Sabres Thompson returns to practice on Tuesday.

Buffalo, NY (WGR 550) – Tage Thompson returned to practice on Tuesday centering Jeff Skinner and Alex Tuch. Thompson missed practice on Monday. He really didn’t want to talk too much about it. He said, “It was good to get a little rest and to get back out there with the guys.”

On Monday Don Granato said Thompson had been dealing with a nagging injury. Thompson said it was something that happened in Saturday’s Minnesota Wild game.

When you play 13 games in 22 days, you would expect fatigue to show. The team looked good against the Wild, but Thompson admitted they did have to play through being tired, “There’s definitely fatigue, so that’s a lot of games in a short amount of time, so obviously we’re going to be really tired, but I think when that happens, you’ve got to be able to play smart and efficient and I think that’s what we’ve done by making the game easy on ourselves by not exerting extra energy and that’s coming from playing simple and making sure we’re not doing dumb things with the puck and having to defend which will exhaust you.”

As this season has progressed, the Sabres do a good job of getting to their identity in games quicker and with more ease. Thompson said, “As I team we know when we’re at our best and what makes us successful, so it’s easy that when we aren’t playing good, we can look at ourselves in the mirror and look around the room and say, ‘This is our standard and this is where we need to be and where we need to get to,’ so it allows us to get to our game quicker.”

Midway through Saturday's game, Granato switched up the lines. On Tuesday,
things were back to normal:

Girgensons – Krebs – Okposo

Skinner – Thompson – Tuch

Mittelstadt – Jost – Olofsson

Peterka – Cozens – Quinn

Asplund

Samuelsson – Dahlin

Power – Jokiharju

Bryson – Lyubushkin

Clague