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carpandean

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Posts posted by carpandean

  1. Doesn't the instigator rule tell us the exact opposite? To me it says to the players "We, the NHL, will punish these plays how we see fit, and if you try to police yourselves, we will punish you."

     

    It was mostly tongue-in-cheek. By not punishing these hits hard enough, the players are providing the incentive (through the catastrophic hits) to not turn your back on the play. That is what they are, quite unintentionally, letting the players police themselves on.

  2. Someone would do it. You just have to give them a bunch of picks. Someone traded the Great One for gosh sake.

     

    For a lot of money, which you can't do anymore. If you had the pick to get the next Crosby (exaggerating a little), what would a team have to offer you to trade him away? Remember that after the top 1-3 in most drafts, you're talking about players who will probably be pretty good. So, no matter how many "first round picks" you're talking about, they aren't worth much if they are out of those top 1-3.

  3. Who cares if it is a high pick or not. Trade all of our picks in the top three rounds to the team with hte first overall. Hopefully that will be two firsts, two seconds and a third.

     

    This year's? Is Reinhart really worth all that? Draisaitl is ahead of him is scoring in the WHL and is bigger. Dal Colle is lighting up the OHL. Now, in 2015, it would be worth that and more to get McDavid, but this year (assuming we don't win the lottery, which is certainly possible), I just don't know.

  4. I will tell you whats wrong with that hit. Schenn is a victim of playing in a era where they put near full blame on the hitter. He had no reason to have situtational awareness nor the need to bother to expect a hit. Had this play happened 10 years or more ago Schenn would have been raked over the coals for putting himself in a vulnerable spot.

     

    Don't worry, a few more hits like this, a few more guys with long-term concussion issues, a few more guys carted off on stretchers, etc., and they'll remember those dark days of peer pressure. :thumbsup:

     

    As long as the NHL is soft on suspensions, players not respecting the position that they are putting themselves in will continue to get destroyed. Personally, that seems to me like a little more incentive than a teammate giving you crap for turning your back to the play. Really, the league is just letting the players police themselves.

     

    With this play, it is simple. He charged, which is illegal. He boarded, which is illegal. The hit was particularly devastating (high energy hit 3 feet from the boards), so you suspend him. The league wants hard hits into the boards and hard open-ice hits (as long as neither has principle contact to the head), but the one thing that they don't want is hard hits in that dangerous zone 2-3 feet away from the boards that launches guys head-first into those boards.

     

    Perhaps, Schenn was foolish on the play, but I'm pretty sure he's not thinking about how he tricked Wilson into taking a penalty that helped his team.

  5. Not that it has anything to do w/ Kassian, but Briere comes to mind. Still, few and far between, like you say.

    With Danny how much of that was being a small, skill player in the post-lockout1 NHL? I think the NHL changed, him not as much.

     

    Briere had a 32G season (78GP) in 2001-02 as a 24-year old after scoring 11G in 30GP (split time in the AHL) the year before. He didn't exactly come out of nowhere when he came to the Sabres. He only had 17G in 68GP before being traded from Phoenix, which was apparently enough for them to lose faith in him.

  6. The other thing to remember is a lag effect in coaching. The first few games, Nolan had no practice time with the team and limited knowledge of the players to use in making in-game decisions. So, while Rolston may have been coach for 20 games and Nolan for 11, one could argue that Rolston's impact was on 22-23 games to Nolan's 8-9.

     

    It's also hard to project a trend with so few games, especially when they were against teams with varying ratings. Their possession ability could be going up as Nolan works with them, but it's nearly impossible to tell. I'd wait until they are 60 games into the season, then compare the first 20 (under Rolston) with the last 20 (under Nolan), throwing out the middle transition period. Not perfect either (Rolston could have shown improvement with fewer and/or improving rookies, too), but more reasonable to me.

  7. They are unlikely to get a lottery pick for Vanek.

     

    Unless some bottom level team believes they will sign Vanek in the off-season they are not about to trade for him as a rental. The only takers are playoff teams and thus out of the lottery.

