Lindros wrecks havoc in Sabres third straight home loss
By Rick Anderson
Friday, December 2, 1999

A couple weeks ago, Lindy Ruff was enthusiastic about the long home stand the Sabres had ahead of them. After losing their third straight at home, Ruff may now be looking forward to going back on the road again. Last night, the Philadelphia Flyers took advantage of lots of power play advantages and handed the Sabres a 4-2 thrashing.

Back on November 20, Ruff was optimistic about the team's upcoming home stand. "We're starting a pretty good stretch here," Ruff said after beating Atlanta 4-3. "We've got quite a few home games. This should set us up to have a pretty good run. The schedule is in our favor now, we've played very well at home. I think that's six in a row at home for us, this could get our season going again for us."

The Flyers put a blanket all over the Sabres offense as Buffalo could not generate too many scoring chances. One of the reasons for this was getting into penalty trouble again. After Tuesday's game against Pittsburgh when they gave up 3 shorthanded goals, Ruff was determined to get the team to play a more disciplined game. His players must not have listened to him as they went out and were shorthanded for almost 8 minutes in the first period alone.

Eric Lindros knocks both the puck and Martin Biron into the net after scoring the opening goal after just 24 seconds elapsed

Eric Lindros scored in 24 seconds of the first period when he got a pass from Mark Recchi and Lindros went head first into Martin Biron pushing the puck and Biron over the goal line and knocking the net off the moorings. The Sabres disputed the goal but referees Jackson and Trottier refused to listen. Then when the Sabres did almost the exact same thing, the goal was disallowed! In the second period, Miro Satan got a breakaway as Lindros pursued him. Just as Satan crashed the goalie, Lindros bulled in and slammed the net off. The resulting play was reviewed and ruled in the Flyers favor, as fate always seems to have it.

"It's bad to give up a goal in the first minute on the first shot," said Biron about the Lindros goal. "After the first period, they had 18 shots and only one goal, so we were still in the game."

"It was a big goal for us," John LeClair said. "A team like Buffalo plays better when they have the lead. When you have the lead against them, it enables you to play your game."

For the third straight game, most of the calls went against the Sabres, not that they didn't deserve a lot of them. However, the Flyers seemed to be getting away with the same infractions that Buffalo was being tagged for.

When asked what was going through his mind when the Sabres took all those penalties after he explicitly emphasized that he wanted them to cut down on the undisciplined play, Ruff said, "You can guess what's gong through my mind. There are some players who will pay a price for it."

The Sabres penalty killers got plenty of work in the first period and they kept Philadelphia from scoring another goal. With the Flyers on another powerplay in the second period, they finally tallied when Simon Gagne flipped the puck between Biron's right arm and the goal post and hit him in the back and bounced in at 4:01 mark of the period. The goal was very stoppable and Biron wished he had that one back as he wasn't hugging the post.

"Penalties are killing us," said Michael Grosek. "We can't do that against good teams. Philadelphia is a good team, and they will score. If you get behind two goals, you have a minimum chance to win."

"You can see after McKee took his penalty, 15 seconds later Desjardins get Dixon Ward in the face," Ruff said about the poor officiating. "Same play, identical - and McKee didn't get Recchi in the face. We warned them, we said that anytime you get a stick anywhere on Recchi, a shoulder, elbow, anywhere - he's going to grab his face. We talked about the Ottawa game where he threw his stick 8 feet in the air, went down when the stick didn't even touch him in the face. We warned our players that if you get it anywhere near him, he's going to go down or he's going to grab his face."

"We'd just like to see some of the calls go our way," Ruff said. "You can look at the tape. If you want to watch Dixon Ward - Dixon Ward gets it 15 second later, the identical stick that Recchi got. I think Ward actually got it in the face mask. But Dixon didn't go down, he didn't grab his face. You could see his face mask go up when the stick hit him in the face. There's no excuse for our high sticks."

Buffalo finally got on the scoreboard when Grosek scored in his third straight game when he shot it into the wide open net as John Vanbiesbrouck was down and out. The goal came at the 12:32 mark of the period and put the Sabres back into the game. Michael Peca and Alexei Zhitnik got assists.

The Sabres powerplay, which has been inept all season, allowed another breakaway as Jody Hull broke in and deked Biron to his right and then put the puck in on Biron's left side to give the Flyers a 3-1 lead. It was the third time this season that Buffalo allowed a goal while on the power play. That goal seemed to deflate the Sabres spirits as the Flyers had more chances on the Buffalo powerplay than the Sabres did. After Hull's goal, the Flyers had two more two-on-one breaks while the Sabres were a man up.

"I anticipated (the pass) and knocked it down," Hull said about his breakaway. "It was pretty much a footrace from there."

