Buffalo, N.Y. (WGR Sports Radio 550) - As the Buffalo Sabres were talking about trades on Trade Deadline Day, head coach Lindy Ruff said twice that they had to change the culture on this team, and he said it emphatically.
For the last few weeks of the season, Ruff chastised himself for not getting this team where it needed to be in time. He says it took too long.
"I still remain very confident. I’m angry with myself for not getting the job done, and the realization is I’ve got a lot better take on the players," said Ruff during his end-of-season press conference.
"There’s lots of different reasons, but I didn’t think we started well enough. Our inconsistency hurt us as the season went on: Win three, lose three. But at the end, we got terrific goaltending, we scored more.
Ruff says there were a lot of games where the Sabres could outplay the opponent, but didn’t outscore them. The inability to get those timely goals hurt the Sabres in the end.
"In the last segment, we had timely scoring, we had good special teams and we had good goaltending, which led to a good consistent run where every night we were in a game that we felt we could win. When you play like that, you get to win on a consistent basis," Ruff said.
The Sabres blew so many leads, and didn’t even get one point out of many of those games.
When the Colorado Avalanche came to Buffalo, the Sabres had a 4-0 lead just 11 minutes into the game. The Sabres lost that game in regulation, 5-4. Then in Denver later in the year, Buffalo had a 3-0 lead, but ended up losing in overtime.
Against a slumping Detroit Red Wings team, the Sabres led 5-3 midway through the third period and lost.
It was just a theme for this team. If the game got tight, they’d get tight and sit back, and just wait for the other team to beat them. They just continually found ways to lose.
"Early in the year, we had trouble with adversity. Later in the year, I think we dealt with high pressure situations better," Ruff said. "Even look at the last game, it was a game where probably earlier in the year we might have found a way to lose. But by the end of the year, we were a team that was able to push through and win games like that, where pressure mounted inside the game and we were able to push through and win. We just didn’t get there quick enough."
In their last 20 games, Buffalo was ninth in the league on the power play and 24th on the penalty kill. In their last 10 games, they were sixth on the power play and 19th on the penalty kill.
So the question is, how do you get this team playing at a high level in October and November, instead of waiting until March. How do you change that culture that Ruff was begging for at the trade deadline?
“Ultimately, you need to believe in each other. It’s not a group of players that maybe complain about each other or complain about plays, there’s a lot of mistakes inside a game," Ruff said.
It’s bringing a group together that Ruff is focused on, and making sure they're connected and committed to the same thing. The culture is a team-first attitude.
"That might be giving up individual success at certain times in a game, that’s blocking shots when maybe you’re not the best shot blocker, or getting in the way of people when you probably don’t want to. It’s a selflessness culture, and there was times where I thought we were really close to it, but we failed the test at times," Ruff said. "You know the incidents that I was disappointed in, and to a man, our group was disappointed. Really hard learning points at different parts of the season where we failed, and then picked ourselves back up and started to build again. I feel that the group is connected, they are committed, but we just didn’t respond sometimes to what I thought were big culture moments."
There’s a very real chance this team will go into the next season with two young goalies who failed the NHL test this season.
Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams is determined to have Devon Levi as the team's No. 1 goalie. He’s handed him the job twice, and the 23-year-old was not even remotely ready.
After last season, Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen had some of the best numbers in the NHL in his last 35 games, but this season, he regressed drastically.
It might work, it might not, but you haven’t made the playoffs in 14 years. Can you afford to put the season on the line with two unproven youngsters? Ruff defended Luukkonen and his season in goal.
"I believe in ‘UPL’," he said, "Until I get the team to clean up some of the poor puck play, it’s going to be hard on any goalie.
"Look at our game against Philly (where Luukkonen gave up seven goals), there’s nothing your goalie’s going to do about that play except make a highlight or ESPN reel type save. But the area that hurt us the most the whole year, we tried to keep improving (coverages in the middle of the ice) and I’ve seen improvement, but inside of a game you look at what happens on a play like that, you’re asking your goaltender to make an unbelievable save, and he shouldn’t have to make that unbelievable save. That’s on the group. It’s not on the goalie."
The other side of that is that was the kind of saves that 37-year-old James Reimer was making, which is why they were winning games when he took the net in March.
For much of this season, the defensive play was horrendous.
Buffalo was 29th in the NHL in goals-against at 3.50 goals per-game.
In the few games where the puck decisions were good, they looked like a really good team and won, but they were few and far between.
"For me, it’s easy. No. 1, it’s puck play. Your decisions when you play with the puck. No. 2 is your decisions when you’re staying in the zone or getting out of the zone," Ruff said. "You look at the last game, we gave up a 2-on-1 because we stayed in the zone for no reason.
"Lets say it’s your five/six defensemen, they shouldn’t make that decision, because the reward a lot of the time isn’t worth the risk. And the nights we made a lot of good decisions, the chances went way down, and the high risk chances went way down. If we can improve on that area, I think that’s what Kevyn and I have talked about, the group needs to be better and that will help the goaltending out itself."
Adams had said that changes in the organization won’t include Ruff, as he’ll be back behind the bench for the 2025-26 season.