dudacek

Well, I did say I’d judge the trade based on what Adams did to backfill centre. To me it’s basically a crafty 60-point 2C with slick hands, and a good skilled, fast, small, forward prospect. for A puckmoving 40-point 2/3D with elite feet, and a big, fast prototypical defensive 30-point 3C Interesting hockey trade. We’ll see how well the parts match their profiles and how much the whole helps each team.

Right now he is the 13th forward.

There’s still a real possibility of this happening. My reaction to the reaction though is 🤷 No risky trade the Sabres make will get the benefit of the doubt because Buffalo. We’ve earned that. The only way to overcome it is to win.

And not piss off @Thorny while he’s having a good day, but having the bottom 6 we now have, means we can afford squeezing a kid into the lineup if he earns it (like real NHL teams do), because there will be veteran support for him.

Just seems like business. Malenstyn has been in the org less than a week, has had very little time to negotiate and has to protect his bargaining position. Luukkonen has one of the best arb cases out there. Just seems like it’s about getting a fair contract.

I think when they traded for Byram ^^^ was inevitable. They can trade him to a team that wants to extend him now, trade him as a rental at the deadline, or ride him into the playoffs. But there’s no way they can afford to keep him by paying term.

Been meaning to do the math on it, but have yet to get around to it. My thing is less about average age, and more about number of players in their prime years. Last years team started the year with Tuch, Clifton, Greenway, Olofsson and Girgensons between 25 and 30. Aube-Kubel, Lafferty and Malenstyn also fit. Thompson turned 26 last year. McLeod turns 25 in September. Jokiharju just turned 25 and Dahlin 24, but each has played a ton of NHL games. And I think Adams is on the mark when he says many of the younger players have been around long enough that “youth” needs to stop being an excuse.

As well they should.

So when Adams said his plan was to overhaul the bottom 6, he wasn’t fooling around. Our projected bottom 6 right now literally has 5 new faces, with Greenway the only holdover. Every one of the new guys is fast - extremely fast even. Every one save Zucker is big and strong. Every one takes care of his own zone. Every one save McLeod loves to hit. The past week has been identity-changing.

Value feels about right. Flexibility for both sides

He's heading into his 5th year and will be an RFA next summer.

There's that thing about knowing your players better than anyone else. There's also that thing about having too many of the same types of players. And that thing about the necessity of getting better now. I liked Savoie, but I think he was more likely to become a Tyler Ennis than a star. Not sure if McLeod can be more than what he is right now. That's consecutive trades made where Adams "lost value" to "fix his roster" It's what a lot of people wanted. As usual, time will tell.

Unless they are trying to flip him along with more futures for a top 6 wing. That would pretty much complete what's needed.

Big, fast and pretty much the definition of a 3C. Won over 50% of his faceoffs as a 3rd-year player, which makes him the go-to for the Sabres. And just 24, so he fills that 3C window, now and moving forward. Matt Savoie, we barely knew ya.

If you think it costs nothing to clean the room and feed the players, I’m not sure what to tell you. Never mind the opportunity cost of giving away a room for free (if indeed that’s what happens) as opposed to actually making money renting that room to a paying customer. Then there is flying them in, getting them to and from the airport, processing them, coaching them and teaching them. There likely are economies of scale, but there is almost certainly an additional cost. As for the “fantasy” of Terry being cheap, the Sabres have been among the lowest-spending teams in the league for 3 consecutive seasons - closer to the floor than the cap and are showing no signs of changing that trend. They just pocketed $7M cutting Jeff Skinner and have not spend a cent of the resulting cap space on replacement players. They are currently $19M under the cap. What does an owner have to do to be considered “cheap?”

D+3, so pretty much. Costantini was a D+4 and I think van Barnekow was there (D+3 as well)) There was something really weird going on with development camp invitations this year and Adams slid past the question. My first conspiracy theory is that the upper tier prospects are all being dangled right now and what they'd get out of camp was not worth the risk. My 2nd is that with the late arrival of Leone and the compressed draft/UFA situation, a scaled-down camp was easier to execute. And my final one is that Terry saved a considerable amount of cash by bringing in half the prospects who could have been there.

This is a much different argument than whether or not Zucker's contract and Monahan's are similar.

Leino, Ehrhoff, Okposo, Skinner — how did those long-term UFA contracts work out for you? Term matters. A lot. Especially when you are signing a guy who is about to turn 30 and has had exactly one healthy season in his last 5.

This is incredibly misleading. The Sabres committed $5M to Zucker. The Jackets committed $27.5M — more than 5 time that total — to Monahan The difference is enormous

I think a lot of people around here don't believe 47/47/94 was real and Tage should be more properly regarded as a Miro Satan-level player.

And I just want to say that what players do in their 3rd or 4th season is more typically called "breakout year" because it might be an outlier, and it might be a sign of what's to come. Perreault improved 3 straight years, then got hurt then came back with a "career" year in his fifth season. And then he smashed that career season with another one the very next year. Danny Briere had a "career" year, making a huge jump to 60 points in his 4th season. He stayed around that mark for 3 more years, and then erupted with his real career year with 95 Pominville broke out with 80 in his 3rd season and it was his real "career" year. The highest he ever got after that was 73. Many of the Sabres are too young to know for certain whether they've had their career year.

Yes and no. Yes, I am giving 50 per cent of the weight to last year and 50 per cent of the weight to this year. What would you do instead and why? And no, every single player did not have a career year last year. Tuch, Thompson and Cozens did. As GA points out, Zucker had a bit of an outlier as well. Peterka had a career year this year, and Dahlin and Greenway less-dramatic ones. Quinn got hurt and the others are rookies or basically the same year-to-year. Again, I am not saying "this is what I think these players will get" I'm simply presenting numbers, mostly based on the past two seasons.

This is all reasonable, but it's not really what I'm going for here. There is no projected explosion from Benson or Thompson, or huge regression from Peterka and Dahlin in my post: there's none of the bold going on with this one: it's strictly a numbers thing based on what the players have done in the recent past.

I figured people might point to Tage and say "too much weight to one flukey season". That was kinda my perception before I ran the numbers. But if you pull it back another year, he scored exactly 38 goals that year — that's his average three seasons running. That's a pretty significant sample size for NHL hockey. No idea on the fudge factor. I strictly pulled last year's Sabres team, no idea what is typical, but it didn't seem out of whack. And to be clear, the flip side is also true for injuries. Had Quinn been healthy last year the fudge number would likely be lower, but the Quinn number would probably be correspondingly higher. How do you come up with 253?

I was using "expected" here more as a median. Not sure what would be a better word. Over/under? What is a reasonable figure for this group that's neither optimistic, nor pessimistic based on their track records, and how should we determine it? Obviously, there are way too many variables to expect anything.