darksabre

It's certainly interesting that if we break things down into 7 game sets, the Sabres went 1-6 in their first set after Krueger was fired. They're now 6 games into their next set and have gone 3-3. If they win against Boston that would be an astounding turnaround in such a short time. 7 games without Krueger is all it took for things to start looking different...

It's an interesting thing to ponder. It's not the ideal way to build a winner, but maybe someday we'll look back on these trials as foundational.

They're being allowed to take chances with the caveat being that if you screw up you better hustle to try to fix it. Which is how the game should be played if you have the skill and conditioning to do it.

Best game they played all season.

Holy ***** what a goal

R2!

That was a fun little set play by Jeff and Sam.

Someone on twitter said yesterday that not retaining salary on Montour may have been deliberate because it let's them still have two spots to retain salary on other trades, notably Hall. So perhaps Adams is expecting to trade another player and retain salary in addition to Hall. We'll see if it happens.

I think they'll get it done for around 4.5 for maybe 4 years. I can't see it being less than 4 years, but I can't see the money being more than 5 per.

The thing I keep coming back to with Granato is that the kids are thriving under him because that's what he knows. He knows how to deal with young players. But what about beyond that? I think, in all seriousness, that Ted Nolan could have accomplished the same thing here. We all know this team needs a coach that can take things to the next level. Granato as that guy? I don't know. I would bet not.

Mittelstadt's honesty about his maturity is really endearing. Kid seems to have turned a corner.

I give this mess of a roster credit, even if they're losing they're at least doing the things you have to do to win.

That was excellent

Skinner around the net causing trouble definitely helped there

I expect the Sabres will win this game, but it will be in comical fashion.

It's anecdotal for the most part. They tell you before the shot to drink a lot of water but "a lot" is open to some interpretation. I drink a lot of water every day anyway, so all I did was drink even more. Which is probably leaps and bounds beyond what most people consume. Zero side effects after 48 hours so...

Sorry, that's what I meant. I took it after, but I didn't wait until I felt crappy.

My advice is to drink an insane amount of water. Everyone I know who has had reduced/no side effects hydrated like crazy. I also took a few tylenol preemptively. But yeah, water. Lots of it.

Got the J&J one-shot vaccine at lunch yesterday. 30 hours later and I have had zero side effects.

This is why I think the fancy stats stuff is still lagging behind in providing context. They might be able to look at things like shot quality and say "this player is just unlucky" but they really still aren't getting into the meat of what makes hockey so interesting from an analytics standpoint: the flow of the play. I still believe that until we are modeling player movement on the ice and analyzing how the way one player moving around the ice and taking certain actions influences the play of the other players on the ice, we can't really look at stuff like Expected Goals and come to strong conclusions. So when the stats crowd was hemming and hawing about players just being unlucky it made me go "hmmm" because all that said to me is that the stats they were using to make that argument were inadequate.

I like that. I never for a second bought into the argument that the Sabres were good but just unlucky. The stat models don't tell the whole story. You watch that team on the ice and you see that they aren't doing the things they need to do to win and there's no way you can just call it bad luck.

It would be an honest to goodness accomplishment if they somehow managed not to finish dead last in the league.

I don't know if Granato deserves any credit beyond being a replacement level coach, but whatever he's not doing is working.

Guess I'm gonna watch something on Netflix instead

I really like that the GDT isn't pinned yet. It's a nice tribute to Taylor Hall.