The Buffalo Sabres can move further up the standings in their final game before the Olympic break against the Pittsburgh Penguins at KeyBank Center on Thursday.<\/p>\n
A win would send Buffalo \u2013 currently in the first wild card spot \u2013 into the break in second place in the Atlantic Division by virtue of tiebreakers over both Montreal and Detroit.<\/p>\n
The Sabres are 1-1-1 in their last three games, all of which were tightly contested, playoff-like contests against Atlantic Division opponents. They came within 30 seconds of winning their most recent game, a 4-3 overtime loss to division-leading Tampa Bay.<\/p>\n
While Thursday\u2019s game offers a reprieve from divisional play, the Penguins come to town as yet another Eastern Conference playoff contender who\u2019s been hot of late. They won six straight games to end January before dropping their last two, both by one goal.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what you need to know before puck drop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Buffalo Sabres can move further up the standings in their final game before the Olympic break against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-460511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}