded by a 5-0 home loss to the Minnesota Wild on Friday.
“We need points right now,” Pittsburgh coach Dan Muse said Saturday. “We have a weekend here where the game was no good yesterday, it was much better today. But if you go through this month, there’s been too many games here where we said there’s positives to take from. … I thought we did a lot of things that we needed to do on a consistent basis. I think we did a lot of things that are going to lead to success, but one out of four points on the weekend is not good enough.”
Wednesday’s contest could see forward Tristan Broz make his NHL debut. The 23-year-old was recalled Monday from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the American Hockey League. He leads the AHL club with eight goals and was third on the team with 13 points.
“It’s a dream come true,” Broz said. “I mean, just been through so much to get here. Like, what a journey it’s been. When (assistant general manager Jason Spezza) told me, I dropped to my knees.”
