darksabre

I think Jack was a noticeably more mature in a lot of his post-game stuff this year, and I think that likely reflects the added responsibility he was carrying this season. Despite all the losing I thought his attitude was better. He was much better with the reporters, there was a lot less eye-rolling. Hopefully a leadership core can develop under Kreuger out of all these kids. Lord knows we need to move on from Bogo and Okposo wearing A's.

I know what "the room" was like because I drink and I know things. O'Reilly is toxic if you're asking him to lead a room on his own. He's fine if you can plug him in to a team with an established leadership group already in place for him to feed off of. Without it he gets crazy and puts everything on himself. We saw the evidence of that first hand. And we see now how much better things are for him on the Blues where they already had a guy like Pietrangelo wearing the C and a bunch of other vets who have been grinding it out for a long time. Ultimately, the O'Reilly trade says more about the state of the Sabres than it does about him. We heard all the stories about the splits in the room under Gionta, various cliques, clashes of personality. O'Reilly isn't the kind of guy you ask to unite a locker room and teach young players how the game works. We can argue that the Sabres should have been more patient and let that leadership group develop, but my personal opinion is that it was (probably) never going to happen with O'Reilly here trying to do it all himself. I think they needed to expose Jack and put that responsibility on him as the franchise #1 center. I don't know if it would have been any better to keep O'Reilly and strip him of the C, but it's essentially what needed to happen to get the rest of these guys to take some responsibility. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I reiterate.

Extremely cool for Binnington. 16 playoff wins by a rookie goalie for the first time ever.

Welp, there it is.

Breaking the seal early in this game was so important for the Blues.

This game has the stuff.

Blues doing a great job of keeping Boston to the outside.

Ooooo

I've stated previously that my biggest area of concern was the lack of improvement from Ullmark. Apparently Botterill wasn't happy with it either given how quickly they replaced that specific position.

Allen was the goalie coach and he definitely needed to be fired.

The best case scenario for the Blues, imo, is for either team to score a goal early in the game, just to break the seal. The longer this game goes scoreless, the better it is for the Bruins.

O'Reilly said something to the effect of "game 7 needs to be the best game I've ever played" after the last game. So it's obvious that he's already in "it's all on me" mode. And if he's that tightly wound up then there's a good bet the whole team is. I could see this being a blowout if the Bruins can weather the early Blues push and crack Binnington.

Maybe we should make this the Optimist thread.

Oh yah. Unless he gets hurt he's absolutely going to surpass 60.

The poll was about last season. I figured we could use a new poll for a new season.

Okay, Alex Nylander Watch is closed. Please move discussion to Alex Nylander Watch 2.0

Most people said Alex would get an occasional call-up last season, and most people were WRONG. The next most people said he would have significant ice time for the Sabres. They were also WRONG. Let's see how people are feeling about Nylander's prospects this season. Keep in mind that Nylander is 21 years old and has two years left on his ELC.

Hm. I think I'll start a new thread and let people vote again.

Okay, fine. Just the players. It sucks for them to have negotiated a NTC that isn't actually an NTC when an expansion draft happens.

Which is absolutely the right choice by the Canucks.

That strikes me as wildly unfair to players/teams that negotiated NTCs.

I would assume NMC/NTC are treated the same for the purposes of the expansion draft but someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

He's probably going to be in a tough spot this summer as a free agent. He had a NTC with Vancouver for his last contract but I doubt any team will want to give him that again at 33 and with the expansion draft coming up. No one is going to want to be forced to protect Edler.

We already have Bogo for this season soooo