TAMPA, Fla. \u2013 Rasmus Dahlin thought immediately about the opportunity awaiting him in Buffalo when his Olympic journey ended with Sweden earlier this month. Josh Norris referred to these late-season games as the biggest of his career.<\/p>\n
Three games into this final push, the Sabres have risen to the occasion. They punctuated their road trip with an emphatic 6-2 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning at Benchmark International Arena on Saturday, their third straight victory.<\/p>\n
The Sabres \u2013 alone in second place in the Atlantic Division \u2013 trail the first-place Lightning by four points with two head-to-head matchups remaining, both in Buffalo. (The Lightning do, however, have two games in hand.)<\/p>\n
With each passing win, the tenor in the Sabres\u2019 dressing room has been business as usual.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t get too high, we don\u2019t get too low,\u201d Dahlin said. \u201cWe just stick with it and work really hard. There was a lot of goals today, but we had a lot of blocked shots, a lot of good box outs. We\u2019re playing the right way and it\u2019s hard to play against us right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Playing on the second of back-to-back nights (a situation they\u2019ve thrived in this season), coach Lindy Ruff implored his team pregame to \u201cput the heat on\u201d the Lightning early. The Sabres answered that call with a dominant four-goal first period.<\/p>\n
Dahlin and Norris opened the scoring with goals scored 50 seconds apart, then Norris added a second goal three minutes later. Tage Thompson tacked on the fourth goal late in the first period, while Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen made crucial early saves, including a breakaway stop on Jake Guentzel.<\/p>\n
Zach Metsa pounced on a turnover for the Sabres\u2019 fifth goal early in the second period, prompting the Lightning to pull goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy. He\u2019d been arguably the hottest goaltender in the NHL, having gone 17-0-1 in his previous 18 games.<\/p>\n
In fact, Tampa Bay was the only NHL team with more wins than Buffalo since the Sabres\u2019 season turnaround began on Dec. 9. The Lightning had won 11 straight games on home ice and Nikita Kucherov, a Hart Trophy candidate, had points in 12 consecutive games.<\/p>\n
Each of those streaks ended Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just shows that we\u2019re a really good team,\u201d Norris said. \u201cWe\u2019ve known that for a while now. But we just reset and today\u2019s a new game. We just go out there and do our thing. I think we just have a lot of belief in ourselves right now. It\u2019s a lot of fun playing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just took it to another level, which was unreal,\u201d added Dahlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2013 Rasmus Dahlin thought immediately about the opportunity awaiting him in Buffalo when his Olympic journey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-173663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}