Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff spoke to the media prior to the finale of the club’s three-game homestand against the St. Louis Blues. Buffalo will start Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen in goal, and St. Louis is healthy scratching winger Jordan Kyrou.
Q: Do you almost expect maybe a desperate hockey club, considering what happened to (St. Louis) last night?
LR: I think sometimes back-to-back has an impact on teams sometimes. For us, it’s worry about how we’re going to play. (There are) just no easy games.
Q; What did you want to change up with a team (like St. Louis coming off a bad game?
LR; You evaluate your game and what you’re giving up and how you’re giving it up. We spent a good part of time yesterday on what we gave up and how we gave it up again. And then you just map out, ‘here’s how we’re going to improve. This is what we need to change. This is where we need to get better.’ We probably had 20 minutes of talking about where we need to get better and that is ongoing through the year. Some teams will be a more dangerous rush team. Some teams will be teams that hang on the puck more. We’ll talk about what they’re doing, and then we’ll talk about, how are we going to defend it and how are we going to exploit them. I think they’ll look at our last game, and they’re probably doing the same. They’ll look at their own game and say, ‘Man, we failed here, and here, we’ve got to be better’. And then they’ll look at some of our stuff and say, here’s where we think we can take advantage of these guys.
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Q; How do you feel that’s gone in the first month of this season (with a condensed schedule)?
LR: I think it’s gone well, I think where we started off at 0-3 and where we’re at now. You look at the number of bodies that have gone in and out, the number of players that we’ve had. You look at three of our six guys around the power play to start the year are no longer part of that power play. You use a lot of sports science now when it comes to trying to keep your team fresh. You don’t automatically practice. If you think you can practice and get them better, then you can fatigue your team, so you weigh what is best for your team. Sometimes you might bypass what you should do and say, ‘hell with it, we’re going to practice anyways’. That’s all part of it. But we’ve tried to err on the side of keeping your team fresh.
Q: What is the key to flexibility for your players when they’re going through all these lineup changes?
LR: For us on a night to night basis has been just a rolling of lineups, and different guys fitting in different (places)…….. It looks like we may get Kozak back for tonight. So lines will change again. I would love to have our lines just stay the same, but due to injury, you look at Benson, Zucker, Norris, you take those guys out, you’ve got to sometimes evaluate inside the game, which guys are producing, give them a little bit more, or put another guy with a different guy to see if they can produce a little bit more. I’m not big on just trying to put a round peg in a square hole. If I can use that analogy, if it is not working, why not change something a little different? And I don’t have to wait a whole game. I don’t have to wait a period. Sometimes I waited half a period last game to switch things up.
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