Salt Lake City, Utah (WGR 550) – Lindy Ruff decided it might help the team to get to Utah a day early and practice in Salt Lake City on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday morning Lindy Ruff joined Jeremy White and Joe DiBiase on WGR Sports Radio. He talked about Jason Zucker and the lengthy illness that has kept him out three games and three more coming up,<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just one of those crazy viral sicknesses that he hasn\u2019t had any solid food I don\u2019t think for nine days and has gone through every type of test. Weight wise I think he\u2019s down a considerable amount of weight and when he does start feeling better, it\u2019s going to take a good period of time to get him up and running.\u201d<\/p>\n
One line has been consistently good for the Buffalo Sabres and according to \u201cMoney Puck\u201d has been one of the seven best lines in the NHL. In Carolina on Saturday, Ruff shuffled the lines in the third period and one line dominated play\u00a0and scored two goals. There\u2019s one player that has been in on both those lines and that\u2019s Ryan McLeod. He centered Alex Tuch and Josh Doan for a while and that line was usually good every game. On Saturday, he went between Tuch and Tage Thompson and both his wingers scored.<\/p>\n
In 15 games this season McLeod has three goals and five assists for eight points. That translates to 16 goals and 27 assists for 43 points which is down from his career highs last year in all three categories. The fact is he\u2019s using his speed to help drive his lines and Ruff has liked what he\u2019s seen,<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a good driver because his speed through the middle is something that helps create a lot of opportunities.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look at the Thompson in alone play, you look at in the third period where he threw it out wide and got in behind them and missed on his own opportunity, the drive on the Thompson goal, so he\u2019s a good driver for offense and that helped those two guys.\u201d<\/p>\n
McLeod is a very humble man and doesn\u2019t want the credit. He said,<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just trying to work pretty hard and try to do the little things, I still think I can add a lot to my game, but I\u2019ve just got to work on the small details and me and \u2018Tuchy\u2019 have had some good chemistry now and it\u2019s been good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Going into Tuesday\u2019s games the Sabres have the worst record in the Eastern Conference with a points percentage of .467. Their second three-game losing streak of the season will do that to you. Buffalo is now four points out of a playoff spot and has eight teams to leap frog to get there. This thing is starting to slip away quickly as it usually does at this time of year for them, so they must get it turned around now on this four-game road trip where they\u2019ve already lost one game. If they come home after Saturday\u2019s game on a six-game losing streak, they will likely be out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Salt Lake City, Utah (WGR 550) – Lindy Ruff decided it might help the team to get to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-286481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}