Friday's hockey: Surging Sabres set for Wings' showdown at LCA
Buffalo, N.Y. — Someone evidently forgot to inform Dylan Cozens and the Buffalo Sabres they were considered counted out of playoff contention when falling 12 points out of the race a month ago.
Then again, Cozens wouldn’t have accepted the notion even if someone had.
“Our belief is higher than ever right now,” Cozens said after scoring in a 4-0 win over the New York Islanders on Thursday night. “I think I said it a month ago, maybe weeks ago, that we still believe in this room that we can do it. And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
From dropping to 13th place in the Eastern Conference standings – and sitting closer to last than eighth – following a 4-3 loss to Anaheim on Feb. 19, the Sabres are enjoying a remarkable resurgence. They’ve gone 8-3-1 since and closed to within three points of the Islanders and Detroit Red Wings in the race for the conference’s final wild-card spot.
Buffalo will face the Red Wings on Saturday at Little Caesars Arena (12:30 p.m., BSD/97.1).
Cozens said one difference is Sabres players feeling more loose after spending much of the first part of the season carrying the weight of expectations to end what stands as an NHL-record 13-season playoff drought.
“I think if we’re gonna go down, we’re gonna go down with a fight. We’re going to play like we honestly have nothing to lose,” he said. “We obviously know there’s a lot to lose, but we can’t talk about that when we’re out on the ice.”
Suddenly, the shortcomings – slow starts, a three-goalie rotation, injuries and the inability to win more than two in a row – that swamped the Sabres over the first four months of the season appear to have been resolved.
And keep in mind, Buffalo’s last three wins, including a 3-2 shootout victory over Edmonton on Saturday, followed the team trading its captain, Kyle Okposo, to Florida, and trading it’s top scorer, center Casey Mittelstadt, to Colorado in a deal for offensive defenseman Bowen Byram.
“I think I’ll answer that one after we keep responding,” coach Don Granato said, when asked about his reshuffled roster. “We just have to keep responding so it’s on to the next game. … But to this point, yes, I think the energy’s really good.”
Though the Sabres have yet to win four in a row, they’re enjoying their second 3-0 run in three weeks.
For a team that still struggles to score the opening goal, Buffalo has opened the scoring in each of its past two, including a four-goal first-period eruption in a 7-3 rout of Detroit on Tuesday.
And most significantly, the Sabres are riding a hot goalie in Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, who has gone 16-8-1 with four shutouts and 45 goals allowed in his past 25 outings since claiming the starting job in late December.
“It’s enjoyable to watch because it’s been a build,” Granato said, in referring to both Luukkonen and rookie Devon Levi, who is now developing in the minors.
“It’s something we’ve been tactically building for, is we took two young goalies into this organization, Levi and Upie, and we’ve made a commitment to two young goalies to develop them at the NHL level and that’s not a common thing to do,” he added. “So, it’s a good feeling when you see them progress the way they did.”
With 15 games remaining, the Sabres still have a hill to climb with the team embarking on a five-game road trip which opens Saturday in Detroit.
Cozens recalled how the Sabres closed last season going 9-2-1 only to fall two points short of a playoff berth.
“We knew what we did last year and found a way to get close. And I think, last year, we kind of let the outside noise make us think we were out of it,” Cozens said. “And that’s something we’ve learned this year. Don’t worry about the outside noise, just just worry about this dressing room.”
Friday's NHL games
(At) Winnipeg 6, Anaheim 0: Tyler Toffoli scored his first two goals since being traded to Winnipeg and Laurent Brossoit stopped 21 shots for his second shutout of the season for the Jets.
Jets defenseman Dylan DeMelo snapped a 63-game goal-scoring drought and added an assist, and Kyle Connor, Nate Schmidt and Mason Appleton also scored for Winnipeg. Josh Morrissey had three assists and Nikolaj Ehlers added two for the Jets, who’ve alternated wins and losses their past five games.
The victory moved Winnipeg into a three-way tie with Dallas and Colorado atop the Central Division. The Jets have the tiebreaker for first place, having played two fewer games than the Stars and one fewer than the Avalanche.
