LTS

If I recall correctly, Ott didn't make contact with the player... or do I not recall correctly? Perhaps I should have been more direct with the spitting... and said "spitting ON someone"

It's funny regarding the call from the NHL, but honestly not sure how he's allowed to do that and not get suspended. How is it any different than spitting at someone?

Yea... I'm still up. This is still awesome.

Regardless of what happens... at least the Sabres have started out the 2018-2019 season with a win. Awesome news.

If you have to move a salary then ROR is an attractive piece to another team such that they may take on Bogosian's salary. I don't want ROR traded. As for the Tavares comment, I said, if he's available. As for assuming he doesn't want to come to a last place team... I can't answer that, you can't answer that. The point is, to all of what i said, is that if that were to happen I would think that the Sabres would then look to move ROR. I think Scandella was brought in here to do exactly what he did. It makes him a core piece of how this team will be built. He was targeted by this GM. The same with Mittlestadt. Reinhart I could see but truthfully they aren't moving Reinhart and getting back anything better for him.

It blows up because when someone suggests that telling someone to get lost might not be a great course of action people begin to rise up in opposition. Call it the Zach de la Rocha maxim.... "F you I won't do what you tell me." No one said you can't talk about Matthews sucking in the playoffs. Really.

I won't try to quote everyone... The statement was "tearing the team down to the studs". There are 20 players on the bench. How many of them are the "studs" on ANY team? The players who aren't the studs are the drywall it would seem. There's more drywall than studs in any build. I don't think it's as extreme as Friedman makes it out to be. The players who are the "studs": Eichel, Reinhart, ROR, Mittlestadt, Okposo, Ristolainen, Scandella, McCabe" Eight players of 20... the remaining 12 are open to be drywall. You remove any more of those studs and the house falls down. Now, it might require moving ROR and Bogosian to get him off the books. Hopefully the team gets the right player back in return. Perhaps, if Okposo isn't on the list you'll need to bundle him with someone like Ristolainen to get the salary dump. However, it won't be easy. Pominville and Moulson just need to get buried again. The cap space isn't required yet and they're gone after next year. The only way this entire plan changes is if they are going in on major UFAs this season and they need to move people out. (ie. Sign Tavares if he's available and then move ROR and Bogosian, etc.)

Totally uncalled for. He raised a perfectly good point. Matthews is only 20. Don't be an ass about things. I am pretty sure the counter-argument to your point is Eichel can't get his team in the playoffs, so at least Matthews was there. There's no need for this crap. You aren't making fun of the Leafs when you tell someone to get lost. Make fun of the Leafs, we all do it. Rooting for a team to fail is not the same as telling someone to get out of here and not be part of the give and take in what should be a light-hearted battle of fans. If you feel so strongly against the Leafs that you want to tell a single person, who has represented himself quite well, to get lost then you've lost sight of what this is about and more importantly what life is about. Damn right. You know what I am dealing with today? A message written on our HS bathroom wall yesterday that something bad was going to happen at our HS on 4/27. At this point I couldn't care less about the Leafs or the Bruins because in today's life that kind of threat carries the potential for media vans to be swooping in on my little town this weekend. All of this crap starts because we don't WANT to act civilly towards each other. It's all either "I don't care what you think, I am going to be me." or "I don't like what you think, you shouldn't be here." The truth is the answer lies in between. The two scenarios described above are the opposite, extreme ends, of the spectrum. Get along, have a little bit of fun, we're all going to die soon. A friend of mine wished his daughter well as she left the house the other day... 12 minutes after leaving he received a phone call that she was in a serious accident. Thankfully the car was only thing seriously damaged. This is the life we lead... we should have a lot more respect for it and the lives of others.

There are many other factors that go into the lottery system. Because contracts are guaranteed in the NHL it makes things much more difficult in regards to changing out a roster. In the NFL players are dropped and added all the time because contracts aren't guaranteed (well not 100%, all the time). I don't particularly like the lottery system. I could see a system that moves a team from picking in the top 3 in back to back years and forces a team down the draft order if they finish worse than they did the year before. So, if a team drafted 6th the year before and they finish in a position to draft 5th this year they would be moved back to 7 and the 6 and 7 teams would be moved to 5 and 6. A team that just misses out on the playoffs should not have any shot at a top draft pick.

Many of them... sadly. I wish they would move back to Philly.

Bolded 1: It's almost as if we didn't just have a thread about this based on an article from only 16 days ago... http://buffalonews.com/2018/04/04/whats-next-for-buffalos-aging-keybank-center/ https://forums.sabrespace.com/topic/25717-game-experience-russ-brandon-weighs-in/ Bolded 2: What's the alternative? What makes it "enough" in your eyes? Any of the ideas you posted would have come from challenging your staff to be "better"... certainly not from asking them to care less. You lost me on your entire response at bolded 1 and cemented it with bolded 2. The sense from your response is that if he had said he was lowering ST prices by 5% next year you would have said it should have been 10%.

If the Sabres had hired me for their CIO position when it was open a few years ago I would have instituted programmatic version control on twitter and One Buffalo App to scan for crappy English and immediately reject the post/send. :) Just saying..

