All Activity

Absolutely. We are always trying to attach meaning to the moves Adams makes because we are full of more intelligent people who care more about the team and actual success it’s all a contruct. We know for a fact there was no plan to trade JJ until he asked for it and they were happy to oblige. The plan so far as it exists doesn’t prioritize the same aims we do I can’t believe this still needs to be said. The vision of how the deal could work is ours, not the team

Dude it’s August 5th we always have it down to a single variable by now

Not if you were an announcer LOL

We’ve averaged 78 points the duration of Adams tenure those are the points the league uses to measure teams relative to eachother, as opposed to the numbers we select that paint the team in a good light. If advanced stats tantamount to offsetting the good ones, to the tune of a balance sitting around 26th place aren’t being shown to you, rest assured they are still there - - - you need to be cognizant of framing. For example: remember, we are only replacing Peterka’s goals. His other offensive attributes aren’t something we need to worry about. You can’t forget that if he tabulates a significant amount of secondary assists, we can write off his high assist totals that lead the forward group in *totality* - that’s the key to the framing. you have to work the little tricks - we should be and do shape ourselves by the principles being used to construct the team. You know, that plausibly deniability they institute every year to explain why they just couldn’t find a way to spend. You take a point of logic, a reasonable thing that DOES have basis in fact like “we need to deal with the Byram situation”, but extrapolate that to, “and that’s why we couldn’t make other moves of note or find a way to spend to the cap.” JJ has a high secondary assist total - that’s the good initial fact here, but don’t forget to warp it to “we only need to replace his goals” it’s the little cuts on the margins. The EEE. You need to work the efficiency into your actual arguments if you want to make sense of their vision - once you ignore a whole bunch of seemingly small things like that, but do it ROUTINELY like they always do (hope for best etc) it’s quite easy to see how they all add up together to a missed playoffs - - - TLDR *plausible deniability* Remember. It’s not about building a playoff team. It’s about crafting a team and arguments to ensure why, and explain why it wasn’t and isn’t strictly *impossible* ”prove the team Adams built COULDN’T make the playoffs. Go on, prove to me things can’t all go right.”

There's simply too much youth and inexperience in the top 6. The odds of it working are minimal at best.

I’ve also seen statistics outlining the fact the sabres have been significant front runners. A lot of their goals are garbage time, in essence the 23rd place the Sabre finished in goals 2 years ago is for me as accurate as their placement last year, then add in the fact we lost Peterka

Very salient tbh. You can find a stat for any opinion you want to have. This thread is evidence enough. I very nearly just dropped a poop emoji in the name of balancing things out - that seems most fair and the closest I could get to accurately displaying how ridiculously one sided the vision gets - but I’ll settle for this

Well, their strategy for making up for Peterka's goals is clearly 3 things. 1) Norris is healthy and contributes more than Cozens did. 2) Quinn regains a scoring touch instead of Peterka goals we get Quinn goals. 3) Benson keeps rising and starts finishing his plays and putting the puck in the net. You go +10 on each of those 3 and there's your 30 goals. That's their plan. Personally, as things stand, I'd throw some money at Roslevic, but maybe he doesn't want to be here either.

There are articles out there about the bullcrap DOGE claims. Here’s the most recent I found. A whopping 3%. Per my previous article about the rehires at the NWS, is that there’s an additional training cost involved in terms of real dollars, not to mention the brain-drain from all the experience that is no longer there. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-claims-slashing-costs-cbs-news-analysis/ And it was all predicted previously. Arrogant pisspots who think they know more than anyone else in the room.

Maybe not, but that 'strategy' in goal was pretty successful just 2 seasons ago. It has not failed 5 years in a row. UPL had a great year, and, if I remember correctly, was the best or 2nd best goalie in the league in many/most metrics the 2nd half of the season.

This is a fair and accurate post. Hard to win if you can't stop the other team. (ask the Bills in the 4th qtr of the playoffs) Adams has had years to address the goaltending. The last game Ullmark played for the Sabres was 4/13/21. The next season, Adams gave us UPL with Anderson, Tokarski, Dell, Subban and Houser. He followed that up with UPL plus Anderson, Comrie and a late season visit from Levi. Next came UPL with Comrie and Levi followed by last season's S..t show of UPL, Reimer and Levi. Is it any wonder this team can't crawl out of the cellar. This coming season we are getting UPL with Lyons and Levi. Does anyone really expect a different result in year 5 running back the same failed strategy in goal that has failed for 4 straight seasons?

And no PT's

DODGE was a good way for Elon to cut and or block government contracts with other companies so his companies could get them. I am not sure after everything they even saved money, they have never released any proven data of ever saving money. I wonder if our fellow eyeroller has any insight into the numbers of how much it cost the US to employ DODGE and how much they actually saved in the end after all the screw ups and problems they caused. So far getting rid of the immigrants have cost America more money, with the concentration camp costing US $450 Million annually.

"....but he didn't want to be here"

How quickly we all forgot how good Samson Reinhart was on both sides of the puck. Truly one of the dumbest trades of Adams illustrious career.

https://abc7.com/post/weather-service-is-now-hiring-back-hundreds-positions-got-cut-doge-chaos/17441964/ Way to go, DOGE. Perhaps the least needed government agency ever created.

