In Greek mythology, Cerberus was a three-headed dog known as the “hound of Hades” whose job it was to protect the gate to the underworld and keep the dead inside.
The Sabres currently have their own Cerberus guarding the blue paint in the form of Eric Comrie, Craig Anderson and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen who have all been doing an excellent job of late. The past three games saw the team use all three goalies with Anderson winning in Dallas on Monday, Luukkonen winning in St. Louis on Tuesday, and Comrie winning in Winnipeg on Thursday. It’s the first time in franchise history that the team had three different goalies win three games in a row.
Normally a three-goalie rotation leads to drama as there are inevitably not enough games to go around and goalies get cold, get frustrated and inevitably go to their agent to complain about their playing time situation. The Sabres are pretty well situated to avoid that scenario. Anderson can only really play once a week anyway because of his elite oldness, and because he’s not playing to get another contract, he probably doesn’t care whether he plays all that much.
He's also seen enough hockey in his 41 years that there’s not a large risk of him going cold if he doesn’t get in enough games. He’s always sharp when he gets in, regardless of whether he’s played recently. The Sabres have opted to start him for the season opener for the past two years for that very reason. It should also be noted that the Sabres’ high-tempo offensive system tends to – shall we say – put some pressure on their goalies in the form of odd-man chances against. That can get tiring, and having the ability to cycle through fresh goalies can’t hurt when the Sabres are playing a lot.
Following the All-Star break, the Sabres will play 9 games in 18 nights from February 11-28, or put another way, they’re essentially going to play a game every other day for three weeks. The Sabres are going to need all three goalies.
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Time for the Tyson Jost revenge game.
It had been a string of bad luck for Jost prior to the Sabres claiming the former 10th overall pick from the Minnesota Wild. Jost had spent his entire NHL career with Colorado until the Avalanche moved him in a trade with the Wild at the trade deadline last year.
The Avalanche would go on to win the Stanley Cup three months later. That’s gotta hurt.
Things never got better for him in Minnesota after that, and he finished his short career there with 9 points in 33 games over parts of two seasons. He’s seemingly found a home here in Buffalo while playing on a line with Casey Mittelstadt and Victor Olofsson. Those two players had been playing some absolutely putrid 5-on-5 hockey before Jost’s arrival, but since those two were paired with the tenacious Jost as their pivot, they’ve both looked a lot better.
It's still tough to say if Jost is going to be a piece of this team moving forward given that he’s not your prototypical bottom-six center. For one thing, he’s pretty bad at faceoffs, which puts him in good company because the Sabres are the worst faceoff team in the league at 46% on the dot. How much does that really matter?
Well, the top-five teams in terms off faceoff winning percentage this season are Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Carolina and LA. They’re all good teams, except for Chicago, obviously, who is terrible despite having the best faceoff win rate in the league. Conversely, the five worst teams at faceoffs are Buffalo, Arizona, Seattle, Philly and Colorado. That’s three pretty good or good teams and two lousy teams. It’s safe to say that there’s no direct correlation between being a bad team and losing faceoffs, or being a good team and winning faceoffs, so it can be hard to quantify just how much it matters. It definitely does matter in certain key moments of the game like during a defensive zone draw with 30 seconds left while nursing a lead. That particular situation is sort of a stat grey area that’s hard to quantify.
Maybe Jost can improve his 39% career numbers on the dot. It’s also possible that the Sabres could use a winger in that spot, even if some of the winger candidates are just as bad at faceoffs as Jost.
Jost may contribute enough in other areas, like the penalty kill, that Sabres management will just ignore the faceoff point. For now, it’s probably enough that he’s helping guys to score and win some games.
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