November Preview

The opening month of the season didn’t go as we hoped. The Sabres finished October with a 3-7-2 record that has them tied for 29th in league with eight points. After going 0-4-1 in the first five games of the season, if you want some positives they finished the month 3-3-1.

October is in the past. If you want to go re-live that you can check out the piece Ryan put together. Let’s shift our focus into the future and in particular the month of November and what awaits the club in the next 13 games of the season.

High-Level View

The Sabres will have six games on the road and seven games at Key Bank Center in November with three sets of back to backs. Four of those games will be against the Western Conference and nine will be against the Eastern Conference. Five of those nine games against the East will be against division opponents.

They’ll start the month with a mini western/central United States trip with visits to Arizona and Dallas. Then they’ll play the next two at home before heading out on a three-game road trip. The end of the month shapes up pretty well for the Sabres with five of the final six games taking place on home ice.

The Opponents

Entering play tonight the current record of the opponents in November is 62-64-12 which breaks down to a .449 winning percentage. Only four teams on the schedule are sporting a winning record. Those four are the Tampa Bay Lightning, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars and Pittsburgh Penguins.

The flip side they face the 31st (Arizona), 30th (Edmonton), 27th (Montreal-twice), 26th (Florida), 25th (Carolina), 24th (Minnesota) and 22nd (Detroit) ranked teams in the standings at this point in the season.

It’s still very early and hard to get a grasp on what teams are going to be like over 82 games. Nonetheless, the month of November looks to be shaping up to be in the Sabres favor.

If you want to go even further three of their opponents are in the bottom 10 of goal scoring and six are in the bottom 10 for goals against (allowing the most goals).

Other Notes

Not only does the schedule seem to be in their favor, but you would expect the club to start to get some injured players back. Justin Falk appears ready to play if the coaching staff wants to put him in. Zach Bogosian is getting closer, but might not be ready in the early part of the month. Lastly, Evan Rodrigues should be healthy enough to back in the lineup at some point this month. We’ll wait to see if we get an update in the near future on Nathan Beaulieu and Josh Gorges.

Barring any further injuries (knock on wood) we could start to see a pretty full Sabres lineup that we expected on the ice. We also saw some things start to get better at the end of October. Hopefully, they can continue to build on those improvements and have a good rebound month in November.