2. Big guys weren’t big enough<\/p>\n
There was no question that in Game 6, some of the Sabres big names, notably Tage Thompson<\/a> and Rasmus Dahlin<\/a>, began to find their games. But it came a bit too late and wasn’t quite enough.<\/p>\n But forward Alex Tuch<\/a>\u00a0didn’t find his game at all.<\/p>\n After scoring seven points (four goals, three assists) in six games against the Bruins, Tuch had no points despite leading the team with 26 shots on goal and was minus-8 against the Canadiens. The Western New York native is the team’s biggest pending unrestricted free agent.<\/p>\n As Tuch said after the 6-3 loss in Game 5, “I’ve got to bear down. I’ve got to be better. \u2026 I can’t play the way I’m playing right now.”<\/p>\n While some of the Sabres depth players — forwards Zach Benson<\/a> and Josh Doan<\/a> among them — did a good job of providing offense, it wasn’t enough to make up for the vanishing act pulled by the top guys that, in some games, included misplayed pucks, mistimed penalties, or outright mistakes.<\/p>\n Dahlin (five points) and Thompson (four) had major bounce-backs in Game 6, and Dahlin scored the game-tying goal in Game 7, but had they been bigger factors earlier in the series, it’s possible it wouldn’t have gotten that far.<\/p>\n 3. Undisciplined play<\/p>\n It may be true that the Canadiens were inviting penalties to be called against the Sabres, as Ruff alleged early in the series. But it was also true that the Sabres were undisciplined, taking unnecessary penalties at unnecessary times, especially in the offensive zone.<\/p>\n That was never more the case than in Game 4, when the Sabres gave the Canadiens seven power-play opportunities.<\/p>\n Even if the Canadiens didn’t score on the power play — which they did, going 8-for-26 (30.8 percent) in the series — going to the penalty kill over and over disrupted the offensive flow for the Sabres, putting too many minutes and too much pressure on their penalty killers.<\/p>\n 4. Not taking advantage of early goals<\/p>\n In Game 1, the Sabres scored 4:31 into the game. In Game 3, it was 53 seconds. In Game 4, it was 6:32. In Game 5, it was 2:00. And in Game 6, it was 32 seconds.<\/p>\n The Sabres, over and over, got the jump on the Canadiens, but couldn’t take control of the game. They jazzed the crowd at home and quieted the crowd on the road, but still lost two games in which they took an early lead, instead of building on what they had done and creating momentum.<\/p>\n And then in Game 7 at home, with the KeyBank Center crowd wild, they allowed the Canadiens to score first for only the second time in the series, as Montreal built up a 2-0 lead that, although the Sabres were able to erase, never turned into a lead and the series ended in overtime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2. Big guys weren’t big enough There was no question that in Game 6, some of the Sabres…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":["post-680102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}