Sabres win fourth straight, BLAST Boston 6-2
By Rick Anderson
Thursday, November 11, 1999

The Buffalo Sabres completely dethrottled the Boston Bruins last night in a big 6-2 inter-division game that ties the Sabres with Boston in the standings. It took Buffalo 17 games to finally get back to the .500 mark, after going winless in their first seven games. They have now won 6 of their last seven games and that loss was a 3-0 defeat in Boston on October 30. In completely manhandling the Bruins, the Sabres played their best game of the season (or tied with the Dallas game).

Martin Biron stops shot by Mikko Eloranta and Cory Sarich is there to clear rebound

In a battle of Biron vs. Byron (Dafoe), Martin Biron came out on top. The rookie goalie who has shined since filling in for the injured Dominik Hasek, registered his sixth win against one loss. Biron came up big in the first period, making 12 saves and finished the game with 21 stops.

"Getting the lead, blasting them 4-0, it was just great," the talkative Biron said after the game. "You see the guys taking really good pride in playing strong defense."

Dafoe, meanwhile, had trouble hanging onto the puck, especially a weak shot by Vaclav Varada that was a knuckleball, fluttered past his glove and into the net in the second period. After allowing 4 goals (3 in the second period) on 20 shots, Dafoe was chased from the nets and replaced with Rob Tallas.

"I hate getting pulled out of the game. I didn't get pulled once last year, so that's really frustrating," a bitter Dafoe said. "The last two were pretty much bang-bang plays across the crease -- some bad bounces all around. You can't use it as an excuse but still, it wasn't a good effort on all of our parts tonight."

Dafoe, playing in only his second game since ending his holdout said, "We've had problems here in the past, and we talked about it before the game. We had problems again, and it was definitely not a very good effort."

The Sabres opened the scoring when Richard Smehlik took a shot from the point and Erik Rasmussen got his stick on it and deflected it past Dafoe with around 9 minutes remaining in the first period. "You saw a more consistent effort from every line," said Rasmussen. "Every line is going. We're not going to win with Miro Satan scoring 50 goals. We're not going to win with Jason Woolley having 50 assists. We need everyone." In the second period, the Sabres took complete charge of the game. At the 4:04 mark of the second period, Varada took that weak change-up shot on Dafoe that looked like one of Doug Flutie's "dead duck" passes, it bounced off Mattias Timander's stick and fluttered in mid air as it slowly bounced off Dafoe's stick and into the net. Dafoe was as surprised as any of the 18,690 on hand at Marine Midland Arena.

"I didn't think I could score in the regular season anymore," said Varada. "I know what they want from me on the ice. To chip on a goal is good for me, and it helps the team, too."

"I thought it went over the glass," Varada said about his first goal of the season. He credited his teammates for getting him out of his slump. "They told me to shave," he said. "I decided I wasn't going to shave until I got a goal."

"Vaclav has been working hard. That line was doing a very good job against the (Jason) Allison line," Lindy Ruff said. "We've been harping on getting pucks to the net and he just threw that one at the net. It is just one of those nights where we got a couple of breaks going our way."

Alexei Zhitnik scores his first goal of season against Byron Dafoe

From there, the Sabres kept on pressing, like Sharks tasting blood. They got 11 shots on goal in the second period, while the Bruins managed only 5. Buffalo employed the same kind of trap system they had used against Dallas in their 3-1 win over the Stars and the game plan seemed to be the same. They attacked the Boston zone in waves, peppering both Dafoe and Tallas with quality shots. In fact, even though the Sabres outshot the Bruins 35-23 in the game, most of their shots were great scoring opportunities. As for Biron, he had a pretty easy night of it after the first period. The two goals that the Bruins scored in the third were because the Sabres went back into a defensive shell after taking a 4-0 lead.

Thumpin' Joe Thornton ruined Biron's shutout bid when he deflected a shot past the rookie goalie at the 6:43 mark of the final stanza. Less than two minutes later, Steve Heinze scored on the next shot on Biron, a goal that the referees went upstairs for a video review. The goal came after it took a weird bounce off the back boards and came right out to Heinze who put it top shelf and it fell right on the goal line where Biron covered up. At some angles, it appeared as if the puck never entered the net or went over the line, but the video judge ruled otherwise. This came after Miroslav Satan scored an apparent goal when he bowled over Tallas behind his own net and put it into the empty goal. Satan was given a tripping penalty and the ensuing powerplay resulted in Boston's second goal.

Maxim Afinogenov, up for his first game with the Sabres, got his first NHL goal when he shook Thornton from behind the Boston goal, circled through the left faceoff circle and went into the slot and put a backhand shot past Tallas.

Jay McKee also got his first goal of the season and Afinogenov got an assist on the goal. The other goal scorers in this game were Alexei Zhitnik, who scored his first goal of the season, along with Satan who got his eighth of the season.

""I got a kick out of it," said McKee. "It was a long time coming. The guys were laughing. Any time a guy goes into a 130-game drought or whatever it is, everybody gets a good chuckle. It (this game) was a big test. These are two teams that are very similar. We're very happy coming out on top of this game. It's a good feeling." Ruff was glad to get some revenge for that 3-0 thumping in Boston the other week. "They kind of embarrassed us in their building. We talked about getting some retribution from that," he said. "We got some breaks. It helped seize the momentum. The one thing we didn't do was ease off. We kept going at them. We sensed we had them. It was an important win for us."

"We weren't in the game at all," said Boston coach Pat Burns. "I haven't been too critical this year no matter what we went through, but tonight you can't accept that. That's not a very good effort. ... One of the biggest problems, we were soft. We didn't finish any hits, we didn't get in there. That's not us."

The Bruins just couldn't seem to mount anything substantial and their passes weren't clicking. The Sabres-Bruins games have a history of being hard hitting, but the Bruins just left that part of their back in Beantown.

"They played well and we stunk," Bruins defenseman Don Sweeney said. "There's no reason for it, really. We just didn't do the right things tonight."

"We just weren't ready to play," added former Sabre Dave Andreychuk. "We didn't do anything."

Meanwhile, the Sabres had their second most productive offensive output of the season, topped only by a 7-3 win over Carolina.

"We played like a pack off wolves," said Jason Woolley, who was named the game's first star.

The Sabres travel to sunny Florida for weekend games against Tampa Bay tomorrow and Florida on Saturday.

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