BOSTON – Head coach Don Granato returned to the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday during the 4-3 overtime loss to the Boston Bruins in TD Garden.
Granato, who entered Covid-19 protocol on Sunday, missed the last two games. Assistant Matt Ellis directed the club in Wednesday's loss to New Jersey in KeyBank Center and Thursday's loss to the New York Islanders in UBS Arena.
Ellis had been scheduled to do the daily pregame media briefing but Granato took the reins after getting on a flight to Boston in the morning. He learned he was clear to go just before 7 a.m., about six hours prior to faceoff.
Granato, 54, was asymptomatic and said he had no real symptoms. He said he felt more ill after he got his Covid booster shot last month than in the wake of this positive test.
"The symptoms I had the morning and day after I took the last vaccine were much more severe than I experienced through this," Granato said. "Basically I didn't feel much. I was a little lethargic maybe for a day and then ready to go. And so I'm pretty excited to be back and extremely excited and grateful. I feel very, very sure that the vaccination did its work for me."
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Granato is a cancer survivor and dealt with a near-fatal blood infection in 2019 as a result of a severe case of pneumonia. The Sabres have been very concerned about him during pandemic times the last two seasons and his positive test was jarring for the entire organization.
"Very concerned. Going through things at times, I guess there's an inner faith kicks in that whatever you're going to deal with, you're going to deal with it, you're going to get through it," Granato said. "Having experienced things that I don't want to experience again, I was very, very grateful.
"You hear the word 'Covid', you see a positive test and your mind can go places you don't want it to. I did my best to not let it go there. And I felt good all the way through."
Sabres coach Don Granato conducts his pregame media briefing Saturday at TD Garden in Boston after returning from Covid-19 protocol.
Granato had high praise for the work of Ellis, the former Sabres forward who who got his first chance to run an NHL bench in the head man's absence.
"It was awesome. Extremely difficult circumstances," Granato said. "Just in my 2,000 games of being a head coach, I can tell you there's some elements there that were really challenging. You throw that many new players in a lineup, it's going to be tough. And that many players that haven't had experience. We had multiple guys with first games, second game played. Very difficult circumstances, I thought the standard that we want to play by was upheld by our players, our leadership there, and certainly by 'Elli' and our coaches."
Granato also revealed the team's video coaches, Myles Fee and Justin White, have also been in protocol and remain there working remotely. He said the trio did what it could to help Ellis and fellow assistants Jason Christie and Marty Wilford before and during games. There were regular video calls between the group, even some in intermissions.
"You can't sit down when you watch stuff like that," Granato said of what he was doing during games. "My feeling was I felt that I left the coaches in a pretty tough spot. ... We were just trying to support Elli, Marty and Jason as much as we could, in between periods and whatever, and not interfere with the feel they have on the bench, the energy, the emotion. We were trying to be as supportive as we could."