They still had a lot to say about who bought the team and the future plans of the team.

These are the numbers I was referring to earlier: https://moneypuck.com/goalies.htm It's interesting that UPL generally also ranked low in the "above expected" categories, meaning that even with the poor defence factored in, he's not making enough saves.

A rank in 30s would just mean you're average. I think the problem is how badly things fell off across the board. He went from slightly above average to very good in most categories last year to below average in everything. I've dug up some actual numbers: 24/25 Games started SV% > .900: 45.5% (Below 50th percentile) 23/24 Games started SV% > .900: 64.7% (90th) 24/25 Save percentage: .887 (Below 50th) 23/24 Save percentage: .910 (70th) 24/25 High danger save percentage: .769 (Below 50th) 23/24 High danger save percentage: .830 (86th) 24/25 Mid-range save percentage: .873 (Below 50th) 23/24 Mid-range save percentage: .893 (52nd) I mean someone could run the actual numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if he put up his 2023/24 numbers last year, the Sabres are in the playoff mix. Now I recognize that's not all on him, but it's pretty hard to underestimate the impact good goaltending would have on this team. The over/under .900 number is huge. James Reimer had 8 games over .900 down the stretch and just 3 under. Not coincidentally, the Sabres went 1-2 in the unders and 7-1 in the overs.

Totally agree... this is a nothingburger to me...

I'm really curious to see whether Peterka is more Sam Reinhart or Miro Satan.

What bothers me about UPL in your excellent description of his game is his mental fragility. The critical trait for goalies is the ability to handle adversity. There is no question that our overall defense was inadequate, lacking structure that included too many lapses. He reacted to the poor defense in front of him by getting into bad habits, such as lunging and flailing when the play was scrambling around him. As you noted, when he plays a more composed game with an economy of movement, he is very effective. Entering this season, I consider him to be the most important player that will determine how the season will play out.

Your answer is Sam Reinhart. NHL teams in general sign players to deals like this with the assumption the player will be overpaid at the start of the contract and underpaid at the end of the contract as they develop. The Sabres in particular also have to deal with the issue of attracting/retaining talent as one of the league’s less attractive markets and are more sensitive to the realities of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” than, say, Vegas. Those are your big picture contextual answers. As to Power himself the tools and the pedigree are obvious; it’s also pretty clear after two years of watching him train, practice and interact that they regarded the person as someone they are comfortable investing in long-term. When they signed him Power was coming off his second season with these statistics: ES points 26 icetime 1880 Corsi 52% GF% 53% xGF% 47.2% These are Power’s peers at the time of signing their second contracts. Luke Hughes ES points 28 icetime 1506 Corsi 56% GF% 52.8% xGF% 55% Jake Sanderson ES points 15 Icetime 1687 Corsi 50% GF% 47.5% xGF% 49.2% Moritz Seider ES points 24 Ice time 1833 Corsi 45% GF% 48.6% xGF% 42.7% Rasmus Dahlin (bubble season) ES points 12 Ice time 1211 Corsi 55% GF% 43.6% xGF% 50.7% Seider $8.5m and Sanderson $8m signed similar deals to his. We’ll see what Hughes gets soon. Dahlin signed a bridge for $6M which (with inflation) represents roughly what would have been the alternative to what Power signed. I’d also point to the deals signed by the likes of Miller and Provorov this summer under the growing cap as a sign of things to come and a warning of how $8M is not going to be what it was, very soon. None of that changes the fact that Power regressed in the 1st year of his 2nd contract while his peers continued to develop. We’ll see if that is a blip, or whether he bucks the trend and fails to emerge the way most players of his pedigree tend to, and the way he was on track to in his first 2 seasons. Bringing it back to Reinhart. There's an example of a high-pedigree guy who wasn't an immediate star and the Sabres did not lock up. Fear of repeating that mistake has to be a motivator. Your question was what did they see in him. There’s an answer. The contract still has 6 years to prove its worth.

Personally, expect you're misreading UPL. He's a guy that needs to know everybody on the team believes in him in order to believe in himself fully AND when things start to go bad he hasn't figured out how to get out of his own head. That year he finally showed that he could be what he was in Juniors prior to the hip surgeries, he did 2 things he hadn't consistently done as a pro. He kept himself more upright in his butterfly taking away the top of the net like big goalies are expected to do. AND he moved post to post explosively and didn't overshoot the far post which personally hadn't seen him do at all as a pro. (He mght've done it on occassion, but not when this kid was watching.) As he continued to do those things, the crease was his and his play was on a positive feedback loop. Near the time that Levi's college season was coming to an end, he started to falter some, and by the time the season had ended he'd played himself back into the #3 role and didn't move back up from there on his own merit, rather he got the starter's job back by default. And about the time Levi got some starts again in the NHL, UPL's play started to tail off again. IMHO, UPL's issues are primarily between the ears. And won't expect him to figure them out for good until he demonstrates he's actually figured them out for good. But IF he does do that, the team probably is good enough in front of him to make the playoffs with that. Even with the same awful coaching we've watched for so many years.