dudacek

What would people think of UFA Adam Henrique on a short-term deal? 52 points, versatile, good on faceoffs... https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/h/henriad01.html

Dudley signed the day after the final? In other words, he was already gone while playing for the Cup?

Agreed. Gritty is a word that seems to have different meaning for different people. He's not going to scare anybody, but he competes hard on both sides of the puck, gets his hands dirty and plays the game the right way.

I wouldn't call him a gritty player, but I would call him a brave player.

So I am kinda like your mirror universe doppelganger?

Dammit man, I was just trying to be funny. Nobody gets me. I really have become Bizzaro @PASabreFan 😜

And I have X's eyes and Neo's hair.

I’m also curious what will happen with Jokiharju. I’m not one of those “Joki is garbage” types. He’s a legit NHL 4/5, 25, mobile and right-handed, a good value at his $2.6M qualifier. But I’m wondering if the Sabres would rather have someone cheaper and more abrasive given their other 5 under contract and there is trade value there. I could see him moved. If he’s not moved, there is probably a good chance he goes to arbitration, takes his reward and moves on at the deadline as a rental, or next summer as a UFA.

Am I the only one who thinks it unlikely that Jacob Bryson receives his qualifying offer? I think he rehabilitated his game quite nicely last year and is a serviceable 7, but his QO of $1.9 is far too much for a spare defenceman, especially with what the Sabres are paying their top 5 (or 6 if Henri comes back). I think the Sabres and Bryson like each other, but I think the only way he’s back is if he agrees to a pay cut. Which he might, because no team is going to give him $1.9M.

Jakob Konecny and Albert Lyckasen - Euro 7th rounders from 2020 - are 2 others whose rights are expiring. Neither has done much in Europe and Id be very surprised if either is signed.

I believe the deadline is June 1 for signing or losing the rights to 2022 4th-rounder Mats Lindgren. Kid’s a great skater but doesnt have size, or create or defend that well and doesn’t seem to have progressed much from the day he was drafted. Sabres already will have Komarov, Novikov and possibly Johnson in Rochester next year. They signed all the other guys they had to (non-Euro and NCAA) months ago. They’ve hyped the kid on social media in the past, but the clock is tIcking. Im kinda thinking they may let him go back in.

I tend to agree. Not only were there legitimate reasons for the stall, but the fanbase was still in the honeymoon phase, not beaten down by a decade of constant disappointment and losing. Oh for the misery of the late 70s again, when we wanted the GM fired because he wasn’t winning the cup. Expectations.

In the 4th year of the Punch Imlach build - with a roster including Martin, Perreault, Robert, Schoenfeld, Luce, Ramsay, Dudley, Korab and Robitaille - the Sabres finished with just 76 points, after a feel-good 88 points (up from just 51) the year before. I wonder what Sabrespace was saying.

No person who ever sat beside a pool should ever wear the "C" for an NHL franchise. Brad Marchand spends his vacations wrestling bears in Siberian coal mines.

Tampa fans are saying a 3rd or a 4th — to them he's basically a cap dump. Given how easily I'd pay that, I'd say it's got to be more. GMs will remember what he was in Nashville. But given his play the past 2 years on a good team, maybe not much more? Tampa paid pretty much an entire draft (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and Cal Foote) to acquire him.

Friedman is saying Tanner Jeannot is a player to watch after a brutal season in Tampa. No idea what happened to this guy, but at $2.6M for one year, I’m definitely kicking those tires.

Benson just had the 19th-best 18-year-old season since the 2006 lockout. It looks even better when you look at the top 30. Sillinger is an outlier. Most of these guys are studs. https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/nhl/stats/all-time-season?age=u19&from=2005-2006&to=2023-2024

First bold was a reference to you saying they were a bottom 1/3rd defence in the league, which from your past posting I took to be a reference to expected goals against. That's a useful stat, but it is also a team stat that measures chance prevention, not a measure of how effective your defencemen are at their all-around games. It's kinda like saying they are a top half defence in the league because of their team Corsi numbers Also, the numbers for this past season reflect 18 games of Byram and 41 of Mule, two players expected to play top 4 minutes in the coming season, so not exactly apples to apples. Second bold is absolutely a great point, but the flip side is also true. Paying your top 2 centres just $7M each long-term and 5 of your top 6 forwards only a combined $20M right now allows you to spend more on your D. And the hope is clearly that Cozens/Thompson/Power/Dahlin provide a useful artificial cap moving forward when the cap rises and contracts are needed for Byram, Peterka, Tuch and Quinn — similar to what the Bruins did with Bergeron and their other leaders all those years. People talk about what kind of influence Ventura has or doesn't have on coaching or pro scouting decisions. I wonder how much influence his department has had on contracts and roster makeup. The Sabres braintrust has clearly decided their key players are Dahlin and Power and their key position is the blueline and invested accordingly.

