Sometimes it isn’t the head coach’s fault a team under-performs. That certainly seems to be the case in Buffalo where the Sabres’ season has seen a dreadful start.
On Saturday night in Dallas, the Stars potted four goals in the first period and cruised to a 5-1 win over the Sabres.
Kari Lehtonen made 27 saves to backstop the victory.
“You have to treat it more like a practice. When it gets to four goals or five goals, just go shot after shot,” Lehtonen said. “Don’t think too much, because you know they [are going to] have some good chances, and stay in there. Stay calm, and if they score one, so what.”
Remi Elie, Radek Faksa, Stephen Johns, Tyler Seguin and Antoine Roussel struck for the Dallas goals.
“I give [the Stars] credit. They went to the net hard,” Sabres coach Phil Housley said. “The second one bounces over [Matt] Tennyson’s stick and it goes right to their guy. Would we have wanted to change that? Yes, because I thought our guys played well and did a lot of good things. I thought we played good, it was just unfortunate we got bad bounces.”
Ryan O’Reilly had the ,lone goal for the Sabres.
“When I evaluate the game, I thought we played well. The score tells you differently. There’s probably going to be a lot of people that disagree with me, but I thought we got the start we wanted. There’s just some bad bounces that occurred,” Housley said.
Difficult to see a path to a well-played game with four goals in the first period.
The outcome gave the Stars some reason to be optimi9stic as their season had been mired at 7-6-0 before the win.
“It was really big, I mean, we responded the way we needed to. We had a little bit of a meeting yesterday too,” Dallas’ John Klingberg after the win. “It needs to be better, and I think we cleared that up today. We hold on to a lot more pucks, get into a lot more battles. That was a really huge win, and I feel like this was a really good team game, probably the best 60 minutes we played so far this year.”
[WATCH: All Sabres vs. Stars highlights]
Robin Lehner got the start but was given the hook after yielding three goals on just seven shots; he was relieved by Chad Johnson.
“This is the life I choose. This happened to a lot of goalies,” Lehner said. “We’ve just got to throw this out and go to the next game.”
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