Buffalo, N.Y. (WGR Sports Radio 550) - The Buffalo Sabres are in the midst of another double-digit losing streak, having gone winless in the last 10 games, going 0-6-3 in that stretch. It is the third time during the franchise's record-long playoff drought that the Sabres have lost more than 10-consecutive games.
The Sabres will look to snap their 10-game skid on Tuesday night when they take on the Canadiens at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
Ahead of Tuesday's contest, Sabres owner Terry Pegula met his team in Montreal, and held a meeting with the players on the team, general manager Kevyn Adams and head coach Lindy Ruff. According to Frank Seravalli from Daily Faceoff, the meeting was held to remind players of Pegula's faith in the current group, and the belief that the team can turn things around within the locker room.
While struggling in a losing streak such as this, there can be many areas of a team's game that can go wrong. For the Sabres, it has seen a bit of everything: Blown leads, bad penalties, lack of scoring, and more scattered throughout all 10 losses.
Following Sunday afternoon's loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs at Scotiabank Arena, Ruff pinned this current losing streak squarely back on himself. He did so again on Tuesday while appearing on WGR during the "Jeremy and Joe Show".
"I'm the coach. I am the one that has to solve this," said Ruff with Jeremy White and Joe DiBiase. "It has been a lot of different things inside of those games. Our puck management against Toronto put us in a bad place in some situations in the game. I really felt early in the year, our managing the puck was better. You look at that game, we mismanaged it. It ended up giving Toronto a couple goals, gave them life. Couple penalties inside of that game have also allowed teams to get some life."
In order to get out of this bad string of games, the Sabres need to continue to keep up their mental side of the game. The moment the game starts to go against Buffalo, panic starts to settle into the group, which sends the team spiraling.
If the losing gets to a certain point, it could also boil over off the ice, resulting in a team's loss of chemistry. Ruff believes, though, that as the head coach, he can settle things down.
"It does start to weigh in players, and my job is to pick up the pieces after that," Ruff said on WGR. "I think when you look at that second period, that couple minutes that got away from us. And then calling the timeout just trying to settle things down, and just saying you've got to continue to believe in what you're doing. Manage the play a little bit better, make the right play at the right time.
"You can look at a game, there's a lot of mistakes inside the game. There's a lot of mistakes that don't go into your goal, there's mistakes that do. It's minimizing mistakes at crucial times. I think if you have a goal scored against you, that next shift, not allowing the other team to gain even more momentum is a big part of the mental part of the game. You can either fuel their momentum or you can stop it right there with those next couple shifts."
The Sabres and Canadiens drop the puck on Tuesday just after 7 p.m. EST, with pregame coverage on WGR starting at 6 p.m. EST during "Schopp and the Bulldog".