BUFFALO, N.Y. — Current and former Utah Mammoth players alike called Clayton Keller the most underrated player in the NHL in recent days.
The former seventh overall draft pick and Mammoth captain backed up the praise with an overtime game winner in a 2-1 victory on the road against the Buffalo Sabres on Tuesday, moving Utah to 9-4 on the season and 3-0 in overtime games.
“(Karel Vejmelka) makes an unbelievable save and (Mikhail Sergachev) tells him he’s got time to play it,” Keller said of the lead-up to his goal. “That makes a difference there, and then we go down and I make a nice move. It’s nice to see it go in for sure.”
It was Keller’s fifth goal of the season to bring him level with Dylan Guenther for the second-most on the team, with Guenther claiming the other two overtime winners on the year.
Nick Schmaltz got the first goal of the night after almost 44 scoreless minutes between the teams, moving into a tie with Logan Cooley for first place on the Utah goals leaderboard at eight. Keller got the assist on Schmaltz’s goal, with the linemates combining for 12 goals in 13 games so far this season.
Noah Ostlund scored the lone goal for Buffalo four minutes after Schmaltz’s opener in the third period, earning his first NHL goal to force overtime for the fifth straight game for the Sabres.
For as good as Keller was on Tuesday, putting up a game-high six shots on goal, he redirected all the hype toward Vejmelka in net. The 29-year-old Czech tender moved back into a tie at the top of the NHL goaltender wins leaderboard with Colorado’s Scott Wedgewood — the “Wedgie” to Vejmelka’s “Veggie” — at seven.
“All year, he’s been the MVP, making huge saves at the right time,” Keller said of Vejmelka. “If the other team has momentum, he has our back and gives us momentum back. He’s been awesome all year.”
Tuesday’s tight matchup in Buffalo was a goaltender showdown for much of the night, with the Sabres’ Alex Lyon earning first star of the game with 33 saves and a .943 save percentage. Vejmelka actually bested him by one one-hundredth of a point on save percentage, but faced 16 fewer shots on goal.
One such shot came early in the game when Vejmelka robbed former Utah teammate Michael Kesselring of a goal in the first period. Kesselring was traded to Buffalo in the deal that brought JJ Peterka to Utah, and went so far as to say he had a special celebration planned if he scored against his former team.
Kesselring will have another chance very soon to show off that celebration when the Sabres visit Salt Lake City in Utah’s next home game on Wednesday, Nov. 12.
Vejmelka will likely get the night off in Utah’s next game, with the second game of a back-to-back in Toronto on Wednesday. The Mammoth have shown little drop-off between goaltenders, with backup Vitek Vanecek getting two wins in three starts and posting a .913 save percentage so far.
Puck drop against the Maple Leafs is set for 5 p.m. MST on Mammoth+.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.