Team USA teammates Jack Eichel and Noah Hanifin to be honored in ceremony on Tuesday.
The Buffalo Sabres play at home for the first time since Tage Thompson brought back the gold medal from Italy as part of Team USA and will be honored as part of a ceremony prior to the game against Jack Eichel and the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday. Seats at Key Bank Center were adorned with towels celebrating the achievement, and Thompson indicated that the former Sabres captain will take part in the ceremony, as Thompson was invited to take part in the ceremony along with Olympic hero Jack Hughes in Newark last week.
Thompson spoke about his reception back home last week:
It was cool coming back to the States and seeing the reception we got, right when we landed in Florida, and then obviously, having our first game against New Jersey with Jack (Hughes) as really cool. The reception he got. I think Buffalo is a blue collar town, and I hope that the metal meant a lot to them, and I'm very excited to be back in front of them playing.
On playing with Eichel with Team USA:
(Eichel) is familiar with Buffalo and it was great playing with (him and Noah Hanifin) over there and accomplishing what we did. Now we have to look forward to the task at hand here, and obviously that's making a playoff push and just continue to win games and get points and try to climb higher in the standings. (Vegas) are a really good team, they are two really good players too, so no friends out there tomorrow.
(Jack) was one of the guys when I was first here, that I looked up to. (He's an) unbelievable player and someone I always tried to emulate parts of my game after him, just being a big, strong power forward. He's got a ton of skill. He skates really well. I just tried to watch him on and off the ice, the things that he would do, and try to emulate him a little bit and learn from him. So it was cool going to the Olympics and kind of going full circle playing with him there
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Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff spoke to the media after practice.
On Noah Ostlund coming to the defense of team captain Rasmus Dahlin after he was hit by Brayden Point on Saturday:
It stresses that we're q pack, we're all in this together. You go after my teammate, or if it looks like you've gone after my teammate. I'm going to be there. It doesn't mean you're fighting, but I'm going to be there. And I think our group has done a great job of that this year, of just being there for each other the whole year. And in my eyes, we've got tighter and tighter as the year has gone, and we played harder and harder for each other.
On the reasons for the dramatic turnaround with the club since December:
We dealt with a lot of adversity. Looking at start of the year. I'll just share a little bit of my thoughts. We were looking at (Josh) Norris and (Jiri Kulich) being our one and two centermen, which didn't happen right off the bat. We had to move a lot of pieces around. We had Dahlin who was dealing with what he went through. We had our starting goalie, who was dealing with a couple injuries for those first couple months. It was in and out, so we had probably four or five pieces that we were counting on that that weren't in there and I said in that stretch where we started to get healthy and Norris came back to the lineup, was kind of the turning point for our team, where we started to really be a consistent team from night after night, and you're not consistent unless you get great goaltending
Injury Updates on players still out:
(Jordan) Greenway's back with us after going through some treatment away from us. (Conor)Timmins is progressing, probably had his best day. Kulich will undergo another test that I believe it's tomorrow, whether he'll be cleared to rejoin us, and he's been skating. (Danforth) has been skating too, just kind of on and off, (he's) still dealing with some pain issues.
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