In Glendale, Craig Anderson made 28 saves in his return to the Buffalo Sabres lineup, in a 3-1 win over the Arizona Coyotes on Saturday.
“It was a nice finish to a chaotic day for us,” Sabres head coach Don Granato said. “I thought Craig was amazing, how simple he makes the game look in the net. You can tell why he’s been a great goaltender in this League for a long time.”
Shayne Gostisbehere was the lone goal scorer for Arizona, he spoiled Anderson’s shutout bid, midway through the third period.
“We didn’t have much,” Coyotes head coach Andre Tourigny said. “When you’re not into it, when you don’t have the urgency, that’s what happens. The pressure was not hard on the puck. We’re not physical. We’re not reloading hard enough. We can go on and on.”
Alex Tuch and Peyton Krebs had multi-point games for the Sabres, each had a goal in the win.
“It’s nice to see guys execute. I mean, that’s a high level of skill,” Granato said. “We talked about being in the chaos of the day, but when you look at your line chart as a coach and you look at guys like Peyton Krebs and Alex Tuch … it’s nice to have the skill we have. They’re guys whose careers are evolving in front of all of us.”
The Coyotes 10-29-4.
“Last night’s game that was probably one of our better games of a 60-minute hockey game, and you’d think we’d come in here with a little more motivation to build off that,” Arizona’s Lawson Crouse said. “But we let things slide early.”
Kyle Okposo also scored for Buffalo.
“For me, personally, I was coming back to the rink, excited to play and then it was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one thing after the other for us,” Okposo said. “We just tried to focus on coming together as a team for 60 minutes and get a win, and we did.”
The Sabres improved to 14-22-7.
“We had to look at ourselves and say, ‘What can we control?’ It’s what we have in the room, right? It’s not what we don’t have. Throughout the season, whether it’s injuries or COVID, there’s going to be pieces that are in and out,” Anderson said. “You just can’t worry about, ‘Oh, we’re missing this guy or missing that guy’ and think it’s going to a horrible night. If you say, ‘Hey, this is what we’ve got’ and have that mindset, good things usually happen.”
Karel Vejmelka made 32 saves in the Coyotes loss.
“We gave them a lot of space,” the Coyotes’ Christian Fischer said. “It was a winnable game, we knew it, when we didn’t turn the puck over. But you’re down after two periods, and you’re just chasing the game.”
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