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The Last 10 Games: New Jersey is 7-3-0 and Buffalo is 4-4-2.
Season Series: This is the second meeting between the two teams this season. The last meeting was on Nov 16 in Buffalo where the Devils skated away with a 5-3 victory.
Know Your Enemy: http://www.topshelfblog.com/
What We Think of the Sabres: The Sabres are pretty much where I thought they would be this season. At the beginning of the season I pictured a dog fight for the 7th and 8th spots in the East between NJ, Buffalo, Carolina and Toronto. I was right about NJ and Buffalo but way off on the other two. Buffalo has been struggling recently but they’ve had injuries and any time you have a Ryan Miller in your net, a winning streak isn’t far away.
Big Story Lines Tonight: The Sabres beat the Caps the other night to snap a 3 game losing streak and now they get Brad Boyes and Jochen Hecht back in their lineup tonight. The Devils lost to the ‘Canes 4-2 the other night and looked pretty bad doing so. Adam Larsson will return to the lineup tonight (non-injury) and Henrik Tallinder is hoping to get back to it tonight.
What I Am Looking For Tonight: I’ll call it a Christmas hangover but hopefully we see a much better effort tonight than we did on Monday night. We’ve been kicking and screaming about the Devils not showing up for the third period but the other night in Carolina, they showed up in the third, they just didn’t show up in the second. Let’s play a full 60 minute (or usually in our case 65 minutes) and get the win. We have a tough game on Saturday at home against the Penguins so it would be nice to go into that one and not be on a 2 game slide.
I’m looking for Kovalchuk to redeem himself tonight. He had an awful game Monday, seemed to know that in his post-game comments and hopefully goes out there like a man on a mission tonight. I was a little hard on him yesterday and it was more frustration than anything else but I do expect a lot from him.
I’m also looking for more from our captain. He had an awesome game in Dallas but since then has been quiet. It is time to pick it up again and start leading this team
Marty is in net tonight so hopefully the good Marty shows up. Sadly, we just never know which Marty we are going to get.
Projected Lines:
Zach Parise-Adam Henrique-Ilya Kovalchuk
Petr Sykora-Patrik Elias-Dainius Zubrus
Mattias Tedenby-Travis Zajac-David Clarkson
Eric Boulton-Ryan Carter-Cam Janssen.
Bryce Salvador-Adam Larsson
Matt Taormina-Mark Fayne
Anton Volchenkov-Kurtis Foster
Martin Brodeur, Johan Hedberg.
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