     

    Well, they could a fringe team trying to make sure they get in, so in theory you could get a very low chance (0.5 - 1.5% for the best four teams that miss the playoffs) lottery pick.

  8. Can you imagine having to receive all of your sports coverage from an entity that is a substantial owner of a different team from the one you root for? How could you possibly get unbiased sports coverage? It'd be like watching Sabres games on the non-Buffalo MSG (remember doing that for NYR, NYI, and NJD away games for years?), except all of the time.

     

    It's not exactly the same. We were watching a broadcast designed for the NYC market, which was then mirrored here for a select few games. Their market drove their content.

     

    In the case above, the market is the same whether or not Rogers is the owner. To the extent that the market demand drives the content, there will still be incentive to cover other teams. In other words, Rogers' stockholders will still want them to make as much money as possible. It's unlikely that neutral reporting (vs. biased) about the Leafs would have a significant impact on the franchise's valuation, while biased reporting could have a substantial impact on viewership outside of Toronto (they'd still watch the games, because there's no alternative, but the other content would not be viewed.)

     

    So, yes, there might be some bias, but not exactly like what we saw on MSG.

  9. Since the lockout the lowest point total has been 56 points (06/07 Flyers). We are on track for 39 points this season. The last team to get 39 points in a season were the 99/00 Thrashers. It was their first season in the league

     

    Their level of losing rate to date is probably not sustainable, so they'll likely finish closer to that 56-point mark. That said, they are already 8 points behind their own worst start (first 2423* games) since the 2004 lockout and 3.5 points further away from the playoff pace line that I use than they were at any point in any season over that period (it took 49 games to get 11.4 points away in 2011-12; they are already over 15 points away.)

     

     

     

    * Edit: oops, 24th data point, which is actually 23 games in (first point is 0,0.)

  10. I worry still... I like Pegula. He seems like he cares and he wants to win. What concerns me is how this all got started. 10 Days prior they met LaFontaine for Dinner during some league meeting. During the course of that T-Pegs is all drooling over LaFontaine and asks if he could be a GM (obviously thinking for the Sabres). That indicates to me that Terry was thinking of making the change but may have only made it because he was all nostalgic... This could be entirely wrong but the timing is odd for the whole thing. I think a change was coming but I think it happened the way it did because LaFontaine was available.

     

    That being said, La Fontaine said he wasn't qualified to be GM which indicates he is a smart man who knows his limits and has no problem saying NO to Terry. Glad the change was made and something about having LaFontaine seems right.

    I get the image of Uncle Terry as a dim bulb who is in way over his head running a professional hockey team. Just read his quotes...he sounds like someone who's had a lobotomy. He just doesn't know what he is doing. After all this failure since he took ownership, how could he offer the GM position to an inexperienced guy who knew he wasn't even qualified for the position? Didn't Terry know too? I could just see him getting all teary eyed and sentimental assembling his fantasy Sabres dream team in his plastic bubble where unicorns and rainbows all come neatly tied up in a pink ribbon.

     

    I'm glad that there is now a layer between Terry and the GM, and that that layer has a lot more hockey knowledge. It may have been a bad thing for Patty to be GM and perhaps Terry got lucky that he was smart enough to know that, but the fact is that Patty is now the one that will hire the next GM. I am far more confident that he will get it right than I would be if Terry were making the decision. When Terry took over, I wanted him to gather a committee of guys like Pat Lafontaine and empower them to hire his next GM. This is close enough, even if way, way late.

  11. Forsberg looks like a good prospect, but he was sent down to Milwaukee recently. Other GMs seem to recognize that the vast majority of young players take time to develop... they take time to adjust to the defensive responsibilities and speed of the NHL game. Not Darcy. Here in Buffalo we draft kids and throw them right in the lineup.

     

    This is a recent thing for Darcy. He's been one of the biggest proponents of "give them time to develop in the minors" for most of his tenure.

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