Buffalo, N.Y. (WGR 550) - On Tuesday the Buffalo Sabres and Boston Bruins tangle for Game 2 of their Stanley Cup Series. Buffalo took a one game to none lead in the series with an emotional third period comeback win.
Lindy Ruff said Game 1 has to be out of their minds as they approach Game 2
“Today we talked about Game 1 is over, and we’re on to Game 2 which can take a whole new look, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen that change. We’ve got a team that’s going to be desperate, no team wants to go down 2-0 and we’d like to push it to 2-0.
“I think they believe in the way they play, we believe in the way we play. We made a couple of mistakes that we paid for that they took advantage of, try to eliminate those mistakes and a couple of breakaways that we gave up and I thought our guys stuck to our game plan and played a heck of a game.”
Marco Sturm knows his team collapsed in the final eight minutes giving up four goals. He said,
“If you look at the last few goals out of nothing pretty much, they scored three goals in the area that we wanted to protect, so if you give a guy like 72 (Tage Thompson) lots of room and lots of space out there, he’s that good and he’s gonna score against you, so we should be a little bit smart about it.
“When you head down on your rollercoaster, you can’t freak out, you’ve got to stay calm and that’s something we’ve just got to get better at, especially on the road.”
The Sabres power play is in a very bad slump and it looked awful in Game 1. Ruff said he does know some of the reasons why,
“We didn’t solve pressure good enough, and our loose puck recoveries weren’t good enough, but there was some good in it and if you want to focus on the bad, there’s bad in it too.”
Neither team is making any lineup chances.
Josh Doan got to experience his first playoff game in front of a Buffalo crowd and he really felt the passion that filtered down to the ice,
“It was pretty cool, obviously the crowd was pretty electric and I think a lot of us built off it and we carried momentum at the end of that game when we needed it, so they showed up and they showed out like we heard they would and it was cool to see some of the videos as well.”
After a game like that, players can’t just go home and go to bed. They’re still keyed up and Doan said he had to find ways to wind down and get his rest,
“The good thing is being on the East Coast there’s other games to watch, so you can slow yourself down a bit by doing that and just relaxing, but it’s never easy to sleep after a game, especially a game of that magnitude, with that amount of excitement and the lead up was really huge.”
Join “Schopp and the Bulldog” for pregame starting at 6:30 when you’ll hear from NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, Ruff, Sturm, Doan and possibly Alex Tuch.
Buffalo came from behind to win in Game 1
Buffalo came from behind to win in Game 1
