nfreeman

Not the win total. The fact that they put up quality wins -- including road wins -- after a generation of failing to do so -- IMHO reflects well on McD.

In that 17-year drought, there was 1 good win vs the Pats and 1 vs the Packers, both at home. Last year, they beat Denver at home, Atlanta (SB team the previous year) on the road, Miami (playoff team the previous year) twice, the Raiders (playoff team the previous year) at home and KC (playoffs last year and the previous year) on the road. The Atlanta and KC road wins alone were better than the total number of good wins during the drought.

In addition to making the playoffs, they also had more quality wins last year than during the prior 17 years combined.

Respectfully, I don't think Roysie EVER displayed an iota of the heart that is a big part of Sharp's game. What Roysie was good at was putting up numbers in a low-pressure, favorable-matchup role -- i.e. as the center of the 3rd line when Briere's and Drury's lines drew the opponent's top defenders. If that's all Reino can do -- it's better than nothing, but it's not a core role either.

I need to see Reino start off next season strong, and clearly be part of the solution and not part of the problem, before I think of him as a core piece of this team's future. If he has another season like he did this year -- i.e. terrible when it counted and then a bunch of garbage-time points to juice his stats for the year -- then he looks a lot more like Derek Roy than Patrick Sharp.

I think he's going to be really good.

Ooooooooooohhhhhhhh.

Well, everyone will have his or her own views on this. I generally agree that this incident shouldn't make her unemployable for life. However, the job we're hiring for requires that the person interact with clients and other outsiders in a professional manner and generally reflect well on us to the outside world. Since this incident was pretty recent, this young woman obviously can't be trusted to do so at this point in her life.

OK -- as I posted in the playoffs thread, I'm ready to commit to Braden Holtby as my #1 offseason target for the Sabres, with Grubauer as my fallback. It looks like the Caps have enough cap space to keep both, but they also have a good goalie prospect in their system -- Ilya Samsonov, their #1 pick in 2015 -- and the plan reportedly is for them to bring Samsonov over from the KHL for next season. So it's fairly likely that they trade either Holtby (if they want to free up more cap space) or Grubauer. Holtby is under contract for 2 more years at a $6.1MM cap hit. His numbers declined this year -- he was 7th in the NHL in wins, but had fairly pedestrian GAA and SV%. But over the last 3 years, he's #1 in wins, #7 in GAA and #13 in SV%. And the 2 years left on his contract means that it's not an Okposo-like enormous commitment that goes on forever. Grubauer played 35 games this year and had better GAA and SV% than Holtby. Grubauer is cheaper and is trending up, while Holtby is expensive and trending down (although he's had a great playoffs). If Holtby is put on the market, a number of teams will be interested. Could the Sabres get him for Nylander and their #2 pick this year? Who says no?

I was living in DC at the time and attended 2 of the Caps-Sabres conf. finals games in 1998. (The Caps were then swept in the finals that year by Detroyit.) As for Hasek's departure -- that was after the 2nd-round loss to Pittsburgh in 2001 -- and that was Dom's last game as a Sabre. Separately: I would freaking love for the Sabres to trade for Holtby this summer. It is indeed outstanding.

So at work we are hiring a junior person for a post-college, 2- to 3-year role. Someone screens all of the resumes and googles the ones who look promising to find out whether there is any damaging info out there on them. One young woman who made it through the first screen with very good college grades didn't make it to the interview stage because she was arrested last year for drunkenly urinating on the sidewalk in front of a police station, and then punching a cop when he tried to get her to move along. She's now working for NY state, btw.

No -- because it's in MH's interest to cultivate good relationships with the teams and their owners so he can get interviews, inside info, hear their side of the story, etc. This would help him present himself as a prominent and respected voice, instead of a low-rent loser who throws tantrums at press conferences, has widely respected NHL writers publiclyl disavowing him and continually gets into public spats online.

I thought he was talking about Kim's comment.

Does MH think it's a savvy career move, as a local sportswriter, to call the owner of the 2 major pro sports teams in his town "pathetic?"

Sauve should be the #1 goalie. And JF Sauve could be a depth player/PP specialist.

Good stuff here boys. I agree with much of what Robvy said. As I've posted previously, I think ROR had a poor start to the season and, although his scoring numbers weren't horrible, was pretty much invisible until after the season was lost. Like Reino, he put up good numbers in garbage time, such that the season doesn't look like a debacle on the stat sheet. But he didn't have a good season IMHO. And part of his $7.5MM per year is supposed to be for leadership, and if he's led them anywhere, it's into a ditch. BUT he's still a very good player, and I would only unload him if either (i) he's a major problem in the locker room, which we can't know, or (ii) someone knocks their socks off with a crazy offer.

Winnipeg looks like a juggernaut.

Interesting. I kinda think that if DC trades Grubauer, it will be at the draft, and if so they will get a 2018 2nd or better for him — but you could certainly be right. And I agree that it’s likely that they want Lehner gone as part of the push to improve team attitude.

Outstanding.

I would do that in a second, which makes me think it’ll cost more.

Again: what if, instead of Kim, TP had appointed as president his friend’s son, Joe, same age as Kim, and TP had met Joe at the same time he met Kim, and Joe similarly never had a real job before meeting TP, and Joe had the same amount of pro sports senior management experience as Kim has now? Would people not raise similar questions? They would, and it wouldn’t be due to prejudice.

And for dudacek's consolation let it be noted for the record that Martin Jones just gave up a very Lehner-esque goal to give Vegas baby Vegas a 3-0 lead.

That slapper by Stamkos to tie it with 7 min to go though.

Also quite fair, and quite possible. (And Friedman's rank relative to MH's is like the jungle rank of the lion vs that of the vulture.) I think it still goes back to how much time they've spent together and thus how well they know each other. Friedman said "I've known Mike a long time." If they've spent a bunch of late nights boozing together after games, Friedman's probably got enough information about MH to formulate a reasonably well-informed opinion. If they've just met briefly a couple of times and follow each other on twitter, then he probably doesn't have enough info. Of course, we don't know -- and since we don't, I think the default should NOT be to assume that Friedman is a simpleton who would think "he's always been nice to me, so he's not a sexist."

I agree with WC that the bolded is fair. I do not doubt that prejudice, and resulting disadvantage and unfair treatment, exist. I just think it's a serious accusation, involving a significant character flaw, and one that shouldn't be thrown around without really digging into the facts and allowing the person in question to explain his/her actions. I also think that this type of sober, pre-accusation analysis doesn't occur very often, and that the failure to do so has had a cumulative, highly destructive impact on our society.