Cozens built confidence at Worlds with goal-scoring mentality

Kevyn Adams had a conversation with Dylan Cozens after last season, before Cozens departed to join Team Canada at the IIHF World Championship in Finland.
Adams asked Cozens what he hoped to get out of the tournament.
"He said, 'I want to score goals,'" Adams recalled Thursday. "He said, 'I know I can score goals in the National Hockey League. I'm getting chances. I want to go over there and find my scoring touch.'"

Cozens made good on those intentions, tying for the team lead with seven goals and tying for second with 13 points during Canada's run to a silver medal. He played on the left wing alongside a pair of NHL scorers in Winnipeg center Pierre-Luc Dubois and Ottawa winger Drake Batherson.
It was a positive experience for Cozens, who had tallied 13 goals and 38 points in his second NHL season but had ended the season with one goal in his final 29 games. He still finished third on the Sabres in scoring chances at 5-on-5, according to Natural Stat Trick.
"I just wanted to go there and find the back of the net after kind of a slump at end of last season," he said. "I needed to go get a confidence boost going into this year. I just, I went there and, obviously, played left wing, which is new for me, but it was fun.
"I just kind of had that mindset of being a shooter and shooting the puck. I think I had some decent success there."

Cozens continued his goal-scoring ways on Saturday during the Sabres' intrasquad blue and gold scrimmage. Centering a line between Aleksandr Kisakov and JJ Peterka, Cozens sent a shot bar-down and in as part of a winning effort for his gold team.
"It feels good to get a goal in something like this, just kind of a bragging rights game against each other," he said.
The fun of goal scoring aside, Cozens is focusing more on the process than results entering the new season. He has already established himself as a reliable two-way presence in the NHL at just 21 years old, having played 120 games over the past two seasons.
"I just want to go out there and be better than last year," he said. "Maybe not stick to statistics, just improving myself every day and improving game by game and shift by shift and just letting my game take care of itself."
He, like many of the young players on the Sabres' roster, has been intentional with his efforts to take ownership of the culture in Buffalo. He went to Rochester to watch the Amerks open their playoff run in May and drove in from Ontario to spend a day at development camp in the summer, which he spent catching up with Granato and meeting Matt Savoie and other recent draftees.

He was the veteran on his line Thursday, skating with a pair of wingers younger than him in Kisakov and Peterka.
"I feel like I just got started here, I'm already going into my third season," he said. "So, it's kind of weird as being seen as a vet. That's just how it is, I guess. I'm just happy to be seen as that."

Saturday's scrimmage

The Sabres broke into two teams for their intrasquad scrimmage, which comprised of two 20-minute periods followed by five minutes of 3-on-3 overtime.
Oskari Laaksonen scored two goals for the gold team, which won 5-1. Kyle Okposo and Cozens also scored at 5-on-5 for the gold team, while Rasmus Dahlin sliced his way through traffic to score a highlight-reel goal in overtime.
Tage Thompson scored for the blue team.
Here's how the two squads lined up:
Gold
52 Aleksandr Kisakov - 24 Dylan Cozens - 77 JJ Peterka
71 Victor Olofsson - 74 Rasmus Asplund - 63 Isak Rosen / 49 Filip Cederqvist
37 Casey Mittelstadt - 93 Matt Savoie - 21 Kyle Okposo
8 Riley Sheahan - 17 Brandon Biro - 29 Vinnie Hinostroza
26 Rasmus Dahlin - 46 Ilya Lyubushkin
4 Jeremy Davies - 33 Chase Priskie
78 Jacob Bryson - 64 Oskari Laaksonen
83 Mats Lindgren - 76 Vsevolod Komarov
41 Craig Anderson
1 Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen
Blue
53 Jeff Skinner - 72 Tage Thompson - 27 Jiri Kulich
22 Jack Quinn - 19 Peyton Krebs - 89 Alex Tuch
81 Brett Murray - 48 Tyson Kozak - 13 Lukas Rousek
65 Linus Weissbach - 28 Zemgus Girgensons - 15 Anders Bjork / 57 Michael Mersch
23 Mattias Samuelsson - 10 Henri Jokiharju
25 Owen Power - 38 Kale Clague
20 Lawrence Pilut - 45 Casey Fitzgerald
31 Eric Comrie
47 Malcolm Subban

Up next

The Sabres play their preseason opener in Washington on Sunday at 2 p.m. The game will be televised nationally on NHL Network. Dan Dunleavy and Rob Ray will have the radio call on WWKB 1520 AM.