Krebs is an interesting one for me: Is he a Casey Mittelstadt-esque case of patience being needed? Is he a Tyson Jost type — given plenty of rope due to his draft slot, but basically an NHL tweener? I'm kinda inclined to think he's neither. I think his most likely fate is as a Teddy Blueger-esque journeyman role player. He's right at the 200-game mark that I tend to use as a cut-off for when the learning period wraps up for young NHLers. And I think that over those 200 games he's really grown as a defensive player. But his offensive game seems to actually have regressed. He will never be a finisher, but he used to show far more creativity than he did this past year. He's going to get a cheap qualifying offer and not much more, so there's no sense turning the page yet. He is competitive, diligent, relatively fast and coachable; I'm fine with him as a 4th-line placeholder. But in order to be an actual asset, he needs to forge some kind of bottom-six identity trait: PK, faceoffs, 30-point scorer, fighter, forechecker, pest, shutdown guy, hitter... he desperately wants to have a role on this team, but seems to have no idea what that is. I'm really hoping Ruff can help him find it.

Yep, pretty risky on Adams part to bet so much on unproven potential: 5 regulars of your top 6 under 25, 3 of them with less than 170 NHL games played? Your “bottom 3rd” is a cherry-picked stat not necessarily reflective of the players in question, but Dahlin Power Mule Clifton Byram (and Jokiharju?) certainly have a lot to prove next year. There’s a lot riding on as-yet-unrealized potential.

Edmonton has $23M invested in their top 3C (27 if you use Henrique instead of McLeod) Florida $16 (Lundell on ELC), Dallas $22 and the Rangers $19M. You absolutely can invest $21M in your top 3 centres if that’s how you want to build your team. Adams chose not to. So much this. Regardless of what any of us think of Cozens, it’s pretty clear that Adams sees him as a core player.

What Granato did was mostly irrelevant in terms of what Ruff might do, but I think we get too locked into the idea of 1st, 2nd and 3rd pairings as rigid entities when they are actually very fluid from game to game and within games. For example, I picked a random February game from March versus Dallas. Johnson and Johnson were the 3rd pair. Over the course of the game, they played 10 (very short) shifts and about 6 minutes together. Dahlin and Jokiharju were the 1st pair, Power and Clifton the 2nd. Power played 7 more minutes than Clifton, Dahlin 8 more than Joki. Ras played 21 shifts with Henri, 5 1/2 with Cliffy and 4 with Owen. The shift chart makes a very clear that Granato’s plan for that game (a very tight 2-1 loss) was to have either Power or Dahlin on the ice as much as possible. One would come off and the other jump on and that continued until late in a close game where he started throwing them out together to tie things up. Being on “the 2nd pair” had no drag whatsoever on Power’s ice time; he got considerably more minuteS than 1st-pair Jokiharju. The “3rd pair” didn’t see the ice much more than the “non-pair” of Clifton and Dahlin. My point is pairings are hardly locked at the hip, they switch from game to game and throughout games based on situations, opponents, injuries and trends. Deployment is what’s important. “So-and-so shouldn’t be on the 2nd pair” looking at the pre-game line chart doesn’t really mean what people think it does.

I would not be holding my breath on adding another defenceman of consequence. When a GM invests around $27M in the space of a little over a year on long-term deals for 4 defencemen, then trades his leading scorer for another one 5 months later, he’s pretty well gone all-in on his top 5. If anything, Jokiharju’s contract may see him moved and replaced with a cheaper option and Bryson probably won’t be qualified. (Maybe he returns on a cheaper deal) Fortunately Samuelsson, Byram and Power are probably capable of more than this board expects from them because we’ll be having to cross our fingers they deliver. I’m really curious how Ruff will implement his rotation. 2 years ago, with 5 good veteran D in Jersey he played each of the 5 (Hamilton, Graves, Severson, Marino, and Seigenthaler) roughly equally - between 19:57 and 21:46 a game. Hamilton got most of the PP time with very little PK, the others roughly the opposite, with his #6 (Brendan Smith) lagging well behind. Last year, with Hamilton hurt and Graves and Severson gone, it was harder to track but was kinda similar: Luke Hughes played the Hamilton role and minutes, with Nemec and Bahl roughly replacing the other 2. Bahl got about 2 minutes a game less, but that seems largely a function of him being the #6 who frequently had to slide up Lindy’s fave 5 due to missing bodies. Smith and Colin Miller played roughly 15 sharing bottom 6 duties.

Further to the above, Not saying Adams made the right call, just disagreeing with the idea it wasn’t proactive. Or lacking in balls. it was entirely proactive and there was nothing safe about it. Related, I don’t recall this kind of angst about type or fit when we were chasing Chychrun a year ago. He’s also an offence-first lefty of slightly more size and a more difficult contract situation. Did people have a misperception Jake is a bruiser like his dad?

If only Tim Murray had listened to Jerry Forton. McAvoy was Forton’s guy that year but Murray wanted a guy to ride shotgun for Eichel