darksabre

I've mentioned before that I expect him to rebound next year!

ebay is littered with used ones, so maybe that's the route I'll go.

So Skinner can only score if the chances he gets are easy? Not great news.

We don't know anything about the quality of his shots.

Woody, how do you like that trainer set-up? I've been debating doing this with my road bike.

I don't agree. He might not be playing with Jack, but it does mean he's playing against lower quality of opponents. He should be finding the net with these shots and he isn't, and that's on him.

Yup. Skinner is on pace to match his shot total from last season. It's just that his shooting percentage is half for whatever reason. I think most of us expected a drop from the 14% and change he was shooting at last year, but I don't think anyone expected this much of a drop off. He's really just not getting anything in the net. It's wild.

Start making the banner.

That's the question we should be asking more often, to be honest.

If Minnesota sold Zucker you gotta think they're going to sell even more.

But Wawrow would have had to write a completely different set of words for that to be the case. His tweet is pretty clear that Lafontaine hired him to fail on purpose.

I'm lumping the recovery in. In essence, if he hired GMTM to fail, then he hired him to screw up the accelerated re-build. The more I think about it, the more insane it sounds. Why would PLF think hiring a GM, who would then fail, would somehow get him the GM job?

Spinning this off into its own thread, but this comment from John Wawrow is full of intrigue. Since we know Wawrow is, at the very least, extremely cautious, we can assume that this probably isn't a nothingburger. Did PLF sabotage the tank? Has Wawrow been fed a line of spin from the org? What are we looking at here.

Yup. He never beats anyone to a scoop, but he's a good reporter when it comes to sticking to the facts. Which makes this comment from him pretty heavy duty stuff.

The Austin Powers movies definitely hold up, but like Ace Ventura, there are jokes that definitely don't work now and for good reason.

Yup.

Big news to drop in a random tweet to one of the thousands of Kevins on Sabres Twitter

Is there a quality of shot component? I ask because I don't think the Sabres give up a lot of shots, but they're good for a handful of absolutely horrible opportunities against in every game and I feel like it's mostly good goaltending from Ullmark that has bailed them out.

Boy, I can't say I've ever heard that before. And John isn't the kind of guy who would just speculate. Everything that I knew about the PLF/Murray thing was that PLF thought he was going to have more say in the GM stuff right up until the Pegulas didn't have his back anymore. For Wawrow to take the next step and accuse PLF of being a saboteur is quite the thing.

What does shot suppression measure?

I'm seeing perhaps a little too much criticism of Johansson given the circumstances. He is definitely raw, but most rookie goalies look like this when they get their first cracks at the NHL. I think his foot speed has looked good, and for the most part he's battling. He'll spend time getting the right coaching and seeing the game at NHL speed and it'll make a difference. There was one situation where he nearly got caught sitting on his butt which was caused by his own teammate standing behind him in the crease for some reason... They also hung him out to dry early on, and I'm glad Krueger didn't pull him because it forced the rest of the team to get their act together. This might be the learning experience these bums need now that they don't have Ullmark (or even Lehner) there to bail them out. It might do the team good to play in front of some washed up hacks and rookies in net for the rest of the year.

This all gets back to the key failure of the tank which was the lack of anything substantial in the pipeline to bring up and play with the tank fruit. Better late than never, but it sure would have been nice if they hadn't put the cart before the horse.

That would be HUGE

CAp gEniUS JAsoN BotTEriLl