Buffalo Responds to Challenge With Stalwart Victory

There is a time for coaches to emphasize Xs and O’s and forechecking strategies and game plans, and there is a time to forget all that and tell players to reach into the well of emotion and draw on resources they may not have known they had.

Tuesday was that day for the Buffalo Sabres, who clawed out a 2-1 victory over the Dallas Stars and tied the Stanley Cup finals at two games each.

“That’s all it was,” winger Dixon Ward said. “We had to go out there and play the hardest game we ever played, and I thought we did a pretty good job of doing that.”

They came up with as important a victory as many of them had ever gained, one that reduced the series to best-of-three as it shifts to Dallas’ Reunion Arena Thursday for Game 5. Game 6 will be in Buffalo Saturday, and a seventh game, if necessary, will be Tuesday at Dallas.

“This was the biggest game of our lives, no question about it,” said Ward, who capitalized on one of the Stars’ few defensive errors for the game-winning goal, at 7:37 of the second period. “We don’t win this one, and we’re in big, big trouble.”

Dissatisfied with their effort in Game 3, they rewarded a roaring crowd of 18,595 at Marine Midland Arena with an inspired performance. Despite being outshot, 13-2, in the second period and 31-18 overall, they never lost control of the game or themselves.

“We weren’t able to maintain some territorial play until the third period, and it was a game,” said Dallas Coach Ken Hitchcock, whose team played without winger Brett Hull, who has a strained groin muscle.

“We had a couple of individual mistakes that gave them their two goals, but from our standpoint, the area we weren’t as strong as we were in Game 2 and Game 3 was the front of their net, the slot area. We put a lot of pucks into those areas, but they battled them out, and I thought their defensemen held up good tonight.”

Goaltender Dominik Hasek, who had told his teammates to take more offensive chances and not worry if they exposed him to two-on-one breaks, was brilliant when he needed to be and feisty when he felt he had to be. Hasek, who is so slender he appears vulnerable to being toppled by a strong wind, got into a scrum with strapping Dallas defenseman Derian Hatcher at the end of the second period after he decided Hatcher had tripped him and took offense.

“My teammates being emotional pumps me up,” said Hasek, who is 19-0 in playoff games his team has led after two periods.

Seeing his teammates capitalize on two Dallas defensive mistakes had him pumping his fist with glee.

On the first miscue, defenseman Shawn Chambers’ stick got stuck in the boards, leaving him helpless to corral a pass around the boards from teammate Pat Verbeek. That freed speedy winger Geoff Sanderson to dash up the left wing, fake Ed Belfour down and out of the net, and flip in a backhander at 8:09 of the first period. “It’s nice to capitalize because their mistakes are so rare,” Sanderson said.

The Stars pulled even with a power-play goal at 10:14, a remarkable off-balance shot by Jere Lehtinen from the right circle set up on a pass from behind the net by Mike Modano. In keeping with the closeness of the series--the teams have been even or within a goal for all but 26 seconds of the four games, a span of 255 minutes 30 seconds--they surged back and forth in the early stages of the second period.

Hasek twisted his body to make a spectacular save on Nieuwendyk barely a minute into the period and later made a chest stop on Verbeek on a three-on-two. Belfour stopped Brian Holzinger off a rush, but he couldn’t stop Ward from scoring his seventh playoff goal--all in Sabre victories.

Craig Ludwig was backskating in his own zone when he tried to pass a bouncing puck to his defensive partner, Richard Matvichuk. The puck took a freaky bounce that left it short of Matvichuk’s reach but allowed Ward to dart in and lift a shot over Belfour’s stick hand.

“It was disappointing because at that point they got the lead, and any time you give that team a lead, with the goaltending in this series, it’s tough coming back,” Ludwig said. “But there’s not a guy in this room that didn’t think we could come back.”

They pressed in the third, but the Sabres had too tight a defensive grip to be rattled. “They had a couple of chances,” Hasek said, “but we were more aggressive.”

And so, they are back where they started. “Now, probably the biggest game of our season, or for a lot of us in our career, is coming up,” Ludwig said.

Said Hasek: “Now it’s a best-of-three and Dallas has the home-game advantage. The next game is very important for both teams. They have two home games, but we are confident.”