Getting ready for Buffalo: Antero Niittymaki in goal, team motivation and an update on Craig Rivet.
The quick stuff first: Antero Niittymaki gets his first start in four games and will be looking for his first win since getting three in a row over Dallas, St. Louis and Edmonton.Beyond that, it’s all about dealing with a Buffalo team that outworked the Sharks back at HSBC Arena on Dec. 9 and skated away with a 6-3 victory.
There was still plenty of follow-up from that Vancouver game in the media scrum with Todd McLellan this morning.
Drew Remenda started it off by suggesting that despite what Ryane Clowe had to say afterward, he didn’t think San Jose’s compete level was all that bad (and, truth be told, neither did I, having seen much worse during the season).
Here’s what McLellan had to say: “I don’t totally agree. I don’t think we had the tenacity we needed to have to keep pucks alive. We were OK on the initial battle for about three or four seconds, but when the puck moved to the next spot, we weren’t nearly as tenacious as the other team was.”
Later, I wondered what McLellan — who always stresses that motivation needs to come from the players themselves rather than elsewhere — was expecting tonight, at least in part in the wake of Clowe’s statement.
Here’s how the coach responded: Motivation, he said, needs to first come from the players “themselves waking up in the morning and motivating themselves on the way to the rink and wanting to play extremely hard and well. That internal motivation should be the first one.
“Teammate motivation, the media motivation, the fan motivation is secondary. If you don’t have it when you wake up in the morning, good luck. Outside sources can motivate you a little bit, but not enough.”
*****Logan Couture has now gone six games without a goal — his longest stretch of the season. But for now, McLellan plans to just let him play through this period because the chances are coming.
“The last thing we want to do is tinker with Logan Coture as he’s got it going right now,” McLellan said. “If I see his body language kind of diminish or anything like that, I’ll pull up the chances he’s created or that he’s involved in and I think that’ll perk him up quickly. Things are going well for him, they’re just not going in.
“We’re talking about a rookie that’s leading the league in rookie goals,” he added, “so we’ve got to be a little bit careful.”
*****These are not easy times for Craig Rivet, the former Shark who has been the Sabres’ captain for three seasons after being shipped there the same day Dan Boyle arrived here.
He was a healthy scratch for 11 games, including the one between the Sharks and Sabres on Dec. 9, and for the past two games has been playing as a seventh defenseman.
So when the Sabres had an extremely optional skate this morning and Rivet was not only the only player out there likely to be in the lineup tonight, but also the last one to leave the ice, I had to ask:
Did he stay out there that long for himself, or maybe one of the coaches?
“That’s for me,” he said. “Tonight I’ll be in the lineup and I’m in a position right now where we’re dressing seven D and I’m not going to be playing many minutes so I want to make sure I get my work so that when I do play, I’m going to be ready to play.”
Rivet has long been a media favorite because of his quotability and likability. Ask a question and you get an informative answer.
“It could be worse, it could be better,” he said of his current situation. “Obviously I’d like to be in a different situation and play more. Feeling that I can still play more and play well, it’s tough, but there’s ways of handling it. I’m going to have a good attitude toward it, but I’m certainly not happy with it.”
Rivet said there hasn’t been a whole lot of communication with the coaching staff, “but Lindy (Ruff) and I have had a talk recently and he’s given me a bit of an idea what to expect and what my role is.”
The 36-year-old defenseman is earning $3.5 million in the final year of the contract the Sharks gave him, but says he isn’t ready to think about what happens next season.
“I’m focusing on this year,” he said. The NHL season is an extremely long season. Things can happen very quickly, things can change very quickly and I want to make sure that I’m ready.”
Coming back to San Jose yesterday brought back good memories.
“Just being on the plane, flying in here, looking at the mountains and how beautiful it is, I remembered the first time I got traded here, how excited I was,” he said. “The year and a half that I spent here in San Jose were some of my best times in hockey.”
Great guys and on-ice success were the main reasons, but he also mentioned “fans were outstanding, the place to live is outstanding and it was a very good organization.”
As upset as he was at the time he was traded, Rivet now has a more understanding view.
“You know what? Now that I look back, Doug had to make decisions, hard decisions that he felt were the best for the team,” Rivet said. “As much as I wasn’t very pleased with it, that’s a business decision he had to make and I respect that.”
Rivet said he has maintained contact with several of his former teammates here. And last night he went out to dinner with Evgeni Nabokov.
*****And that gives me the hook to pass along a story that Drew Remenda told a little while ago. During the broadcast, Remenda had been critical of a couple plays by Dan Boyle. Then came the text message: “Get off No. 22’s ass.”
It was from Nabokov and the two kept the exchange going for several minutes.
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