Who looks good for the Sabres in the preseason? A question not as simple to answer as you would think. You're just not going to draw many big conclusions from a game like Saturday's 3-1 win over the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins With Tristan Jarry in goal.
This matinee in KeyBank Center was flatter than stale beer for the first 30 minutes before the pace finally picked up a little and we got some better action.
From this view, one outgrowth of the salary cap is that teams' rosters are pretty well set early in the preseason, based on who's getting paid. It thus cuts down on competition for jobs and the number of players going full throttle in exhibitions trying to push their way on to a roster.
Frankly, there were a ton of guys on the ice for both sides Saturday playing like it was time to hit for the road for AHL camp starting Monday. And the word came down for 21 Sabres later in the evening that their time in the NHL was over, for now. The group includes No. 1 draft pick Matt Savoie, who asserted himself very well in camp and will now return to Winnipeg of the Western Hockey League.
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Thumbing through the notebook after this one:
• The Sabres are 3-1 in the preseason and have had no issues with goaltending thus far. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen has been excellent in both of his starts, and was easily the best player on the ice Saturday. The team giving up just nine goals in four games, no matter how weak opposing rosters have been built, is still a good sign.
"He's obviously a really special goalie, and he was on his game today," said winger Jack Quinn, UPL's teammate in Rochester last season. "It makes it pretty easy on us in front of him. All great goalies and great players you can kind of sense when they're on, and he kind of had that vibe today, for sure."
• Loved coach Don Granato's answer to how Luukkonen has dealt with the situation where his NHL job seemingly got taken away in July with the free-agent signing of Eric Comrie: "You can be frustrated, don't play frustrated." Makes perfect sense. Sounds like something out of the Book of Marv Levy.
• Snipes. Let's see them all day. The calendar just turned to October, but Victor Olofsson and Tage Thompson both went bar down on Jarry with absolute lasers that were more befitting of January than the preseason.
• Owen Power makes the game look easy. He played a team-high 21:12 on Saturday, was active on the power play and didn't give the Penguins any room in neutral ice or the defensive zone. He's played eight career NHL games. Even for a No. 1 overall pick, that kind of polish on the blueline is hard to fathom.
• If there was ever a game where you could enjoy a team going 0 for 6 on the power play, this was it. The Sabres had 10 shots on goal with the man advantage and oodles of zone time. Just no finish on this day. You know that won't last.
"I thought we were pretty good," Quinn said. "It wasn't really going in, but we had a ton of chances and we were having a lot of fun out there moving it around. So I think on a different night, if we played the same way, we would see a lot more go in."
"Keep them hungry," a smiling Granato joked when presented with the assessment that his power play did well even without a goal. "They did a lot of nice things. But it's preseason. You can tell these guys don't feel quite the polish in their game. ... I think both goaltenders were sharper than the shooters."
• Who's headed out, other than Savoie? Draft names like Isak Rosen, Jiri Kulich, Aleksandr Kisakov, Filip Cederqvist and Tyson Kozak. Plus returning Amerks, including captain Michael Mersch, Brandon Biro, Brett Murray, Lukas Rousek, Linus Weissbach, Oskari Laaksonen, Mitch Eliot, Ethan Prow and Peter Tischke and Michael Houser. Also sent out were Mason Jobst, Koshen Olischefski, Josh Passolt, Brendan Warren, Zach Berzolla and goalie Beck Warm.
Another big winter is in the offing in Rochester. Meanwhile, things start to get much more real for the Sabres at practice on Monday. And there are only two exhibition games left, here Tuesday night at Carolina and Friday in a rematch at Pittsburgh.
"Monday is a much different day for camp," Granato acknowledged. "You sort of let the players play from the coaching standpoint early on through camp until they start feeling better and better and stronger. Even this morning's practice (for the non-game group) was much harder than earlier, and that will continue to ramp up."
"It's nice to get a couple of games in here, and I think we're moving in the right way," Olofsson said. "Next week, you can start building a little bit more chemistry between guys, too. We've been playing with a lot of different guys throughout the camp. So we're just going to start building some lines here, hopefully."
• One young player you need to see more from this week is JJ Peterka, who is expected to be on the club, but hasn't done much in his last two games. Perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise. Peterka, remember, started slowly last year in Rochester before his game took off post-Christmas. A new level presents new challenges. We've seen a lot more in exhibitions from Weissbach and Savoie than we have from Peterka.
• I like the defense depth the Sabres added for Rochester. Kale Clague and Chase Priskie, in particular, should be quite strong for the Amerks, and have shown they can be depth callups to Buffalo if the need arises.
Clague, who played 36 games last year between Los Angeles and Montreal, broke up a 4-on-1 break in the first period to stymie a Pittsburgh chance, while Priskie got the assist on Thompson's goal that gave Buffalo a 2-0 lead.
