Alex Lyon’s unique personality strikes chord with Sabres: ‘A guy who we’ve all grown to love’

BUFFALO – Alex Lyon loves to talk. Off the ice, the loquacious Sabres goalie, an affable, down-to-earth personality, always seems to offer some thoughtful words.

On planes rides, winger Josh Doan often has discussions with Lyon, who attended Yale University, about hockey and other subjects.

“We negotiate pretty good,” Doan said in KeyBank Center, where if the Sabres beat the Boston Bruins on Tuesday in Game 5, they will win their first series in the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2007.

While Doan said he and Lyon think similarly, he acknowledged they occasionally “argue about things.”

“He gets pretty fired up about topics, so we have good conversations,” Doan said Monday. “But that’s part of who he is.”

It’s also a part of who Lyon, 33, is on the ice. After he replaced goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen last week in the best-of-seven first-round series – the Sabres lead 3-1 after Lyon won consecutive starts in Boston – a couple of moments went viral.

In Game 3 last Tuesday, a camera caught Lyon asking Bruins rookie Fraser Minten if he wanted to fight and telling him to, uh, shut up. In Game 4 on Thursday in Boston, his first start, a video from the crowd showed him smiling and colorfully responding to a fan who had grabbed his attention.

“It’s just gamesmanship at the end of the day, and that’s kind of how I see it,” Lyon said.

Doan said Lyon “gives you a little bit of that boost, I think, at times, when he’s got a little bit of fire back there.”

“He’s a guy who we’ve all grown to love throughout the year,” he said.

Goalies, of course, are known for being a bit different. In the AHL four years ago, Lyon earned a two-game suspension for flipping the double bird during the Chicago Wolves’ Calder Cup celebration.

“Every goaltender has their own personality,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “And his personality has a lot of fire in it. He’s a character. And I think it’s something the group likes.”

Lyon, who signed a two-year, $3 million contract as a free agent last offseason, believes his personality has helped him mesh well in a new group.

“The leaders we have, they take on that personality as well, but it’s fun to play sports in that vessel of it’s us versus everybody else,” he said.

The confidence Lyon exudes has certainly boosted the Sabres. Following a career-best regular season, he has emerged as one of the NHL’s top goalies early in the playoffs.

He looked stellar while backstopping the Sabres in Boston, allowing just one goal in each contest.

Overall this postseason, Lyon has compiled a 2-0-0 record with a minuscule 0.89 goals-against average and a gaudy .964 save percentage in three appearances. Among netminders who have started at least one game, his goals-against average and save percentage rank first.

In Sunday’s 6-1 shellacking of the Bruins, he lost his shutout with 40 seconds left in the game.

Lyon has worked diligently to hone his craft. The oldest player in the Sabres’ lineup this postseason is in just his third full NHL campaign.

“If he’s not playing, he’s going to be the hardest-working guy,” Ruff said. “I don’t even know if I’ve seen him have a bad day. And that’s just part of his personality as a goaltender, which I think that personality is infectious.”

Lyon said he experiences plenty of bad days. Over the years, however, he has learned not reveal much when he has one.

“It’s all about perception,” he said.

Lyon said as he toiled in the minors about five or six years ago, he realized if he kept pushing through the bad times, “it will always turn around for the better.”

“Even in the course of the game, you go down by a few, if you just keep trying for 60 minutes, you never know what’s going to happen, and that’s kind of the beauty of sports,” he said. “… But you have to go into the game with a somewhat fearless mentality and accept that it might not always go the right way.

“That’s when it’s the most difficult to have confidence in the scenarios is when things don’t go quite as how you planned.”