LGR4GM

He's gotta go. Just totally in over his head at this point.

No they aren't. This isn't accurate, @Brawndo has the correct real amount

Tone deaf is the correct term for sure.

This isn't true. Stop saying it. This roster has plenty of size.

No. The Sabres are bad. They need changes. No we wouldn't. We'd have won 2-3 more games. We're bad offensively.

Wow, that's damning at a minimum and an outright call to pitchforks and torches at maximum. Granato has to go and Adams should go to. Make Karmanos gm. I think your take is delusional to be honest. No one on this team except 22yr old Peterka improved. No one. Yet here you are saying we'll be great anyways. By 23 most players are who they are. For example, this team should move on from Krebs. Without a major coaching overhaul and probably 1 new defender and 3-4 new forwards, next year Buffalo will finish in the 80pt region yet again. Quinn is only gonna be worth maybe 2 games more wins in a full season. There's just no major jump coming.

Yes.

That would be the range I expect.

Mitchell, as far as I know, doesn't have any character flaws. He transferred to Texas so he could be closer to his infant daughter.

His injury really screws the projection. He's been out almost all year and when he did play, looked meh. That said he was a 17yr old in the top Czech league so why would he look great? I think if I'm Buffalo, I'd consider trading up either in round 2 or into round 1. I don't think he'll slide much into round 2 but maybe. His 16yr old year in Czech Jr was really solid and I really liked him. Like his brother he's offensively gifted while having a physical element. With a June bday and a full year of development lost, there could be a top 10 talent there. Still, it's risky. He's a 6'2" rhd who can skate with good offensive instincts. He's 100% worth our second round pick.

I have a friend who's big into college football, in that he loves watching and dissecting it. He does a full 3 round mock every year. Last year he got 27 of 32 first round picks and 16 of the 27 went to the team he thought, so is pretty good in the first especially. He spends a lot of time reviewing guys but SEC guys and Georgia guys in particular I feel real good about his opinions on. Considering he lives under 5 miles away from Sanford stadium and all. Yes, he talked about it at the combine. Running routes at 70% so he can stay out the full drive. Certainly a red flag and one I'd drive deep into. Note that thinking the Bills will take him isn't an endorsement of them taking him.

Had a long draft talk with my NFL draft guy. He currently projects us to take Adonai Mitchell at 28 if we stay put. I agree with him that McConkey shares similar attributes to Shakir and the Bills would want to draft someone with a different profile to give themselves more versatility.

You are viewing it at a micro level, that of the Sabres. Terry Pegula is not losing money here, nor will he. Also the reason the Sabres are not in the black is a direct result of the owner not selling a product ppl want to buy.

like you I dont want him back in any role, that makes the temptation to make him head coach too strong for Terry. Would he qualify, yes.

Not to mention if he is running a -10mil (I made that number up to make math easier, it is problem more like -2mil) he gets to write that off on his taxes every year. As you say, he can do so many things to offset his losses because they are such a small amount.

I would need him to bring in veteran coaches with Cup experience either coaching or playing and 5+ years of NHL level coaching experience. I would prefer a veteran NHL coach as well. If that means that Appert ends up as the GMs assistant coach pick fine.

2 things. First, your main point is not correct IMO. What they do in the defensive zone, how they exit the zone, and their ability to play offense are all interconnected and the stats show that. I don't have access to it but the Sabres zone exit data from last year to this year is like the difference between Earth and Saturn. They worked very hard to shut down chances but they did not do a good job of getting up and creating chances at all. The sacrificed offense for defense and they are 100% connected in hockey, especially modern hockey which is predicated on breakouts and off puck movement. We saw them many times take away passing lanes and then pressure the opposition into giving the puck away or taking the puck away and then... nothing. Maybe a quick rush with a shot from the outside and that was it. There were many times this year as well where the defense did not pinch and keep pucks in but were immediately flying the offensive zone. I watched it live on several occasions where Owen Power in particular would be within a Benson stick length of the puck and he would not challenge it but immediately start his back skating to prepare to defend the rush. Not a knock on Owen here, I think and basically have confirmation that it was what Wilford and Granato wanted. Second, this isn't about Dylan Cozens and he wasn't bad enough to have such an impact he alone skews the results. More than welcome to look it up but the point is the overall team and one player is not tanking the teams overall data that hard. Cozens cf% drops 0.81, is sf% goes up 0.99, and his xG% drops 3.37%. So yes he is worse but the real issue is in the offensive zone not the defensive zone. his xGA drops 1.31 but his xGF drop 12.59. It wasn't the defense, it was that the offense was so bad it makes the defense bad.

Pegula is not losing money. Let's say for arguments sake that the Sabres are a net -10million every year in real dollars because Terrry drove the team into the ground and ppl don't want to pay him money to be bored for 2.5 hours. Terry bought the team for about 200million and can sell them tomorrow for 1billion without any fuss. That means that it would take 80 years for Terry Pegula to actually be negative on this investment. It is a straight up lie he peddles that he is losing money on the team, he isn't. The asset he acquired has almost doubled 3 times in 13 years which is easily a top 1% in terms of ROI. So sure, Terry might lose a few million because again, he ran his team into the ground and ppl won't pay to watch his trash, but overall the guy is up hundreds of millions of dollars. Never believe Pegula when he claims he "lost money", he hasn't and he won't. Sports teams are a very rare commodity.

