Buffalo Sabres vs Dallas Stars Prediction: Best Bet for Saturday

Buffalo has taken points in eight of nine road games and Dallas has the best penalty kill on the Saturday slate, and the Stars already shut the Sabres out 4-0 in the first meeting. Saturday in Dallas is where Buffalo's road magic meets the unit least likely to let it work.

The Matchup

Dallas is 10-6-2, scoring 2.83 goals per game and allowing 2.61, a +0.22 differential built on defending first. Mikko Rantanen leads the Stars with 9 goals and 21 points, and Wyatt Johnston has 13 assists. Dallas is 6-5-0 at home, and the Stars won the first meeting 4-0 in Buffalo on October 8, a result that frames Saturday: Buffalo's attack found nothing that night, and the rematch comes in the harder building.

Buffalo is 8-7-4, scoring 2.89 per game and allowing 3.53 for a -0.63 differential. Tage Thompson leads the Sabres with 12 goals and 21 points, and Zach Benson has 13 assists. The Sabres' oddity is the road split: 4-1-4 away from home, one regulation road loss all season, even while losing four of their last five overall. Buffalo keeps road games close and keeps collecting points from them. The problem is the other end of the ice, where 3.53 goals allowed a night is one of the worst marks on the Saturday slate.

Key Factors

The special teams gap is the widest in any game on the slate. Dallas kills 88.5 percent of its penalties, the best mark on Saturday, and Buffalo's power play converts just 15.9 percent, so the Sabres' best route to goals is nearly shut. The other way, Dallas converts 26.2 percent on the power play against a Buffalo kill of 69.7 percent, one of the weakest units in the league this season. A game where one team can score with the extra man and the other cannot is a game that tilts steadily, shift after shift.

Dallas is missing real pieces on its blue line. Miro Heiskanen is out tonight with an upper body injury. Lian Bichsel is out tonight, Matt Duchene is out tonight on long-term injured reserve with an abdomen injury, and Oskar Back and Kyle Capobianco are also out tonight. Even short-handed, the Stars' crease holds the edge: Jake Oettinger is at 2.33 and .895 with Casey DeSmith at 2.70 and .894, while Buffalo's Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen is at 3.51 and .867 and Colten Ellis at 3.39 and .873. Buffalo is without Matt Grzelcyk, Konsta Helenius and Justin Danforth, all out tonight.

The Buffalo case is the road split and Thompson, and eight points-taking road games in nine is not luck. It fails on the matchup itself: the Sabres' power play is their equalizer, and Saturday it runs into the best kill on the slate, in the building of the team that already shut them out.

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