The Buffalo Sabres posted their third victory in a row, holding on for a 4-3 win over the New Jersey Devils on Sunday afternoon, but the focus after the game was not on the club’s recent positive trend, but on the head hit by New Jersey’s Stefan Noesen on Tage Thompson, that earned the Devils winger a major and game misconduct and saw the Sabres forward driven from the game and not return.
Thompson, who was named the NHL’s Second Star of the Week on Monday, was lunging for the puck in the New Jersey zone when Noesen collided with the Sabres leading scorer. The Devils veteran was assessed a five-minute match penalty, but the NHL’s Department of Player Safety opted not to have a hearing for supplementary discipline.
The furor following the game was the Sabres lack of response to their best player being injured. Veteran Jason Zucker said that he did not see the collision with Noesen, who had cross-checked him after he scored the eventual game-winner late in the second period, but others did see the hit and did not respond.
“I know I had a couple guys that wanted to go after (Noesen) right away, and where we were at in the game, there was going to be a time we were going to be able to even the score,” Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff said after the game. “Why isn’t there a call after (Zucker) gets cross-checked after he scores a goal? In the game where there were all kinds of strange calls, why isn’t there a call on that play?”
The opportunity to exact retribution on Noesen never came to pass, which raises some questions about where the club is at. While it is understandable that players do not want to respond when they are not sure what happened, it was clear afterward and there was still no response to the hit that took out the Sabres best player.
If Buffalo was in the thick of the playoff race, then it would be correct to be circumspect, but the Sabres are 11 points out of the last Eastern Conference wild-card spot and the lack of pushback is very reminiscent to when Milan Lucic ran over Ryan Miller in 2011.
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Ruff indicated that Thompson was cleared medically after the game, but the Sabres did not practice on Monday, so his status for the final game of the four-game homestand against Columbus will not be updated until the morning skate on Tuesday.
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