00:00And that's my next growth point, is that he looks like his game has really sort of grown a little
00:06bit over this summer.
00:07And Matthew Fairburn has a great piece in The Athletic about his summer.
00:11It's really, really good. You should go read it. It's awesome.
00:14He did all kinds of work, and not that everybody doesn't,
00:18but it felt to me like this was a kid that knows he's got a shot here, and he needs
00:23to take advantage of it.
00:24And I thought he took the first step down that path last night.
00:27And he, to your point, looked much more confident in his positioning,
00:33in his sort of control over his own game, and it did not look scrambly.
00:39And early on, I thought that right away, because in the first period,
00:45there was a play, a low lateral pass, dot-to-dot, from Quinn Hughes to Kirill Kaprizov.
00:52Uh-oh.
00:53So two of, I don't know, the maybe ten best players on the planet are connecting.
00:59The two names that came up on the show yesterday when we were talking to Paul about,
01:02what are we dealing with here?
01:03And you're like, watch out for Hughes.
01:05And he's like, watch out for Kaprizov.
01:06He's going to be a factor.
01:08And Hughes makes a great pass into a very dangerous area in what is the most dangerous chance in hockey.
01:15A low pass laterally across the crease is the most scored-on play you can have.
01:22Makes sense.
01:23Look the math up.
01:24It's very difficult to stop.
01:27Ellis, I think last year, would have ended up on his stomach reaching back for it.
01:32Because it was a great play by Hughes.
01:33He slips it across.
01:34It's a hard pass.
01:36But instead, Ellis is totally patient on his edges.
01:40Makes a good, just very calm, efficient-looking butterfly slide push across.
01:46Hits him in the pad.
01:47Great save.
01:48Makes it look easy.
01:49And that was not what he did last year.
01:51He made everything look pretty hard last year.
01:53And he was good at doing it.
01:54Right.
01:55But it looked difficult.
01:56Well, it's just not sustainable.
01:57No, exactly.
01:58It's not.
01:59It's Lukanen, to me.
02:00It's what Lukanen plays like.
02:02It's inconsistent.
02:03And when you're on, you can be great.
02:05But when you're not, it's going to be bad because you're chasing a lot.
02:09And I didn't see as much of that last night from Ellis.
02:11I saw a lot of really good puck handling, which tells me he's got a lot of confidence.
02:15I saw a really, really good sense of game management.
02:19In overtime, there was a shot that he swallowed up.
02:23It felt like he knew, all right, we need a whistle here.
02:25We need to calm this down.
02:27And he did a great job.
02:28And then the Sabres totally stable.
