Buffalo, NY (WGR 550) – Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen rejoined the Sabres in practice on Thursday. Luukkonen played just 12:14 on Jan. 27 in Toronto before having to leave the game with an injury. He then missed the Sabres final five games before the Olympics and had to pull out of the Olympics for Team Finland due to the injury.<\/p>\n
As far as the injury goes it doesn\u2019t sound like he\u2019s quite at 100% yet,<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s getting to the point where it\u2019s pretty normal, as it\u2019s the last push to get it to game shape.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still six days before the Sabres play their first game out of the break in New Jersey against the Devils, so there\u2019s still time for Luukkonen. He said,<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the silver lining of this whole unfortunate thing is I\u2019ve been able to take my time with it and the little bit of time that we still have is going to be good for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course Luukkonen was sad that he had to pull out of the Olympics. He said,<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was devastating to know that you can\u2019t make it, but we\u2019ve been playing well as a team here, but it would\u2019ve been really special to be part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday Finland has a semi-final game against Canada.<\/p>\n
Luukkonan said he was pretty miserable the first few days after the injury knowing he\u2019d be out for the Olympics. The Sabres goaltender was on a 7-2-1 run when he got hurt so, once he processed everything, he said he was in a good place,<\/p>\n
\u201cMentally for me it\u2019s always that what\u2019s happened and you can\u2019t change that, you go through it for a couple of days and then you start to look forward and you start to be positive about the fact that we have a huge playoff push coming here and I\u2019m really happy that I\u2019m part of the team here and we something special going on right now and being healthy for that has gotten me through it too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Talking to the players the last few days, they seem excited to be back and to get to the final 25 games to continue the playoff push. Luukkonen said,<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s something really special for everybody here, we want to make it, the whole city wants to make it, so it keeps you really, really motivated to go back playing again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luukkonen was the only new player at practice on Thursday. Zach Benson was still not out there. Both Josh Norris and Josh Dunne were in regular jerseys which means they were able to practice fully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Buffalo, NY (WGR 550) – Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen rejoined the Sabres in practice on Thursday. Luukkonen played just 12:14…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-491411","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\/491411","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=491411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}