In Buffalo, the Sabres got a pair of goals from Jack Quinn and scored a 6-3 win over the San Jose Sharks on Sunday night.
“You kind of always want to create offense as offensive players, but I think just a learning and understanding of a lot of offense comes from being good defensively, and sometimes getting in deep, you’ll be able to get it back down there closer to the net,” Quinn said. “So just being a little mature like that helps.”
Buffalo improved to 11-13-1.
Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen made 26 saves. in the Sabres win.
Tage Thompson opened the scoring to give the Sabres a 1-0 lead in the first period, but San Jose responded with two goals for a 2-1 lead after the first 20 minutes.
“I just thought they were out-everything us,” San Jose coach David Quinn said. “I thought they were outskating us, they were outhitting us, they were doing everything better than we were. At some point in time, you’ve got to say enough is enough and there’s got to be pushback. We’ve just got to have more pushback in our game. … I thought we had that for an extended period of time, but we’ve lost that along the way here and we’ve got to get back to playing like that.”
Nick Bonino and Kevin Labanc scored for the advantage after one.
“Nice to get a puck in that area. I haven’t had too many shots from there,” Bonino said. “That was a great play all around from the guys to get that over to me. Yeah, I’d love to see more go in, for sure.”
JJ Peterka tied it for Buffalo with 18 seconds of fresh used in the middle frame.
“The start of the second period was big,” Sabres coach Don Granato said. “What an unbelievable pass by Dylan. Peterka made it look easy taking it out of his skates on the fly. I believe we started with great energy and just kept getting better as a result. I thought all of the lines were participants in that.”
Jeff Skinner and Quinn gave the Sabres a 4-2 lead in the second.
“I don’t really know how to describe it,” Quinn said of his line. “I think it’s just a lot of chemistry and like I said, me and JJ played together last year (in the American Hockey League), and I’m really familiar with ‘Cozey.’ He’s such an easy guy to play with, he makes us better. It’s just clicking and we’re continuing to get better each game, which is a good sign.”
Quinn’s second marker of the game came just past the midway point of the third period for a 5-2 lead.
San Jose scored on a marker from Oskar Lindblom 24 seconds later to make it 5-3.
Alex Tuch added an empty-net goal for the 6-3 final.
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Aaron Dell made 32 saves in the Sharks loss.
“They outcompeted us for a lot of the night, and that can’t happen,” Bonino said. “That’s something that you can’t really say about us to this point in the year. It’s very rare for that to happen, and tonight things kind of got away from us.”
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