...

Right! If only we had that power.

Worth seeing in the theatre or wait for on-demand?

I'm with you. Sabres put out a tweet recapping the summer, I thought there was another trade and I was so excited. Except, it was nothing. Boo. Hiss. Botterill still has plenty to do...let's go!

The RAPM confirms the eye test on those two. I think they'd be perfectly fine on a playoff team. With a second winger who can score, this would be a "complete" fourth line.

When you have a good PK unit, though, it's best to try and keep it together. Especially this coming season where I envision the creative aspects of RK's approach/system taking precedence over discipline.

I think the Nylander trade ought to give you some hope. Someone in that thread mentioned that there are two different contexts for trades: the fans' context and the GMs' context. The Nylander trade seems to, at least in a vacuum, illustrate that.

Is he/she a dental floss tycoon?

Totally alright with this. As @WildCard said, Angry Larry is a good 4C and has earned a bump in pay. I have no problem with him on our fourth (4th) line.

Sorry to hear that. My FiL went through that several years ago now and all is well, so hopefully the same will be true for you. It's one area of the big C they seem to have a good grasp of.

I wouldn't ever lump polling into the same category as NHL stats collection.

A scourge on society? You could have stopped there, having said all you need to have said. There is no irony. I just explained why to the layman, no less someone who thinks data collection is a "scourge on society", a peek into the inner world can lead to erroneous conclusions. If you were to poke around the inner world of surgeons, for example, you might find fault with robot-assisted surgeries or non-invasive techniques. And then you would prefer for heart-bypasses the patient is sliced open from foot to sternum. On the third point, without collecting the first set of data and analyzing it, they have no idea what additional data, or changes to the collection process, they need to make. That's how it works. It's science.

Your thinking is all wrong, sorry, IMHO. Just because they talk about flawed or missing data, it doesn't mean the entire data set is inaccurate or wholly flawed, or that the results are more novel than useful. These are people who labor over minutiae talking about the activity they obsess over. What would be be perfectly acceptable results outside of this group are garbage on the inside. @Randall Flagg isn't doing you a favour by providing the narrative above, unfortunately, especially if this is your response. Naïveté of the subject will prevent you from appreciating just how detailed and useful this data is. What's more, this type of data is collected everywhere now against many, many things (no doubt you've heard of "Big Data" and "The Internet of Things"). This type of data/processing is the source of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It doesn't assimilate you into the Borg, but it does allow for smarter decisions made quicker. It also opens the door for a discussion of the merits of fancy stats here in this thread. We've hashed out fancy stats on Sabrespace countless fricken times. If anyone is going to criticize fancy stats because the observations were made by people in real time, well, I have news for that person/anyone: all of our science started that way and most of it continues to be done that way. The flaws inherent in hockey fancy stats are no different than the flaws in science, and in life, for that matter. To poo-poo them because of the flaws is like a child crying over having to grow up and be an adult. IMHO. ? ? ?️‍♀️ ?

That's true for some of our GMs and past coaches, too.

With all due respect to @Ho-Chi-Sock, that meme goes waaaayyyy back.

FIRE BOTTERILL!!

If he were a 4C.

You're in luck. I have obtained video of the people who collect stats doing the work...

You forgot to mention the Gaussian “white-noise”. I'm disappointed.

I'm sure Phil would have loved the upgraded D corp. His "system" relied on the transitions and D contributions. On the goalies, I think the answer to this is going to be in a shot chart that I can't spare the time to look up. If the improved D can allow the forwards time to come in and defend properly (which is something RK needs to address), we might very well think we gots some new goaltenders.

Pulled from another thread, background info on the RAPM charts. This describes the RAPM charts in detail: https://hockey-graphs.com/2019/01/14/reviving-regularized-adjusted-plus-minus-for-hockey/ One concern, and argument against the RAPM charts, is the effect of line-mates. This effect is built into the equations. A summary of what we're NOT looking at, in general, with these charts: And, addressing another concern, TOI:

Since this wasn't answered, yet, I will answer it. So, the 68 minute RAPM is skewed, possibly making Mitts look better. And since I'm here, let's also note this about the RAPM charts we all know and love:

You did read this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.0317.pdf Right? And this: https://hockey-graphs.com/2019/01/14/reviving-regularized-adjusted-plus-minus-for-hockey/ too? Because those more aptly apply to the metrics we're discussing. You're using paper #1 to make your argument.

Are you saying Casey spent 92% of his time with Okposo and TT 92% of his time with Sobotka? Since the league is littered with pairs, are you arguing the fancy stats aren't built to account for the effect one might have on the other within a normal context?

Explain the significance of the difference between 68 minutes TOI versus 884 minutes TOI. I'll hang up and listen.

This logic is confusing. Whatever the Sabres "do" is all geared toward winning. The goal is to win a Stanley Cup. Every decision is made with this as the ultimate goal. Therefore every analysis of whatever the team does is in context of achieving the ultimate goal (winning a Cup), no matter how far off that might be.