Tonight the Sabres took a pretty pathetic 5-2 loss at home to the Bruins after the team celebrated captain Kyle Okposo’s 1000th career game.
The Bruins got on the board 3:01 into the game with a goal from Danton Heinen, following his own rebound and beating Devon Levi amidst chaos out in front of the net. Just 1:08 later, they quickly made it 2-0 with David Pastrnak scoring in transition on a perfectly placed one timer on a cross ice pass from Pavel Zacha on a 3 on 2. After a fantastic, very aggressive sliding save by Linus Ullmark, the Bruins came streaking back down the ice on a 3 on 1, with Brandon Carlo making it 3-0 B’s with 4:39 to go in the period. Very lousy start to this game. We outshot the Bruins 13-11, but the Bruins had way better scoring chance than we did. The Sabres generated maybe two good shifts that whole period where on their chances the Bruins really had chances to score, and capitalized on them. To make matters worse, Tage Thompson got hurt on a missed tripping call.
Luckily, Tage was back on the bench for the start of the second period. Oscar Steen made it 4-0 Boston 4:07 into the second on a nice shot as he got left pretty much wide open right in the middle of the ice. Then they made it 5-0 on a Hampus Lindholm goal with 7:37 left in the second on the powerplay on a shot that Levi didn’t see from a long distance. The Sabres finally got on the board with 4:53 left in the second with Victor Oloffson getting the rebound from an Owen Power shot.
With 4:58 left in the game, Oloffson got his second goal of the game to make the score look a little less embarrassing on a nice goal. Final score ends up being 5-2 to look less embarrassing on paper.
FINAL: Sabres 2, Bruins 5
Pathetic loss. At least we didn’t just give up and it was encouraging to see the Sabres try late to make it less embarrassing of a game, but this was still a pretty bad game. We actually outshot the Bruins 33-31 but that’s a pretty misleading number seeing that we got dominated by an expected goal rate of 4.81-2.96 and didn’t generate much scoring chances all game. Glad I at least bet on the B’s tonight so I cashed in on the loss. Wish I did that for the Bills yesterday.
PS: Congratulations to Kyle Okposo on his 1000th game. It’s such a great achievement and he deserves all the recognition for it. I know a lot of people shit on his play on the ice but what he brings to that young locker room is so valuable to this team. Watch his interview on Spittin’ Chiclets, hell of an interview that really gives another perspective on this guy. Congrats Captain!
Please follow me:
Instagram: @atownszone
Twitter: @atownszone
If you like the site and my work, share it with your friends!
… and tell Dave Portnoy to hire me at Barstool…
A Town's Zone 
One thought on “Sabres vs. Bruins: 11/14/23 – Game Reactions/Recap”