BUFFALO, N.Y. — With Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen playing the best hockey of his young career, the Buffalo Sabres are going to start using him a lot more. That means 21-year-old Devon Levi has been loaned to the Rochester Americans.
Levi is young and has been inconsistent in his rookie year and with Luukkonen grabbing the No. 1 role, Levi has to play and play a lot.
This season Levi is 3-4-1 with a 3.73 goals against and .876 save percentage. In his last three appearances, Levi has given up 12 goals. That’s a 5.16 goals against and a .824 save percentage. In his last five appearances, Levi has a 4.16 goals against and .863 save percentage.
Now that Luukkonen has established himself, he and Eric Comrie can hold down the fort for the time being.
Luukkonen has been on fire in his last six appearances. In that time he’s 3-1-1 with a 2.04 goals against and .933 save percentage.
The 24-year-old needed to work on his consistency and he has certainly done that. He has a VERY inconsistent team in front of him, but if that does change, now they have good goaltending to go with it.
There are still problems with this team, but I can tell you this season, goaltending hasn’t been one of them.
Now the elephant in the room. How can this team play its best third period of the season, recover from a two-goal deficit, and beat the Pittsburgh Penguins 3-2 and in their next game, go out and give up four first-period goals to a New Jersey Devils team that had lost 6-of-7 games?
They next go to Madison Square Garden to play the best team in the NHL by points percentage. The New York Rangers had gone 13-1-1 in their last 15 games, but the Sabres played their very best and won 5-1.
With 22 games played, the Sabres have squandered away the first quarter of the season. They can’t put two wins together and are rarely ready to play in the first period.
Against the Rangers, they did play the way Don Granato wanted them to. They defended well, got great goaltending, they were fast and direct, and came at the Rangers in waves to pressure their defense.
Buffalo tends to get behind early because they’re not ready to play, but not in this game. They played hard and left the second period with a 2-0 lead. It was a total team effort. Most of them played well and were ready.
Now, this team has to get on a streak. They haven’t won more than two games in a row all season, but in their last five games, they’re 3-1-1 which means they’ve picked up seven out of 10 points. Now is a perfect opportunity for them to build on a very good game against the Rangers and go on a streak.
As bad as it’s been, the playoffs are still right there for them. Starting Tuesday's action, Buffalo is only one point behind the Toronto Maple Leafs for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. They’re three points behind the seventh-place Tampa Bay Lightning and three points behind the third-place team in the Atlantic Division, the Detroit Red Wings, a team that on Tuesday signed Pat Kane.
Despite being without Tage Thompson and Jack Quinn due to injury, I think the Sabres have plenty of talent to win games, they just don’t come ready to play enough. I think having Casey Mittelstadt and Dylan Cozens as your top two centers is still a good 1-2 punch.
Mittelstadt leads them in scoring with 20 points in 22 games. In six games since Thompson got hurt, he has a goal and six assists for seven points.
Victor Olofsson’s overall game has been better and now he’s getting points with eight points in seven games.
Alex Tuch has been a clutch player ever since he arrived from the Vegas Golden Knights. In his last 13 games, he has eight goals and seven assists for 15 points.
There is enough there, but they can’t waste another 22 games of not being ready to play and then sticking a game in now and then playing the way their coach wants them to. The future is now and this team has to figure out how to be ready for it, whether Thompson and Quinn are there or not.