As if Ryan Miller wasn't having a tough enough past few weeks losing five of his last six starts, he'll be out of the lineup indefinitely after the Buffalo Sabres announced he suffered a concussion after being hit by Milan Lucic of the Boston Bruins Saturday night.
Once again, here's the hit:
The Sabres' toughness as a team has been questioned since and continued after the game with everyone from Head Coach Lindy Ruff to Paul Gaustad, who was on the ice at the time, expressing anger and embarrassment over the fact that Lucic skated away without a scrape.
The Sabres held a team meeting on Sunday morning at Bell Centre in preparation for Monday's game against the Montreal Canadiens, after afterwards, the questions continued.
GM Darcy Regier talked to Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News and besides releasing the Miller news, he also called for punishment to be doled out to Lucic as they await word from the NHL:
"If this hit and other types of hits like this are not suspended, we are opening up the possibility of losing goaltenders to injury," Regier said sternly. "And not just injury, but concussion. ... When i look at the position of goaltending. in a lot of ways it's not unlike quarterback in football. I feel very strongly the protection has to be provided and players committing these types of action should be punished."
When a member of the Sabres' PR staff told Ruff that some media were waiting for him to talk, his response was, "[Gretzky] the media".
Oh, that Lindy.
Gaustad wasn't happy with his game and his lack of action on Saturday, but felt confident the team will not allow what happened on Saturday night to go down again. "We have to stick together as a team and guys are willing to do that in the locker room. It was something we can't let happen again," said Gaustad.
Veteran Robyn Regehr didn't flat-out say specific action would be taken next time someone hits their goaltender, instead he expressed regret at the team's poor response:
"Those kind of things just happen during the game, it's spontaneous-type stuff. For me to tell you that there's premeditated ways that we're gonna act, there's people that are dealing with issues right now in court because of that way. What you want to do is you want to stick up for one another and be there for one another and do I think we could have done a better job there? Yeah, yeah I do."
The Sabres and Bruins meet again next Wednesday, Nov. 23. Is that when some sort of response will be taken on Lucic?
UPDATE: According to TSN's Bob McKenzie, Lucic has a 1 p.m. ET hearing with Brendan Shanahan on Monday.