In Denver, Philipp Grubauer made 18 saves to help the Colorado Avalanche to a 3-0 win over the visiting Buffalo Sabres on Saturday night.
Eighteen shots from the Sabres?
Nathan MacKinnon had a goal for AVS in win over Buffalo – file photo by Lewis Bleiman
Fighting for relevance and a playoff spot and you get 18 shots?
“I think they had more shots in the last two minutes than they had the whole game,” Grubauer said. “It’s a little bit challenging because you don’t really get into the game. Mentally, you got to stay on the edge every time. They have guys who can make skill plays and you got to be aware.
“It’s actually mentally and physically more challenging than a game where you get 35 or 40 shots. You never know when it’s going to come, and you always have to be ready.”
Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Bourque provided the offense for the Avs who improved to 30-27-12.
“It’s good that everyone stepped up,” MacKinnon said. “The problem with that is we can’t forget that [Landeskog is] not in the lineup and we have to have this same effort to try and fill that void. We can’t fill a 35-goal scorer or whatever he was on pace for and 80-something points. I mean, that’s elite in this league.”
The Avs are just out of the wild card spot in the west, behind the Minnesota Wild.
“I mean, they outworked us,” Sabres forward Jack Eichel said. “They were more desperate than we were.”
The Sabres dropped to 30-29-9.
“Obviously, you try and make adjustments, you try and find ways to get in (their zone),” Sabres forward Jeff Skinner said. “We didn’t do a good enough job of creating a forecheck and spending time down there and as a result we defended most of the game and couldn’t really get out of our own end.”
The Avs played without Gabriel Landeskog who will miss four to six weeks with an upper body injury.
“Start to finish, that might have been our best game all year. (It was) a game we needed to have and we did,” the Avs’ Erik Johnson said. ” This homestand is big for us here. We know the importance of it and we can’t worry about scoreboard watching or anything like that; we just have to worry about our games. If we handle that and handle our business at home, hopefully we are where we want to be at the end of the season.”
[WATCH: All Sabres vs. Avalanche highlights]
Carter Hutton made 40 saves in the loss.
“They carried the play pretty much the whole game. If you want to have success, if you want to win, you’re not going to be able to rely on all that to get the job done,” Skinner said. “[Carter Hutton] played well for us today. We kind of hung him out to dry. We have to bear down and play better and spend more time in the offensive end.”
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