Zellweger’s Protocol Puts Buffalo’s New Pair on Hold

Olen Zellweger left Tuesday’s preseason game in concussion protocol after his head hit the ice. Carson Soucy’s hit was clean, Lindy Ruff said, and Buffalo still beat Columbus 5-1 at KeyBank Center.

Mattias Samuelsson walked off in the same period with a lower-body injury. The Sabres now have nine days until they open the regular season in Columbus on Oct. 1, and the defenseman they signed in July to replace Bowen Byram may not be on the ice for any of it.

Zellweger Is in Protocol After Hitting the Ice

Soucy caught Zellweger with 1:35 left in the second period. The 23-year-old needed help to the room and did not come out for the third. He had logged 13:37 and put four shots on net in his first look with Buffalo’s projected NHL group.

Ruff had little to add after the game. Beat writer Mike Harrington (@ByMHarrington) wrote that Zellweger was in concussion protocol, “likely from hitting head on the ice,” and that Ruff “agreed with notion hit was clean.” Bill Hoppe wrote that Ruff said Zellweger has a concussion. Samuelsson, Ruff said, would also be further evaluated Wednesday.

I liked our response to the whole thing.

Lindy Ruff, Sabres head coach, postgame at KeyBank Center

That response started after the whistle. Beck Malenstyn fought Soucy in the third and later finished a hit that left Soucy favoring an arm, though Soucy stayed in. Sam Carrick, Peyton Krebs, and Louis Crevier joined net-front scrums. The two teams took 42 penalty minutes, 24 of them for roughing or fighting, and combined for 49 hits. Buffalo’s 21 hits were five more than Monday’s game in Pittsburgh.

Josh Norris, who scored the first goal, did not dress it up. “You never like to see that, especially in a preseason game,” he said. “Sometimes things get out of hand, and we just stick up for each other.” He added that he liked Malenstyn sticking up for Zellweger and hoped the new defenseman was okay.

Four Defensemen Finished Buffalo’s 5-1 Win

Samuelsson had already left. He blocked a shot with his foot, took two more shifts, and was done after an eight-second one. His last full shift ended with 9:40 left in the second. The club listed Samuelsson (lower body) and Zellweger (head) on its injury report after the win.

Ruff rolled four defensemen the rest of the night: Rasmus Dahlin, Owen Power, Conor Timmins, and Crevier. Timmins took 12 shifts in the third and finished at 22:19, a workload that would have ranked among his heavier games last season. He also scored, roofing a backhand at 3:53 of the third on a feed from Tage Thompson. Harrington wrote that Crevier played 20:45 with a plus-2, four shots, and 10 shot attempts in his Buffalo debut.

THE MINUTES AFTER BOTH EXITS

The scoreboard never tightened. Norris opened it at 10:12 of the second after Cam Talbot had stopped 17 straight shots. Noah Ostlund scored twice in 28 seconds, both with help from Zach Benson. Thompson made it 5-0 with 5:28 left. Corson Ceulemans finally beat Colten Ellis with 3:41 to go. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen had stopped all 13 shots through two periods; Ellis stopped 12 of 13 in the third. Columbus dressed a mix of NHL and AHL players. Buffalo dressed the group it expects to see on Oct. 1.

Soucy Was in Camp on a Tryout

Soucy is 32, listed at 6-foot-4 and 211 pounds, and he is not on Columbus’s roster. The Blue Jackets signed him Sept. 13 to a professional tryout agreement, a camp deal that lets a player play preseason without a guaranteed contract. General manager Don Waddell called him “a big, physical stay-at-home defenseman who blocks shots, clears the net and plays an overall solid defensive game.”

Soucy split last season between the New York Rangers (46 games) and the New York Islanders (30 games) and finished with 12 points (five goals, seven assists) in 76 games. He has 99 points in 441 NHL games. Zellweger is 5-foot-10 and 193 pounds, on a three-year deal, and was playing to lock a second-pair job next to Power. A veteran on a tryout threw the hit that ended that audition. Ruff still called the hit clean. The contact that mattered, in his telling, was the ice.

Columbus came in 1-1-0 in the preseason and leaves with two games left, Sept. 24 at home against Pittsburgh and Sept. 26 in Detroit. Buffalo is 1-1-0 after a 4-1 loss in Pittsburgh on Monday with a prospect-heavy lineup. Tuesday was the first night the regulars played together.

The Protocol Does Not Care About Opening Night

The NHL’s concussion rules do not run on the exhibition calendar. A player diagnosed with a concussion cannot return the same day. The league’s posted protocol then calls for a brief rest of 24 to 48 hours and a six-stage graded return-to-play progression. Each stage is generally 24 hours. Symptoms send a player back a step. Club doctors individualize the pace.

THE NHL’S GRADED RETURN STEPS

• Stage 1: Symptom-limited daily activity, no practice.
• Stage 2: Stationary cycling at a slow to medium pace, limited head movement.
• Stage 3: Interval work and light resistance training to raise heart rate.
• Stage 4: On-ice skating with no contact.
• Stage 5: Non-contact drills with teammates, plus off-ice lifting.
• Stage 6: Controlled body contact and game-like drills before medical clearance for a game.

A clean six-stage climb after a 24-hour rest is a seven-day floor. Tuesday night to Oct. 1 is nine days. That window is real on a whiteboard and thin in a training room. Guidelines published in Neurology and circulated by UCLA Health put it more bluntly: there is no routine timeline for a safe return, and the highest risk of another concussion sits in the first 10 days after the first one.

