TheAud

Guilty as charged

When you've got stuff like Sergei Plotnikov going from Arizona to Pittsburgh for Matthias Plachta AND a conditional 7th round pick in 2017 it really makes me wonder: what are the conditions? We're really rolling in the deep here.

So Kasdorf stopped 29 of 32 in helping RPI pull-out a tie at Cornell. He's got good size, very poised in net. Seems like ice water in his veins even when things got physical or went against him. First goal was a soft shot less than 30 seconds into the game from the blue line through all sorts of people and may have deflected more than once. He had no chance on the 2nd and the third went to a video review to see if he had been interfered with. In any event there was a ton of traffic in front of him and a hard shot from the point trickled in. None of these goals nor the obnoxious (but great college hockey) crowd at Lynah Rink seemed to bother him. He doesn't move as smoothly as say, Lehner or Johnson but he's not an NHL goalie yet. Nice glove hand and uses his pads well. Doesn't go down too quickly. The RPI coach Seth Appert came to the restaurant where some RPI alumni had gathered before the game and spoke to the group. He started out with glowing praise for Kasdorf calling him one of the 10 best goalies in the NCAA and particularly praising his maturity and leadership. Kasdorf is married with a child due in May. Appert says that although he's a Senior he has a 5th year of eligibility and it's 50/50 whether he signs with the Sabres or comes back for a grad school year of college hockey. Anyway, he's a good guy to have in the system and maybe we'll see him in Rochester next year. I don't think he'd be out of place at all. PS - RPI tied it with less than a minute left and the goalie pulled. A solid effort for an out manned squad with 5 of their top 12 forwards out with injury. PPS - college hockey is so great.

I'm going to see RPI at Cornell tomorrow night and hoping to see Kasdorf play in net for The Engineers. 2.16 GAA with 0.935 save percentage. RPI in the 10-20th range nationally this year. I'll try to report back on how he looks, assuming he's in net as the back-up (a Freshman named Cam Hackett) is having a good year too.

Commodity markets cycle like this all the time over a period of many years. Pegula was just fortunate the Bills sale came up before the latest crash. If he 'knew' it was going to happen he could have effectively shorted the market and be worth $30B instead of $3B.

Pure speculation.

If Weber is at the top of his game he's a decent bottom pairing option. He's had a few good games recently. So long as we don't get crazy and think he's more than a 6/7 guy at best I'm alright with him. I took the poll to mean 'worst defenseman.' So I still voted for Weber as I haven't seen enough of Carlo to develop an overly negative opinion yet and he can move the puck some. If the poll is 'worst defenseman at playing defense' I'd change it to Franson as he is slow as molasses and even good positioning and strength on the puck can't overcome it. However his offensive contributions have me rate him higher than Weber as an overall defenseman. Weber contributes in preventing goals but is a total liability in terms of trying to move the puck up ice and then actually score goals.

When I see or hear this I end up replaying it like 10 times in a row.

Maybe this is for a different discussion, but just found this on TSN: SCORING LEADERS, PENDING UFA FORWARDS PLAYER TEAM POS GP G A PTS Loui Eriksson Boston LW 44 15 22 37 Steven Stamkos Tampa Bay C 45 20 15 35 Mikkel Boedker Arizona RW 45 12 21 33 Kyle Okposo N.Y. Islanders RW 43 11 22 33 Jaromir Jagr Florida RW 43 15 17 32 Lee Stempniak New Jersey RW 46 10 21 31 Frans Nielsen N.Y. Islanders C 45 14 14 28 Milan Lucic Los Angeles LW 44 11 17 28 Teddy Purcell Edmonton RW 47 10 18 28 Eric Staal Carolina C 47 9 19 28 Kris Versteeg Carolina RW 46 8 20 28 Andrew Ladd Winnipeg LW 46 10 17 27 David Backes St. Louis C 49 12 14 26 Shane Doan Arizona RW 36 16 8 24 P.A. Parenteau Toronto RW 43 11 11 22 Jiri Hudler Calgary RW 36 5 17 22 Radim Vrbata Vancouver RW 44 11 10 21 I'd love to see one of the Islander players or Boedker on the 2nd line (I'm assuming no Stamkos). Sorry for the bad formatting.

Foligno on the 3rd line is a weak point. He can move up there occasionally due to injury but on a contender type team he's a 4th liner. Love his attitude and size but he has no hands and is a marginal skater. I agree with other posters need to bring in a 2nd line winger in Free Agency, bump McGinn/Fasching to 3rd line (I expect Fasching needs some time in Rochester anyway) bump Foligno to 4th line. Can they still bury contracts in the AHL? I agree they probably don't want Moulson's cap hit absorbing cap when they need to resign Sam and Jack but can he be an expensive 1st line LW for the Amerks? This is what happened to Wade Redden I believe. Having a deep pockets owner would enable this. (Not that I have written off Moulson coming back somehow but he seems just ....gone).

It's funny, I was thinking about this during the broadcast. His voice quality is pretty much back to where it was pre-surgery but he's much slower and occasionally gets players wrong in ways that I didn't see him do in year's past. Which is normal at his age. I was envisioning the radio only version and it must bear only a passing resemblance to what is actually happening as RJ just can't keep up. That said, I like him and hope he can stick around awhile longer so long as he's enjoying it. Rob Ray on the other hand is close to useless. Nice guy...terrible analyst.

Actually I think signing McGinn right now would be a Darcy like thing to do. They guy is playing the best hockey (statistically) of his life at age 27. That's rolling with O'Reilly and someone else of high skill. His career statistics would indicate he's REALLY a strong 3rd line sort of guy. Signing him to a 3-5 year deal at free agent type money is exactly what not to do when you are in 29th place. I say trade him at peak value. Sell high, don't buy high.

