GLENDALE, Ariz. – As the Buffalo Sabres began their morning skate Saturday in Gila River Arena, General Manager Kevyn Adams and coach Don Granato were in the middle of another crisis.
Defensemen Rasmus Dahlin and Henri Jokiharju, and forwards Rasmus Asplund and Victor Olofsson were held out after testing positive for Covid-19. Then Adams summoned assistant coaches Marty Wilford and Matt Ellis off the ice midway through the skate. With two fewer voices running the workout, Granato hurried to join the rest of his team, the latest unusual day in another Sabres season filled with calamity.
Players looked quizzically at one another as it became clear that something was amiss and, upon leaving the ice, each learned the gravity of the situation. The Sabres had several positive Covid-19 tests, putting their game Saturday night against the Arizona Coyotes in question. Everyone was retested and, as of Granato’s post-skate media availability, only one result had been processed, a confirmed negative for one of the players.
“We have a situation that is ongoing,” Granato said. “We had several players and staff members test positive this morning. Every one of those is retesting. The only one that we’ve gotten back has returned negative, so it’s obviously a pretty active situation.”
Retesting didn’t bring brighten the outlook much, either.
While Jokiharju and Wilford produced negative tests to be available for the game, the Sabres announced before puck drop that Dahlin, Olofsson, Asplund, Ellis and four members of the traveling party officially entered Covid-19 protocol. Per NHL rules, each can test out of protocol sooner than five days by producing consecutive negative tests, but this does raise doubts about Dahlin's availability for the league's all-star game, which he is scheduled to participate in Saturday at Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena.
Everyone in the traveling party was asymptomatic and following the morning skate, all Granato could confirm was that goalie Craig Anderson would start in goal, the 40-year-old’s first game since he suffered an upper-body injury in San Jose on Nov. 2. The club later announced that winger Kyle Okposo and goalie Dustin Tokarski were also ready to return to the lineup.
And though the Sabres couldn’t recall anyone from Rochester in time for the game, they were able to play because they had three extra skaters at the start of the trip: defensemen Will Butcher and Casey Fitzgerald, and winger John Hayden. Buffalo had to use seven defensemen and 11 forwards for the game.
This wasn’t the first time the Sabres faced such a situation. Most of their projected lineup has spent time in Covid-19 protocol this season: Okposo, Tokarski, Peyton Krebs Jeff Skinner, Tage Thompson, Alex Tuch, Casey Mittelstadt, Anders Bjork, Dylan Cozens, Mark Jankowski and Jacob Bryson.
There has also been a litany of injuries, the most recent being winger Zemgus Girgensons’ undisclosed ailment that will keep him out until after the all-star break, and another Covid-19 positive test Friday when Michael Houser entered protocol, causing another crisis in the crease for a club that’s used eight goalies since Granato became coach in March.
The Sabres, like the rest of the world, have dealt with the ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic since the virus shut down professional sports in March 2020, but even the most experienced in the dressing room can’t get accustomed to the chaos that occurs with a batch of positive tests.
“Kind of looking at it from all angles here, it’s part serious, part comical,” said Anderson, a 19-year veteran of the NHL. “You don’t know, right? You don’t know what the next big surprise might be. First it’s a couple players, then it’s some staff and now we’re sitting here going, ‘All right, everyone is getting retested and we don’t know what the final results are going to be.’ It’s definitely an interesting time and from my standpoint, you deal with it on a case-by-case basis and you make the best of what you have.”
The timing of this latest adversity was particularly frustrating, Granato admitted. The Sabres needed to get through three games in four nights, capped by a meeting with the Golden Knights in Las Vegas on Tuesday, to reach the point where the NHL will no longer test asymptomatic individuals.
The club was already facing the significant challenge of having enough game-ready goalies for this road trip, which continues Sunday night in Colorado, and the batch of positive tests had Adams and Granato preparing for the possibility of playing shorthanded against the Coyotes.
“You could probably guess we did mention that behind the doors there, so I’m not going to hide that from you," Granato said, referring to the NHL eliminating testing for asymptomatic individuals. "You do think, your brain goes there and thinks that, 'Jeez, we’re a week away from not testing.' As I mentioned, knock on wood. Talked to all these guys after we got the results this morning, everyone felt normal. So that’s really good and then your brain goes to another week until not testing."
This also occurred right as the Sabres’ forward and defense groups were nearing full health. Granato was finally able to deploy his top-four centermen – Mittelstadt, Thompson, Cozens and Krebs – as well as key veteran contributors Tuch and Okposo.
“Today was the first day with all this chaos that went on that I really felt a little different. You see this number of situations and man games missed and uncertainty and to have it just minutes before you go on the ice when you really need to focus, and you want to focus," said Granato. "It’s a lot and again, it is going to make us better. This is a young group that’s going to be here for what I would say is a very long time. .. These are the things that are going to help all of us grow, but it’s not easy. It’s getting to be a pain.”