FROM THE HIT TO OPENING NIGHT

1. Sept. 22: Zellweger leaves Tuesday’s 5-1 win; Samuelsson exits earlier in the second.
2. Sept. 23: Both players are further evaluated, per Ruff.
3. Sept. 24: Buffalo plays at Detroit, the third of four preseason games.
4. Sept. 26: Home finale against Pittsburgh at 3 p.m.
5. Oct. 1: Regular-season opener at Columbus, 7 p.m., the same opponent as Tuesday.

The new collective bargaining agreement cut the preseason to four games and stretched the regular season to 84. Zellweger already used his one night with the NHL group. If protocol holds him out of Detroit and Pittsburgh, his next game action is a regular-season game, or later.

The Hole Byram Left in June

Buffalo acquired Zellweger from the Anaheim Ducks on June 26 for forward prospect Anton Wahlberg and the 45th pick in the 2026 draft, a second-rounder that had come over from Chicago in the Byram trade three days earlier. Byram and Jordan Greenway went to the Blackhawks for Crevier, a first-round pick, and that second-rounder. On July 1 the Sabres signed Zellweger, then a restricted free agent, to a three-year contract with an average annual value of $3.1 million ($9.3 million total) through 2028-29.

Trading Bo Byram obviously created a hole. This is a young player that has a lot of the same qualities. Really good skater, speed, puck play, ability to move up the ice, whether it’s with a pass or carrying the puck out of the zone. We see a lot of potential in him.

Jarmo Kekäläinen, Sabres general manager, on Sabres.com

Zellweger heard he had been moved during a morning workout, missed calls from Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek, then spoke with Kekäläinen. “It happened pretty fast and I was pretty excited,” he said in early July. He told the club he would “put my best foot forward and try to earn the most opportunity I can” and that he was “ready for that bigger role starting right away this year.”

The bet was speed. NHL Edge tracked 162 bursts between 20 and 22 mph from him last season, fifth in the league behind Matthew Schaefer, Cale Makar, Jake Sanderson, and Quinn Hughes, and the sixth-most bursts over 22 mph. Anaheim held a 53.3 percent share of shot attempts with him on the ice at 5-on-5, tied for the best mark among the Ducks’ regular defensemen. He set career highs with 76 games, 22 points (seven goals, 15 assists), and 85 blocked shots, then added two points in three playoff games. Career line: 51 points (16 goals, 35 assists) in 164 games after going 34th overall to Anaheim in 2021. The Calgary native had 183 points in 180 WHL games and 17 points in 14 World Junior games for Canada.

Wahlberg, a 2023 second-rounder, had 37 points (nine goals, 28 assists) in 68 games with Rochester. Buffalo decided it needed a Byram-type more than another center in the system. Tuesday was the first outside test of that swap.

Who Plays If Both Defensemen Sit?

Camp copy had been tidy. Kekäläinen said in June he expected Dahlin and Samuelsson to open as the top pair again. Buffalo outscored teams 46-29 at 5-on-5 with those two last season, the sixth-best ratio among NHL pairs with 500-plus minutes, per Natural Stat Trick, and led 7-4 in the playoffs. Ruff then started Zellweger with Power, the seat Byram held. Crevier, 6-foot-8 with 124 hits last season, was ticketed for a third pair with Timmins. Zach Metsa and Dennis Gilbert were the extras.

BUFFALO’S PROJECTED PAIRS BEFORE TUESDAY

Take Samuelsson and Zellweger off that sheet and Power’s partner is the live question Ruff already named in camp. He listed Crevier, Timmins, and Zellweger as the names who could play with Power. Crevier just played 20-plus minutes in a game that finished four-on-the-back-end. Timmins scored and ate the leftover shifts. Metsa and Gilbert are the next call-ups from the extra pair. Ryan Johnson and Jack Rathbone are in the organization if this stretches.

Jason Zucker has not skated in camp because of a sports hernia. Kekäläinen said the forward “could maybe miss a couple weeks of the regular season.” The club is already planning around one regular-season absence. Two more on defense, even for a stretch, would force the pairings Ruff has not wanted to lock.

Crevier was not a throw-in. He played 78 games last season for Chicago, scored 25 points (seven goals, 18 assists), blocked 95 shots, and had the league’s fourth-hardest shot at 102.83 mph. Kekäläinen said he “made himself into an NHL player” and that the club checked his competitiveness before taking him in the Byram return. If Zellweger is out, that is the player who absorbs the minutes Buffalo paid a first-rounder and a roster defenseman to obtain.

Detroit on Thursday, Then Columbus

Buffalo visits Detroit on Thursday at 7 p.m., then hosts Pittsburgh on Saturday at 3 p.m. Those are the last two of four preseason games. The regulars already used their dress rehearsal against a Blue Jackets roster that will look different on Oct. 1 at Nationwide Arena, when Columbus is at full strength and the game counts.

Power finished Tuesday with three assists. Dahlin got through the night. Timmins and Crevier just showed they can play a full third with two regulars in the room. That is the useful tape from a 5-1 win that cost Buffalo its new second-pair defenseman and its top-pair stay-at-home piece in the same period.

Ruff will get Wednesday’s medicals, then decide who sits on the bus to Detroit. Zellweger’s next step is the protocol, not the power play. Opening night is still Oct. 1 in Columbus, nine days after the hit, and the pairings on that night now run through the training room first.