In the third period, Wayne Primeau sneaked one past John Vanbiesbrouck as he got the puck on the side of the net to Vanbiesbrouck's right. He backhanded it past the surprised goalie and Buffalo was one down again. But that was it for the Sabres scorers and Vanbiesbrouck had his 800th win of the season. He only had to make 18 saves as Biron had to make 28 saves on the other end.

"We checked well in the third," said Philadelphia coach Roger Neilson. "We would have liked to have gotten another one. I started playing a little more careful than I would have liked to."

The last five minutes of the game, the Flyers had the Sabres bottled back in their own zone. They had a hard time getting Biron out for the extra attacker and when they did Lindros was able to steal the puck and feed it to LeClair who shot it into the wide open net to seal the Sabres fate. The Flyers with the win are now unbeaten in four straight, with three victories and a tie.

"Now it's one game at a time," Ruff said during his post game conference. "We don't have a lot of time to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. We've got to find a way to win a game."

"There are some players here who have struggled putting the puck in the net," Ruff continued. "Tonight there wasn't a lot of opportunities. You're not going to have a lot of opportunities in a period like the first period. But for the game, there weren't plenty of opportunities."

"We talked to Alexei about being a lot more involved to play a lot more physical game and join the rush a lot more" Ruff said. You could see in the third period that he was the only guy that could get it through the neutral zone and skate with it. He tried to play physical. He took a couple of penalties - if we asked him to stand up and play physical he might take a couple. The high sticking infractions though, can't take."

"We've had key players make key mistakes at key times of the game. When you look at the game tonight, we spent the whole first period killing penalties and obviously we did a pretty damn good job of it. In the second period we get the goal, we made a big mistake on our powerplay and that zapped a little emotion out of the game."

"We don't have a lot of time to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves," said Lindy. "We have to find a way to win a game. These two games we lost were almost for the same reasons. Our best line got beat the first shift, and we gave them too many power plays early. It looks a lot like the blueprint from last game."

The Sabres had difficulty penetrating the Flyers neutral zone trap, much the same way as they were stymied by the Blues last Friday.

"You've got to look at the third period. Philly had five guys in the neutral zone, they trap as well as anybody and the only chance you've got of getting it in is to dump it in and retrieve it. To me it's frustrating - it's a frustrating game to watch. Our players are frustrated trying to get through it. When you (the Flyers) get a one goal lead and you don't take any penalties, it's tough to get through it."

Because the message Ruff tried to make after the last game about not taking stupid penalties didn't sink through, he was asked what steps he would take to drive the message home.

"Some players will sit out, they'll have to sit out. The message wasn't strong enough." When asked who was going to sit, Ruff replied, "I'll evaluate when I've watched I've watched it on tape."

The Sabres, who depended on Hasek in years past to keep the score down so that they could make their one or two goals per game decide games, now have to score more goals in order to compete. This season that just isn't happening and they miss Hasek dearly. "We've got some frustrated players when it comes to scoring some goals right now. They've got to work their way through it. You're going to go through stretches of the season, we had it last year where you wonder where the offense is going to come from. But our offense comes from our Primeau line chipping in a goal, the powerplay getting one. It's got to come from all the lines. You can't look at one person. There's going to be stretches where your key players don't score. Other guys have to pick it up."

Michael Peca once again was almost invisible, unlike years in the past when he would hound Lindros and cause the Flyers captain to have a bad game. This year, it has been the reverse for those two team leaders.

"Killing penalties takes away your momentum," defended Peca. "It disrupts the flow of getting four lines going, and that's what we count on so much. We shot ourselves in the foot again."

Lindros was an absolute force out there on the ice. His driving to the net resulted in on Flyer goal and erased a sure goal by Satan. His knocking off the net could have resulted in a penalty shot or the refs could have allowed the goal to stand because of it, but the Sabres have not been getting those rulings for the past half year now. Lindros have outplayed Peca the past two meetings and that lifts the whole Flyer team.

"He was everywhere tonight, just awesome," said LeClair. "He plays a team game and he's let everyone know he's a team guy. It makes a big difference in the way we play."

"He was strong and banged to the net and was hitting all night," Roger Neilson said of Lindros. "Probably his best game in a while."

Lindros, going head-to-head with the Sabres captain, held Peca to a minus-3 showing in the plus-minus ratings.

"Everyone was into [the game], not just one individual," Lindros said. "To win against a team like that, everyone has to be doing it. We maintained our strong neutral-zone play. We were really on them."

The Sabres try to halt the home slump tomorrow night when they host the New York Rangers.

     HOME           SEASON'S RESULTS      SABRE TALK MESSAGE BOARD      NEWSROOM      99 PLAYOFFS    
THE PLAYERS      STATISTICS      SCHEDULE      PROSPECTS      LIVE GAME RADIO      HISTORY      TEAM INFO     
PHOTO GALLERY     MULTIMEDIA      SABRES POLL      TROPHY CASE      LINKS      THE STAFF      E-MAIL SABRESWORD

Copyright © 1999 Sabres Central, all rights reserved