Hockey Rhetoric

I watched this game with a stress ball and a defibrillator. That’s how I roll.

• I haven’t seen much of Brian Elliott but I didn’t think he looked very good this game. I’m leaning towards just calling him a goaltender on a huge hot streak rather than a great goaltender playing at the level we should expect from him in the future.

• Sekera might be the best skater on the Sabres. He can look graceful out on the ice in a way that no other Sabres player can except for perhaps Connolly. Then again, sometimes he looks dreadful and can make you want to throw your phone into the television screen. He just looks like a young defensemen should - one that’s still adjusting to the NHL level. But he’s promising and I have no doubt he’ll eventually figure it out. That last goal, by the way, was not Sekera’s fault.

• It was Tim Kennedy’s. Alfredsson was his man and Kennedy was not in the right position. Honestly, the Sabres can live with that. He’s a young player too. The Sabres shouldn’t lose a game like this because a young player like Kennedy failed to tie up his man. They’re a better team than the Senators and this game shouldn’t have come down to that moment.

• The Sabres had the Senators on the ropes in the first period and failed to score. That’s what cost them the game. People can try to rationalize that period by saying things like they just didn’t get the bounces. Bull shit. The Sabres didn’t execute. When a football team loses a close game after missing a couple wide-open, long touchdown passes because either they were dropped or overthrown, what’s usually said after? Assuming the players we’re talking about are talented, the failure is always attributed to execution. The Sabres might have played better than the Senators in the first period by a wide margin but it doesn’t matter because the scoreboard says otherwise.

• I actually blame Adam Mair and Matt Ellis. The penalties they took in the first period were brutal. The Sabres had momentum, were pressing, and then it was taken away because they had to kill two stupid penalties. Mair and Ellis are not players that are ever relied upon to directly effect the outcome of games. They don’t score regularly and they are not defensive specialists. Their role is to set the pace, provide energy, and wear down opponents. Minor penalties are not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things but at those moments, they really hurt the Sabres. And for them to come from Mair and Ellis is not something I was not happy to see.

• I wasn’t upset that Phillips bumped into Miller. Phillips has a right to that puck too and Miller jumped right out in front of him. I liked seeing Myers get angry about it. It showed everyone that he considers himself a real part of this team. I didn’t like seeing Vanek, who was in a very nonthreatening scoring position, get unecessarily pushed from behind into the boards by Ruutu. When you do things like that, don’t expect justice from the referee in the form of a retaliation penalty if you happen to get punched in the face by the player you nearly injured.