L.A. Kings 5, (at) Chicago 0: Anze Kopitar scored two of Los Angeles’ four goals in the first period and Pierre-Luc Dubois, Alex Laferriere and Jordan Spence each had a goal and an assist to help Los Angeles rebound from a 3-1 loss at St. Louis on Wednesday.
The Kings strengthened their hold on third place in the Pacific Division and a Western Conference playoff spot.
Cam Talbot made 28 saves in his third shutout of the season and No. 31 for his career.
Kopitar, the Kings’ 36-year-old captain, recorded his 19th and 20th goals off pinpoint cross-ice passes by 21-year-old Quinton Byfield. He reached the 20-goal mark for the 13th time in 18 seasons.
Playoff tracker
Atlantic
▶ Panthers (94)
▶ Bruins (93)
▶ Maple Leafs (84)
Metropolitan
▶ Rangers (90)
▶ Hurricanes (86)
▶ Flyers (76)
Wild card
▶ Lightning (76)
▶ Islanders (72)
(Top two wild-card teams make the playoffs)
▶ Red Wings (72)
▶ Capitals (71)
▶ Sabres (69)
▶ Devils (68)
▶ Pittsburgh (67)
Grand Rapids 2, Iowa 0
Grand Rapids goalie Michael Hutchinson stopped 14 shots, Joel L'Esperance scored the winning goal in the final four minutes of the third period and coach Dan Watson recorded his 300th professional win in the Griffins' 2-0 victory against the Iowa Wild on Friday at Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids.
The Griffins extended their home point streak to 15 games, which tied Milwaukee for the longest in the AHL this season, is one game shy of a franchise record of 16 set more than 20 years ago and is Grand Rapids' longest since a 15-game streak from Nov. 11, 2015 to Jan. 17, 2016.
Cedar Rapids 6, NTDP U18s 5 (SO)
Kamil Bednarik had a goal and two assists to give him eights points in the last three games for the NTDP U18s in a 6-5 shootout loss against the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders on Friday at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth.
Wings Alumni in West Bloomfield
The Detroit Red Wings Alumni will help celebrate the 75th year of MI-UCP (Michigan United Cerebral Palsy) with a fundraising game against the MI-UCP Pucksters on Saturday night at St. Mary's Athletic Complex in West Bloomfield from 6-9 p.m.
The game benefits MI-UCP and the 2.3 million Michiganders with disabilities. As a result, 85% of every dollar raised from MI-UCP events goes directly to programs and services.
PWHL allows more hitting
Lowell, Mass. — With an early-season PWHL game between Montreal and Boston winding down, the speakers blared the Olivia Newton-John classic, “Let’s Get Physical.”
And that's just what the players did.
In a break from previous top professional women's hockey leagues, the PWHL has written into its rules more body checking than most might be used to. The skaters say the leeway gives them a better chance to show their skills and restores the traditional balance between finesse and physicality familiar to hockey fans everywhere.
On Saturday, that Boston team, featuring Farmington's Megan Keller, Macomb's Taylor Girard and Brighton's Shiann Darkangelo, will take on Ottawa at Little Caesars Arena at 6 p.m.
“The game’s been physical for a long time,” Toronto defender Renata Fast said. “All of us, we train every single day. We’re strong enough. We’re fit enough to be able to play that physical game. I think if they’re able to get the game to a point where players are still protected and we’re avoiding injuries of head contact, it’s going to be great for the game and the entertainment value.”
Checking — and even fighting — have been a part of men’s hockey for more than a century, with players using their bodies to dislodge an opponent from the puck and their fists to send a message about messing with a star skater or a defenseless goalie. Advocates of the more brutal side of the sport say that by allowing players to police themselves, it actually makes the games safer, and there’s no doubt that dropping the gloves can bring the crowd to its feet.
But most international leagues — both men’s and women’s — ban fighting and threaten heavy punishments like suspensions. Even the NHL has tried to minimize the practice with stiffer penalties against instigators and those who leave the bench to join a brawl.
Women’s leagues have long steered away from not just fighting but even hard body checking; the rare brawl does break out in women’s hockey, but routine fighting has never been a part of the sport. Players say the lack of physicality was partly due to a misguided attempt to protect their supposedly frail bodies.