Oddly passive aggressive. I however went and looked to see how the defense improved. It did, the problem is that is cost us the offense and the net defensive gain was canceled out by the net offensive less.

First, anyone who has said that recently, I am not trying to throw you under the bus. I was generally curious if this was true and below will be what I find. Second, I will not be using goals against or goals against average for this. Goals in the NHL are rare events and shots are a better and more stable indicator IMO of how things are going in the defensive zone. I will use expected goals or xG which makes me a slight hypocrite but xG is more stable than goals (hint Dylan Cozens is going to score more next year). With that said, I used Natural Stat Trick for this. 2022 refers to the 22/23 season and 2023 refers to this season 23/24. Let's start with a breakdown of different types on ice situations: I cut out special teams but they are reflected in "all situations" where we can see they clearly impact things. I highlighted the categories we were better in by year. Interestingly to start, our shots for % was higher than our corsi for% this season. While the difference between the 2 is what I would call minimal, it was interesting. Basically we picked up about 2% for our SF% which is nice, means we shoot more relative to shots against and in 23 we reduced shots on net overall. Let's talk about expected goals (xG). Our xGA in 22 was 187.83 compared to just 172.81 currently. Now, we are a game short with the data but that does show some improvement in our defensive game. However the issue is that the net gain of 15.02 in xGA was counter balanced by 20.55 difference in xGF so we actually lost -5.53xg over the course of the season. This explains why our xGF% is better in 22 by .9 compared to 23. Goals are rare though, so let's look at shots. With 1 game not in the data we have to remember that there are about 30 shots missing from 2023. Not all of them would be high danger shots and that is the focus here. I would guess we are missing somewhere between 5-10 high danger shots for and against for this last game. It doesn't make up the difference we see. Last year we had 823 HDSA in all situations compared to 676 this year or a difference of 147, so we did cut down the total number of high danger shots by about 17%. Again, we can certainly label this improvement on defense. Even if we give 10 hd shots to our last opponent we greatly cut this down. The issue again comes when we look at the inverse. in All situations last year we had 725 HDSF but this year we are down 163 shots at only 562 or 22.5% lower. So the math again fails in terms of the overall, we got better defensively but the dip in offense was so bad that is put us in a net negative situation. Finally let's look at the HDSH%. We got absolutely and brutally murdered in 5v5 (-3.86%), All Sit (-3.69%), and ES (-4.12%) HDSH% compared to last year. Simply put, we shot on average 3.89% lower in high danger situations. So we took far less HD shots and then we shot almost 4% lower on the ones we took. Welcome to scoring regression. Conclusion: Did the defense get better? Yes, I think we can say that the defense was able to limit shots and compared to last year we saw about a 17.9% drop in HD shots for all situations, a 21.1% drop in even strength, and a 22.5% drop at 5v5. This coupled with better overall goaltending (it actually only ends up about 1% higher in terms of sv% over the season shockingly) is the reason we see such a good drop in our goals against (241 this year compared to 297 last year). We have a major problem though. Don Granato has openly said he changed the system, as far back as December I recall him talking about it. The results show a better defense but the offense cratered. All situations saw a 22.5% drop in HDSF, 20.7% drop at even, and a 21.3% drop at even. Put together we have the following All Sit: 17.9-22.5 = -4.6% ES: 21.1-20.7 = 0.4% 5v5: 22.5-21.3 = 1.2% Clearly special teams killed us as the all situations goes negative but the improved defense came at such a sacrifice to the offense that the gains were negligible and well within the variance if I cared to calculate one (I don't, I am lazy). Granato failed and while shutting down other teams on offense and getting solid goaltending helped to make up for some of it, the Sabres offense cratered so hard and so badly that it negates any of the defensive gains. I used HD shots because they are correlated to scoring more strongly than most others. For those of you yelling at your tv to get to the slot or stand in front, that is the hd areas where we need more from. The expected goals for % (xGF%) are the final nail in this coffin for me. All of them are better in 2022 compared to this year meaning, that while yes the defense itself got better, because the offense got so bad it doesn't actually matter. We got worse. I would ask that someone who has a hockeyviz account (mine lapsed) to pull the shot heat maps for the Sabres from the last 2 years so help show some of this. *sorry this is long

In the basement below the 2nd floor bathroom, right next to the chamber of secrets.

Again, can anyone here show anything that says the defense improved? GA didn't prove the defense improved, it proves the goaltending did.

Why do ppl keep saying this? The defense wasn't that much better. The goaltending was but the defense was still meh. Granato changed his system to be more defensive. It craters the offense while providing negligible returns on defense. In fact because it cratered the offense so substantially, the defense actually got worse. Every players xgf% went down. So goaltending saved us. Granato is a fraud.