All Activity

I'm still pleased the Bills had a positive influx on the DL with a pass rush a week before playing KC.

It’s real early in the year, probably too early to draw conclusions on anything. For some perspective though, two goalies who burst out last year as young #1s, are Sam Montembeault in Montreal and Dustin Wolf in Calgary. Per MoneyPuck, they finished +25.6 and +11.9 in GSAx last year and were big factors in their teams either making the playoffs or hanging in the race longer than anticipated. Through the first two weeks of this season, they are at the bottom with GSAx of -6.3 and -5.1 respectively.

I do like seeing Hoecht wearing 55 because I’ve already been calling him Hecht.

I’m sure this has been said but I don’t have the time today to read the whole thread. But it’s been ONE GAME for Ellis and UPL. The likely odds are Ellis won’t keep playing as good as he did in his one game. UPL may or may not play as bad as he did in his one game.

Ya, I guess.

Chauncey Billups should be able to help you with this.

Don't the 1st and 3rd choices mean pretty much the same thing?

Or one game of good team defense makes UPL look like a Vezina winner and then we’re screwed 😂

KA needs multiple kicks to the groin before he decides to move on from his goalie of choice. He believes in the guys he is paying big bucks to and stubbornly hopes for a turnaround. Another 2 good games by Ellis and another clunker by UPL would be enough for me. This could take a while.

With the seemingly positive developments recently as far as how the team has been put together, I'm becoming more and more hopeful that Adams is now in a position where such a stupid decision could be "vetoed."

That’s not the question. Nobody should need more looks at UPL to see what he can do when he’s already played a number of years here. We already know what he is capable of and yesterday was it.

Dogfight might mean wildcards come from the Metro this year. In that scenario you'll have to actually finish ahead of some of last year's teams like Florida or Toronto.

For one thing we don’t know if Ellis is better. Maybe the coaches see it in practice but games will tell us more. I think they need more looks at Ellis before moving UPL.

So if the idea is UPL looks no different then why would anyone say he needs more looks? We already have multiple seasons worth.

We know exactly what UPL is at this point, barely even a backup at the NHL level so let's see if Ellis is any better than an AHL Starter/Backup. To force feed UPL because we overpaid him is terrible which is probably why Adams will start him.

I don’t understand why he was given the start unless the staff doesn’t trust Ellis for some reason. To the point about trusting Ellis: It’s impossible to trust any of our goaltenders at this point. I don’t trust Lyon to handle a starter workload. While I recognize he has so far been a bright spot, he’s never played a 50+ game season in net. He played 44 two years ago in the NHL and then you need to rewind to 16-17 for the last time he even played over 40 (47 in the AHL). He might be able to do it, but I don’t trust that he can. Colten Ellis has played one NHL game. Granted, I thought he looked good and, despite being very active in terms of motion, he was seemingly controlled in all of his movements and his positioning looked excellent—a promising sign considering his rookie status. That being said, I would have made the same statement after Levi’s first few games at the end of 22-23. Ellis is simply an unknown. It’s not even just one NHL game. He’s only played one full season as an AHL starter. So who knows? UPL can’t be trusted. It’s impossible to know which version is going to walk out of the locker room for the game. Even worse, it’s impossible to know which version we’ll get from one period to the next. When UPL is good, he’s properly good, but he then turns around and looks awful for no apparent reason right after. It has to be mental. I have no other explanation.

It has to be this. Like it or not, due diligence requires that they look at all of them to decide on the 1/2 goalies. So let’s try to still achieve the playoffs while also conducting tryouts during real games.

So, he'd only cost THAT number against the cap??? Why TF aren't they doing it, RIGHT NOW!!!

Package him with Power. Position it as "an UpPer echeLon blue zone Power-house" package.

Wow. Would've guessed all of the others combined were a smidge less than his contract. Because even Lyon is well under $2MM/year.

Not a direct answer to the OP’s question, but a UPL contract buyout would cost $1.58MM for six seasons. Not ideal, but also not that bad. It would be less than 1% of each year’s cap to move on from the mistake of the contract. If no improvement this year and a trade is not possible, this is my angle.

The Sabres have 5 skaters on their current 23 man roster (Bryson, Metsa, Dunne, Geertsen, Östlund) who can be waived/sent to Rochester, as the injured get healthy. I guess you could say it’s 4 skaters, as one of Bryson or Metsa stays as the 7th D. So, they pretty much need everyone back, including Norris, and keep everyone else healthy, before they would need to make a tough decision. As Lyon has never started more than 44 games in an NHL season, it’s quite possible we will need another goalie to step up for a stretch or two. Keeping multiple options, at least for now, seems prudent (I’m assuming no team is trading us a 3rd line C for UPL right now; if the Flyers want to give us Noah Cates, then do it). UPL’s best season kinda came out of nowhere after Levi faltered and Comrie was injured. Hopefully Lyon just stays healthy and rolls, but I don’t hate having UPL around for the if or when.

No, he looked like he always does.

The irony is the six other goalies in the organization salaries combined are only 883k more than UPL.

He makes me not want to buy tickets to games. There's a real chance we can get back to packed buildings again if Terry swallows the remaining $20mil on his contract.