“I feel like that always kind of has been something people said about the women’s game: ‘Oh, they can’t hit,'" said Montreal forward Jillian Dempsey, a former Harvard captain who was the all-time leading scorer in the Premier Hockey Federation, a PWHL predecessor. “And it’s like, ‘Well, we really do.’
“But now it’s nice that it’s more within the rules to be able to do it,” she said. “It just kind of gives us that freedom to go out there and display the strength and the power that that many players have.”
PWHL Rule 52, “Body Checking,” allows for contact “when there is a clear intention of playing the puck or attempting to ‘gain possession’ of the puck.” Two players chasing a puck are “reasonably allowed to push and lean into each other provided that ‘possession of the puck’ remains the sole object."
The league also gives any stationary player the right to “hold their ground” — even if she is between an opponent and the puck: “It is up to the opponent to avoid body contact with such a player. … The opponent is obliged to skate around the stationary player.”
This is conspicuously different from the NHL, where checking — at least how the rules are applied — is legal if there is a plausible argument to be made that the hitter is trying to dislodge the puck. And, what the rules say can sometimes matter less than how the individual referees interpret them.
“It’s just a different level, a different kind of physical,” Minnesota goalie Nicole Hensley said. “I think it’s good for the game. But at the same time, you just need to make sure everyone knows how to take and give hits.”
Montreal’s Feb. 4 game against Boston featured a handful of full-body hits that are a natural part of playing in close quarters, a few of them heavy enough to knock a player off her skates. But there were none of the NHL-style, bone-crushing hits that come long after the puck was gone.
More often, players skating near the boards were just muscled off the puck. There was one roughing penalty, when Boston's Jessica Digirolamo, with her hands and stick raised, smashed Montreal's Laura Stacey into the boards midway through the second period, drawing gasps from the crowd of 4,210 at the Tsongas Center in this 19th century textile center about an hour northwest of Boston.
Montreal coach Kori Cheverie noted that most of the women on her team hadn’t played with this much checking since they were young and had to play with boys’ teams to find competition that could keep up with them.
“I think it’s made the game way more exciting,” said Ottawa captain Brianne Jenner, a three-time Olympian for Canada. “I think it’s showcased our skills even more. It actually hasn’t slowed down the game. It’s made it better.”
PWHL head of hockey operations Jayna Hefford, who won four Olympic gold medals with the Canadian team, said the league has been working with players to find the right balance.
“The physicality is one area that they were really excited about,” she said. “These women are skilled, they’re strong, they’re fast, they train hard every day and they want to be able to play the game. It was something immediately that we knew we wanted to add to the game.”
Hefford said the increase in hitting has not led to more injuries – a relief for the young league. But the crowds have responded well – no small factor for a business hoping to stick around where other pro women's hockey circuits have faded away.
“The fans like it, too, which helps to kind of build some of that attention," said Dempsey, who at 5-foot-4 and 135 pounds is more likely to be receiving hits than dishing them out. "I don’t enjoy being on the the wrong end of those a few times, but, yeah, it’s a fun aspect of the game that we get to do now.”
Michigan-area hockey this week
Friday
▶ Grand Rapids 2, Iowa 0
▶ St. Cloud State 5, Western Michigan 2
▶ Cedar Rapids 6, NTDP U18 5 (SO)
Saturday
▶ St. Louis at Red Wings, 12:30 (NHL/BSD/97.1)
▶ Iowa at Grand Rapids, 8 (AHL/106.9/1300)
▶ Michigan State at Ohio State, 6:30 (Big Ten/1240)
▶ Michigan at Minnesota, 8 (Big Ten)
▶ Western Michigan at St. Cloud State, 7
▶ Minnesota State at Michigan Tech, 5
▶ Cedar Rapids at NTDP U18, 7
Sunday
▶ Red Wings at Pittsburgh, 6 (NHL/BSD/97.1)
▶ Western Michigan at St. Cloud State, 7 (if necessary)
Thursday
▶ Arizona 4, Red Wings 1
Tuesday
▶ Buffalo 7, Red Wings 3
▶ Cleveland 3, Grand Rapids 2 (OT)