darksabre

The hubbub over the Taylor firing is probably the funniest part of this whole thing to me. There are people on Twitter acting like the Pegulas put him out on the streets, like Taylor is some kind of working-class martyr. "He's just a hard workin guy, how will his kids eat!?" I dunno, he's the one who picked this career. I think he'll figure it out. I think a lot of people are looking for literally anything they can be mad at the Pegulas about. What's that phrase that gets tossed around, "outrage culture"? I normally roll my eyes when I see someone use it, but in this situation it feels like it might be where we're at.

Vogl's tweet seems misleading given the content of this table. It looks like there's a decent amount of variability between teams as far as what they think works for them staff-wise. There are good teams on here with a small staff, bad teams with a large staff, and a bunch in-between. All I can take away here is that there's nothing to say that the Pegulas and Adams are inherently wrong for deciding a smaller staff might work for them.

Good stuff, thanks

I mean, that's better than Botterill's motto: "Do as little as possible with as much as possible"

Adams lurks on Sabrespace (e5)

Casey's development isn't the concern. It's that he spent a year in Buffalo and wasted our time.

I'm pretty surprised at how viscerally angry Sabres Twitter is. I expected indifference, but I think their hatred of the Pegulas is much stronger.

Believe me, I'm just trying to rationalize things. Maybe the one thing the Pegulas understand is charts that say "this is wasteful!"

To put it another way, if a prospect playing in the college system, who isn't Jack Eichel, is allowed to impose their will on an NHL GM, then that NHL GM is weak.

Casey was only a 1 year college player though. Was it really that urgent? He couldn't have let him play another year of college first? This wasn't a Vesey situation at the time, Mittlestadt couldn't exactly flee the prospect pool. If Botterill freaked out that a player he just drafted might not sign with the team three years down the line, that makes him a coward and an idiot.

hmmmmm

Yeah, it really sounds like it was something like: 1. Hey, the team is bad yet again and we're spending a lot of money. That doesn't make sense, let's study it. (Adams gets tasked with running this?) 2. Here are all of these things that we're spending a lot of money on (scouting, analytics, player development) that are supposed to be making us better, why aren't they? 3. People in charge of these departments get asked to answer for their failures and it turns into a real nightmare when each department's report indicts the other departments, which devolves into chaos. 4. Botterill can't give the Pegulas a restructuring plan that fixes these problems. 5. Purge. So maybe Adams' role in all of this, and why he was installed as GM, is that he was the one who coordinated the analysis of the organization from top to bottom. Maybe he presented a plan to the Pegulas and when they took it to Botterill he balked and they turned to Adams and said "okay, you get to do your plan."

This is the only way it makes sense. That Casey didn't want to leave college and Botterill basically dangled the carrot to entice him. It leans entirely on Botterill being a damned idiot.

What GM makes this handshake agreement though without stipulating some kind of performance expectations from the player? There's no reason to even make this deal from the perspective of the GM. Was getting Mittelstadt in the lineup for six games that important at the end of 2018? The whole thing is a head scratcher.

Yeah, but that doesn't make any sense. He has no leverage. They could send him down without asking him. So anything that would prevent them from simply doing so would, in fact, be sinister.

I wonder if the situation was essentially "if you send me down I won't report and you'll have to terminate my contract". It would seem weird for such a young player to want to make that kind of deal, but...

It was always something that was rumored, just never confirmed.

Yeah, that's definitely the most interesting tidbit. This whole situation seems driven by that relationship. If Adams was the "conduit" to Kim that she said he was, then it's not unreasonable to expect that Nightengale's complaints were heard, investigated, and found to be legitimate.

I'll take it a step further and say that it's weird they wouldn't be carrying any debt. Don't most businesses carry debt when things are good financially? Debt can mean the banks are good with extending you credit. If you're not carrying debt that means you're not going to banks for lines of credit, which means you're not doing any business growth stuff...

It's the details that are making my ears perk up. It just doesn't fit with what we have been told his "role" was with the team prior to this. It hints that he was far more involved in pretty much everything, which may dispel some of the notion that he doesn't have the experience to do this job. He still doesn't have much experience, but he sure seems to have a lot of information.

The question is: were the Amerks good in a way that was benefiting the prospects, or were they good at a detriment to the prospects? If you've got prospects that you set development goals for, and they need to hit certain benchmarks to give you the info you need to evaluated their progress, and then those benchmarks aren't getting met because AHL vets are filling up too much space on the ice, yeah, there could be a problem there. Sounds like the feeling is that a balance wasn't being struck between player development and trying to just win games. That's an age-old struggle with AHL teams, especially in markets like Rochester where the fans really want their team to win every night.

Again, it's very weird that he's this well informed about the org from top to bottom.

I'll just stop watching hockey.

Mike's questions don't get answers though. They just make people mad. There's a way to ask tough questions that get answers without being a massive douche. Mike is not smart enough to accomplish that.

Nightengale: We need guys who generate offense. Botts: Sobotka N: No. B: Tage Thompson N: No... B: Frolik N: What? B: Wayne Simmonds N: .........