In Buffalo, the Sabres stopped a four-game slide with a 4-1 win over the visiting Montreal Canadiens on Friday.
Tage Thompson hit for a double in the Sabres win.
“I feel like I’ve always entered games with the mindset of ‘I’m going to score,'” Thompson said. “I think now I’m getting a lot of opportunity and they’re going in for me. I think the confidence is continuing to grow, and that’s just the product of guys playing good hockey around me, too. As a group, I think we’ve been playing good. Obviously haven’t gotten a ton of the results lately we’ve wanted, but I think we’ve done a lot of good things. A lot of that success is coming from the guys around me.”
Dustin Tokarski made 25 saves in the Buffalo win.
“I loved the way he (Tokarski) looked,” Buffalo head coach Don Granato said, who had been pulled in each of his previous two starts. “Confident, he absorbed pucks, and any rebounds or any pucks that went off of him were in the corner for the most part, not front. But again, he reads the shot selection very well. And he did all that tonight.”
The Sabres improved to 8-10-2.
Josh Anderson scored the Habs lone goal.
“Yeah, it’s frustrating,” Anderson said. “I’m not going to lie here. I’m not going to sit here and go through it. Good first period, we are in the game, and then the second period, just got outworked. That’s all we’ve been talking about this year. I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
Montreal dropped to 5-15-2.
“They scored the first goal, we stayed with our game and tied it,” Montreal coach Dominique Ducharme said. “We weren’t able to maintain it over 60 minutes. That’s what happened in the second period. We crack and we make bad plays with the puck. … Eventually, it’s going to cost you.”
Cody Eakin and Kyle Okposo hit for single markers for the Sabres.
“Obviously, when you have a four-minute power play, you hope to create momentum, create a goal, create something, and we did the opposite,” the Canadiens’ Jonathan Drouin said. “I made a bad pass to Nick (Suzuki) in his skates and it turned into a 2-on-1, 2-on-2, and they scored. It was a bit of a momentum breaker for us, but it’s happening too often.”
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Sam Montembeault made 35 saves in the Montreal loss.
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