The Buffalo Sabres are feeling quite at home on the road and will look to keep that going when they visit the San Jose Sharks on Thursday for the second game of a four-game road trip.
The Sabres (42-20-6, 90 points) are 20-11-3 as the visitors this season. On Tuesday, they set a franchise record for longest road point streak with a 2-0 win against the Vegas Golden Knights that marked 11 straight games (10-0-1) with at least point.
It’s quite the turnaround for Buffalo, which began the season 0-5-2 away from home. The team collected its first road triumph in dramatic fashion on Nov. 15 against the Detroit Red Wings, turning a 4-1 deficit late in the second period into a 5-4 overtime win.
“I think we just simplified,” Buffalo goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen said. “We’re able to fight through those kind of sticky first periods we sometimes have. We don’t dig too deep of a hole for ourselves in the first part of the games, and we’re able to just kind of stick around.”
The road success has helped the Sabres’ ascent to the top of the Atlantic Division. And despite the Carolina Hurricanes’ Wednesday night win against the Pittsburgh Penguins, first place in the Eastern Conference is still attainable.
Now two points off the pace, the Sabres have the edge over Carolina in both regulation wins and regulation/overtime wins.
“We’re still in one heck of a battle when you look at where the conference is at, where division standings are sitting,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “And a lot of guys haven’t been there. You wonder how they’re gonna handle the pressure points inside the game.
“There’s some real good signs and I think they’re believing how we need to play, how we need to play with a lead. We’ve proven that we can win a lot of games.”
The Sharks (32-28-6, 70 points), meanwhile, will be looking to get back on track and potentially move back into a playoff spot. San Jose has lost two in a row and five of its past seven games (2-3-2) after a three-game winning streak and sits one point behind the Seattle Kraken for the second Western Conference wild card with a game in hand.
The upstart team is coming off a 5-3 road setback against the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday. The Sharks trailed 3-1 after the first period and then scored twice in the second to tie it before Edmonton tallied the last two to pull away.
“Every game is a playoff game now. Every game matters,” San Jose goalie Alex Nedeljkovic said. “We need to be at our best or close to our best every single night that we can here. If we’re not picking up points, someone else is. … I think the big-picture message is every game is a playoff game for us at this point.”
Sharks forward Will Smith has been held off the scoresheet in four straight. Before this stretch, the 21-year-old hadn’t gone more than two games in a row without a point this season.
