Sad News: Sabres Star Player Announced A Departure’Says He Will Go Till Coach Don Granato Will Leave The Team

Buffalo Sabres starting goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen will miss at least one game with a lower-body injury, the team announced before its home game against the Florida Panthers on Thursday.

The Sabres listed Luukkonen as day to day without revealing the nature of the injury or when he was hurt. Luukkonen is coming off a 33-save outing in a 7-0 win over the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday in becoming Buffalo’s first player to register four shutouts in a season since Ryan Miller in 2011-12.

Luukkonen is 7-5 in his past 12 starts, in which he’s allowed a combined 19 goals and posted three shutouts.

Backup Eric Comrie is expected to start against the Panthers, who have won a franchise record nine consecutive road games following a 5-2 win at Pittsburgh on Wednesday night. Comrie has a 1-5 record and hasn’t played an NHL game since a 5-3 loss to Detroit on Dec. 5.

Buffalo, which travels to play at Minnesota on Saturday, called up goalie Dustin Tokarski from the minors.

Joel Farabee didn’t understand the negativity.

As he walked into Philadelphia Flyers training camp last September, he saw a locker room that had become even more tight-knit over the summer. He saw key players like center Sean Couturier, now their captain, and winger Cam Atkinson finally healthy again. He saw a coach in John Tortorella who demanded effort every game — the last guy you’d expect to lord over a last-place season.

Yet the Flyers had been effectively counted out in preseason predictions. Their .457 points percentage in 2022-23 was seen as a harbinger of rough seasons to come. And it wasn’t coming just from media or fans: Team management had candidly communicated that the Flyers were rebuilding and not a Stanley Cup contender this season.

But that’s not what Farabee saw before the season. That’s not what a lot of his teammates saw either. And they weren’t happy about what they felt was disrespect from the rest of the NHL.

“We just came in with that F.U. attitude,” Farabee told ESPN. “Just seeing all the media, and everyone else, having us in the bottom five or bottom three in the league, whatever it was, I think it just fueled a fire and motivated us to stick it the doubters.”

Through 57 games, the doubters have been stuck. The Flyers are third in the Metro Division with a 30-20-7 record (67 points), trying to make the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 2020. Instead of tabulating their lottery odds, as many anticipated, it’s their playoff odds that are getting the most attention: a 76.8% chance of making the cut as of Thursday, according to Stathletes.

“There was a chip on our shoulder from the beginning of the year. People were always saying that we were supposed to be one of the worst teams in the league,” defenseman Sean Walker said. “Once we started to win some games, we felt like we could be successful this year. And then we started actually doing it.”

TO A MAN, the Flyers say that training camp was where the belief started. The team had lost a few veteran players in the offseason, including trades that shipped out center Kevin Hayes and defenseman Ivan Provorov. Expectations were low for what was seen as a rebuilding campaign.

But Tortorella believed they could be better than that, and it started with team chemistry.

“For me the most important part of our summer prior [to the season] was our locker room. You could see early on that our locker room was together,” he said. “It’s just something you feel. It’s hard to explain how you see it. There’s no analytic for it. It’s just your gut and how you watch how they act.”