BUFFALO, N.Y. — For a team depleted with injuries, it must be a welcome sight for the Sabres to see Jacob Bryson and Robert Hagg at practice. Bryson was out for about a week after repeatedly testing positive for COVID-19.
"You wake up at 8 a.m. to go test, and then you have the rest of your day to do what you want, really. But you’re isolated. You’re stuck at home. So it’s tough," Bryson said after Friday's practice. "We were able to get a bike in. I think we got one off Amazon, so we would take turns riding that."
Bryson quarantined with teammate Casey Mittelstadt, who also tested positive for COVID. After pushing past COVID and its symptoms, Bryson hopes to return to his form from early in the season.
"If I can get back to where I was, the first probably 10-15 games, I was playing my best hockey, confidence-wise," he said. "I think I was super confident with the puck and without the puck. If I could just get back to that level. I still think I’m playing well, it’s just little errors."
Bryson seems ready to play sooner than Hagg, who is returning from a lower-body injury suffered in December. Hagg says his injury is fully healed, but he's not quite in game shape.
"Today was the first full practice I had,” Hagg said. “So you could tell I’ve been out for three weeks. The vision is not there. It’s going much quicker than I thought it would be. It will take a few practices, of course, to get into it, but we have a few days here until the next game."
Hagg tried to play through his injury before realizing that was a bad idea.
"You feel like you can’t do what you want to do out there. ‘What am I doing here?’ I can’t even move out on the ice," he said. "I just felt it was best to take a step back and do a full rehab and get it healed properly."
The Sabres will need all the help they can get Tuesday, when they welcome first-place Tampa Bay to KeyBank Center.
