The Chicago Blackhawks look to salvage something from their season-opening road trip when they visit the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday night.
After what happened on Thursday night in Utah, something is setting the bar pretty low.
The Sabres also aren’t off to a great start, either, having lost 6-3 on the road to the Columbus Blue Jackets on Thursday, although there were at least some positives for Buffalo after a terrible first period. Twice the Sabres cut the deficit to one in the second period but they never found the equalizer and Columbus eventually put the game away with two goals in the third. The Sabres will be looking to right the ship in their second game, especially since it’ll be their home opener (yes, the Blackhawks will be the opponent in yet another team’s first home game — gross).
The Sabres forward group is still led by Tage Thompson, who went a point-per-game last season with 81 points (40 G, 41 A) while completing his third 40-goal campaign in four years. Ryan McLeod was next with 54 points (14 G, 40 A), followed by Josh Doan with 52 points (25 G, 27 A), and Jack Quinn with 51 points (20 G, 31 A) in 82 games. Zach Benson and Josh Norris both missed significant time, but produced 0.66 and 0.77 point-per-game rates when in the lineup in over 40 games. The Sabres have a few lesser-known young talents in Noah Ostlund, Konsta Helenius and Jiri Kulich in the lineup as well who’ll be looking to break out this season.
On the blue line, there are some familiar faces: Rasmus Dahlin (0.96) and Owen Power (0.36) are still the headliners, while Mattias Samuelsson (0.53) remains a solid top-four option. There may be two new faces in the Sabres lineup, too: Olen Zellweger and former Blackhawks defenseman Louis Crevier, with the latter arriving in Buffalo as part of the trade that sent Bowen Byram (and Jordan Greenway) to Chicago. Zellweger was acquired from the Anaheim Ducks and missed the opening game for Buffalo while in concussion protocol, but returned to practice on Friday and is expected to play against the Blackhawks. A few more Sabres remain out for this game: forward Jason Zucker, defenseman Conor Timmins and goaltender Alex Lyon.
The Sabres had an optional morning skate, so we may not have the exact lines they’ll run in this game, but here are the lines from that Columbus game:
With Zellweger healthy, he’s expected to play alongside Power while Crevier was rotating on the bottom pair along:
Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen looks to be the starting goaltender for Buffalo. He didn’t have a great opener, but he has been excellent against Chicago in his career, going 6-0-0 with a .928 save percentage.
Speaking of records against the Blackhawks, the Sabres won both games last season by a combined score of 14-4, including a 9-3 drumming before Thanksgiving that was just depressing. Let’s hope they can fare a little better Saturday.
As for the Blackhawks, they followed up a messy 5-2 opening-night loss to the Vegas Golden Knights with an absolute disaster against the Utah Mammoth: getting thoroughly outplayed in a 6-0 loss. Chicago was chasing the game basically from the opening faceoff, struggled mightily to move the puck out of its own zone and generated almost nothing offensively. Utah led 2-0 after one, 5-0 after two and mercifully stopped at six. Obviously, it’s two games into an 84-game season, and the Blackhawks are also playing without Connor Bedard, so there’s no reason to reach for the panic button quite yet. When considering the optimism surrounding this team entering the season, though, getting outscored 11-2 in the first two games is certainly not how anyone wanted this thing to start.
To maintain a bit of perspective, though, some of this is likely just growing pains for a very young team. There were only two players (Patrick Kane and Tyler Bertuzzi) among the top-10 Blackhawks in ice time against Utah who were over the age of 25. Some players are getting their first taste of NHL hockey (Anton Frondell and Roman Kantserov), while several others haven’t even reached 100 NHL games yet (Oliver Moore, Nick Lardis, Ryan Greene, Artyom Levshunov and Sam Rinzel). That’s a lot of youth being asked to play significant roles all at once, so ugly stretches shouldn’t be particularly surprising.
But it’d be nice if they gave us something — anything, really — in the Sabres game to feel good about before Tuesday’s home opener.
The big news from morning skate is that the Blackhawks will be without Byram. Sam Rinzel is also scratched, so Kevin Korchinski and Ethan Del Mastro will make their regular season debuts in Buffalo. Final defense pairs are unknown as they were rotated during the skate.
The rest of the Blackhawks lines look a bit closer to what they were during training camp, most notably with Frank Nazar centering Roman Kantserov and Patrick Kane. Spencer Knight will be the starter in net.
Tale of the Tape
Blackhawks — Statistic — Sabres
45.60% (30th) — 5-on-5 Corsi For — 49.28% (16th)
42.25% (32nd) — 5-on-5 Expected goals for — 49.95% (17th)
2.56 (30th) — Goals per game — 3.45 (5th)
3.29 (27th) — Goals against per game — 2.93 (t-10th)
46.0% (31st) — Faceoffs — 45.9% (32nd)
16.9% (29th) — Power play — 19.5% (t-19th)
83.6% (2nd) — Penalty kill — 81.9% (4th)
(All stats from last season)
How to watch
When: 6 p.m. CT
Where: KeyBank Center, Buffalo
TV: CHSN
Webstream: ESPN+
Radio: WGN 720