darksabre

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: .........

The problem with Harrington's question is that it's pure hyperbole based on pretty much zero actual evidence. We don't have "virtually every former employee" calling Kim's leadership "scattershot". We have some "rumblings" at best, and nothing nearly that severe. If he wanted to question her leadership, there's probably a much more tactful way of doing it. He just sounds like a Twitter troll.

Based on what, exactly? Because all evidence points to him being essentially a co-equal with Krueger in this structure. Having an older, more experienced AGM shouldn't be an issue.

You guys ready for Darcy Regier Part II, "Do Something!" Boogaloo?

Which fits if you're trying to restructure to give analytics a bigger role in your team building. The entire analytics hobbyist community started by watching video of games and many of them have leveraged that amateur "video scouting" into actual jobs, and even full departments, within many NHL orgs. There would appear to be merit to it, if you're someone who thinks analytics in an important piece of the puzzle.

It's all very strange...

I'm even more curious now about what Adams' role really was leading up to this. He seems to know way more about the Sabres inner workings than you would expect him to given his known roles in the org. Curiouser and curiouser...

As suspected

I mean, I don't really think Pilut was that good, but I just had a hunch that after all the gnashing of teeth on Sabres Twitter yesterday about Adams that he was going to come out and preach analytics and Sabres Twitter would do an immediate about-face and become his greatest acolytes.

Welcome to Purgeatory

Why couldn't it be Adams, Kim's errand boy? She basically admitted to using him as a conduit between management and ownership. Why that needed to be there I have no idea, but he was clearly in some kind of position to express an opinion on Botterill.

I guess if this is the angle we're running with. But I would expect someone other than the Pegulas put that list together. Which would point to Adams. I don't really know who's side I'm on. Maybe the Pegulas are right and Botterill was running a bloated and ineffective staff? Maybe Botterill was right for resisting their demands? I don't have any faith in either party in this matchup.

Adams knowing exactly who he's canning on day 1 means he had a plan ready to go. Which means he knew this was coming for a while. Was he...a mole?