So it's clear no one here really watches Sabres games. Not one suggestion of Napoli's? ;)

I think it's important to remember how much different a player can look and can play when they are happy with the situation and have a reason to play. It's not just that San Jose is a better team. He's in the playoffs and he has a chance to prove something. This is why you can't always dismiss a player on a bad team as being a bad player. We're all no different. When our situation sucks it's not easy to go out and bust your butt for them. Let's be honest, if you've ever worked in customer service. You are more likely to go the extra mile for a customer who has tried to help themselves and is extra polite in requesting your assistance as opposed to the idiot who walks up and expects to be waited on hand and foot as though it's an inconvenience they have to talk to you. The only difference is the situation those people create. Sports is no different.

Yea.. I would prefer the 27th too... although I am not available that day so it won't matter either way.

Well.. if you want the sure thing you'll need the 25th to be the date. Might be interested.. need to check the schedule and see what tickets cost. A few unexpected expenses have left things a little thin.

I wish I hadn't read this thread this crappy Sunday morning. It's examples like this writing that make me want to get into a secret military cryo-chamber and be forgotten about for 500 years in the hopes that by the time my chamber is accidentally unearthed the world has actually reverted from it's current Idiocratic state.

I don't think he should be. He did not hit Karlsson in the head. He hits him cleanly and I am sure the side impact causes his head to snap and may cause a concussion. However, Karlsson was digging at the puck. I agree with the call in that I think it's somewhat of a bad angle hit but without the head contact I don't think it warrants a suspension. And I would LOVE to see him suspended... not a fan of his.

Look.. Marcus Miller is a bass player, Stanley Clarke is a BASS player.. Victor Wooten? No slouch. There are plenty of great bass players. Which is why I used the wink.. :) At least a timpanist has to know notes... using your reference. Of course my favorite is when we play Also sprach Zarathrustra...

On every face-off the center should be the one deciding where he will attempt to win the draw and communicate it to his teammates. This is why they study the habits of those they will go up against. As far as set plays.. they may communicate a few during a timeout but after that I would think that the players themselves are picking what they want to do from a pool of things they have worked on. It's usually one or two that are in charge of determining the play and they know who it is. My guess is that they'll mostly be in agreement (this isn't football with a huge playbook) based on seeing what the other team is doing from their lineup perspective. In almost all cases the set play will be to get the puck to Jack (in the Sabres case). If you have a few back to back to back face-offs they'll likely switch it up because the other team will shade toward Jack. Kind of like a catcher calling pitches for the pitcher.

It's a measurement factor that is designed to take the size of the market out of the mix. Relatively speaking, more people in Buffalo watched the NHL playoffs than anywhere else. 100 people in Buffalo see an advertisement and 10 people in NYC see the same advertisement and the conversion rate is a consistent 10%. This would mean 10 people in Buffalo signed up and 1 in NYC. This of course gets kludgy really fast because the next part of the calculation would depend on what the product is we are discussing. Let's assume for a moment (for simplicity sake) that the product cost to manufacture remains constant. The cost to ship remains constant. The next part of the equation would be the cost of inventory. This would likely be much more expensive in NYC than Buffalo. Cost of operations similarly more expensive (you pay people to work more in NYC than Buffalo). Assuming other market factors remaining constant the margin dollars of the product remain the same. So, the company earns $5 for every widget sold (revenue - costs). The ad is much more effective in Buffalo because 10 people converted and only 1 in NYC. It may be different with other products but you'd have to factor in the cost of revenue per dollar spent in advertising. Of course the cost of advertising is set based on the viewership where you can see that Buffalo is the top market and likely driving down the overall cost of advertising. So, it might be more cost effective for advertisers to target NBC hockey depending on the type of marketing they need to get out. Lots of variables. You are talking about people paying money to go to an arena. This is people watching and having an interest in the game. Far fewer people pay to go to a game than watch on TV. More wildcards? Should 80% of the league get in? What would you think is the appropriate cut off? The reason they aligned the divisions initially is to help strengthen the rivalries.

I didn't really want to bury this in another thread because I think everyone in Buffalo deserves a pat on the back for this. You topped the playoff viewership ratings with NO team in the playoffs. This is why we have passionate hockey discussions around here. Buffalo loves hockey. https://www.bardown.com/top-10-cities-watching-hockey-in-america-last-night-included-three-cities-with-non-playoff-teams-1.1054964 Following are Top 10 markets for last night's coverage of #StanleyCupPlayoffs: 1 Buffalo 1.75 2 Ft. Myers 1.05 3 Nashville 0.87 3 Richmond-Petersburg 0.87 3 Boston 0.87 6 WashDC 0.77 7 Pittsburgh 0.66 8 Phoenix 0.61 9 Hartford-New Haven 0.60 10 St. Louis 0.59

What Vegas did worked because it was Vegas.... It's almost uniquely Vegas. I'm not sure that would work ANYWHERE else, let alone Buffalo. I might accept NYC as a possibility. No where else is really known for their "shows". For what its worth, I rather like the EA Sports NHL intros the Sabres manage to pull together. For a playoff game however.. I would expect a serious escalation.

From a youth coaching perspective I'll put it this way as well. My best skaters end up at D first, then C, then wing. My worst skaters end up at wing.. always. My lowest hockey IQ ends up at wing even if they are great skaters. Wingers are the bass players of hockey? ;)

I'm rooting for the Bruins... I have a few friends from Boston and I have no friends who root for Toronto. Now.. whoever wins immediately becomes my least favorite team in the next round. Is there any way the NHL can DQ both teams?