It's not blame...maybe that's the best use of Girgensons. They do have other, more productive guys to get more offensive zone starts like Moulson, Gionta, Ennis...oh wait a minute. To me, Byslma is like the little boy sticking his fingers in the holes in the *(large retaining wall holding back water) but there are so many holes he doesn't know how to plug them all. Hence R O'R is playing like 46 minutes a game. *Sabrespace filters don't like the name for this that is a homonym for someone's sexual preference

On a great team Zemgus is a very solid 3rd liner. On a good team he's a decent 2nd liner. On this team Byslma has no idea what to do with him. To call him a bust is laughable...yesterday was his 22nd birthday for crying out loud. He put up 30 points in 61 games on a horrible team last year so to say he's a likely 40-45 point guy (over 82 games) with strong two way play (why Byslma is using him as a shutdown forward, he is 5th in defensive zone starts among forwards) is completely accurate at this point. Note he's also shooting at 4.7% which if adjusted to his career numbers of 8.8% would work out to 3 more goals so far this year, which is a major scoring outburst for this team.

I was a bit young when the 12-6 game vs. the Soviets occurred (although it was always in my consciousness as a young Sabres fan) but this thread spurred on a search for highlights of this game, a 3-2 win for USA vs. Czechoslovakia in the Canada Cup series in a game played in the Aud. The link is a bit weird in that it shows an early US goal and then just a couple minutes of random shots on goal. I couldn't find a longer clip. I attended it with my father and a couple things stick with me to this day. The crowd was electric as the Miracle on Ice buzz from 1980 was still present in terms of USA Hockey popularity. And it was Buffalo... Housely and Barrasso were both on team USA and Barrasso was phenomenal. I remember after some save sequences late in the game the Czech players were tapping his goalie pads in recognition of how badly he was robbing them. Hasek is obviously the greatest goalie to play as a Sabre, and Ryan Miller had his moments, but I think people tend to forget how good Barrasso was in those early years in his career in Buffalo. Speaking of Hasek...I have to admit that until I searched for this video I did not realize he was the Czech goalie that day...and at age 19 no less!

Your personal dislike of the Pegula's really shades your comments . For example it's not inconsistent to wish there was more scoring in the NHL, but still be happy when the Sabres win some games that happen to be low scoring. I agree the NHL needs more scoring. Most NHL arenas have annoying PA music and announcers. Ever hear them go "Whooo!" in Boston? Awful.

A billionaire charters a flight for sponsors of his football team and that links directly to season ticket prices the following season for his hockey team? OK, whatever.

Glad to hear you're on-board with historic 20th century events! Sorry for the hyperbole. I watched almost every game of Levy's tenure with the Bills, and probably 90% of the games since. He is far and away the best coach they've had, although I wasn't around for Lou Saban (I was for Chuck Knox, he was over rated). I was actually at the 4th Super Bowl game where they lost to the Cowboys after leading by 6 at half. That Cowboys team was unstoppable in the 2nd half. It wasn't a coaching issue. Anyway, some subjective and objective data can be found in this article: http://www.footballperspective.com/records-of-great-coaches-against-great-coaches/ Short story is that ESPN ranked Levy as 17th all time NFL coach in a poll in 2013 and his career regular season record head-to-head vs. all other coaches in the Top 25 was 50-44 and in the playoffs it was 7-6. That may not sound great, being only a little over .500 win % but remember it's against the other 24 top coaches of all time (of course that's a subjective list, so let's just say 24 other great coaches) and includes his years with the Chiefs. Marv wasn't the greatest coach ever but when he was outcoached it was typically by another great coach, and they usually didn't beat him the next time.

I am curious as to who you 'hear' things from regarding Marv Levy. Yes, four consecutive Super Bowl appearance achieved in spite of Marv's bad coaching. That's revisionist history on par with Holocaust and Moon Landing deniers.

He is a rookie: Rookie Qualifications To be considered a rookie, a player must not have played in more than 25 NHL games in any preceding seasons, nor in six or more NHL games in each of any two preceding seasons. Any player at least 26 years of age (by September 15th of that season) is not considered a rookie.

However "Small market" isn't based on population alone. Buffalo is a very small market city compared with Phoenix, Tampa, Charlotte, etc but is effectively a large market team when it comes to hockey. Canadian cities the same size or even smaller than Buffalo might be large market, or at least mid-market, cities in terms of hockey given the fanaticism of the population regarding hockey. I think the fundamental question is whether hockey is better served expanding in places where it is revered or at least strongly followed as a dominant regional sport, or whether it should continue to expand to large markets where it can hope for a small but potentially proftiable niche position among football, basketball, baseball or whatever. The Atlanta/Calgary and Winnipeg/Phoenix-Atlanta/Winnipeg chain of franchise moves would seem to be case studies for the former, but who knows.

Fascinating article on this topic from Nate Silver over 1 year ago in NY Times: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/why-cant-canada-win-the-stanley-cup/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 The summary of where he thinks the NHL could profitably expand are (in priority order): 1) Toronto (2 additional teams) 2) Montreal (additional team) 3) Vancouver (additional team) 4) Quebec City In other words, Canada. Plenty of things to potentially pick at in the analysis but it certainly makes interesting points too. Las Vegas certainly looks like a bad idea. Seattle is a lot more viable than Vegas but still not a great idea unless you get some of the potential Vancouver 2nd team fans in the process (since a 2nd team in Vancouver isn't going to happen).