In The Buff

You mentioned earlier in this thread that we're now just seeing VO & Johansson from the 2014 draft come into their own as players. I'm looking at the calendar now, that was 6 years ago. How can you draft for needs 6 years out in the future? You can have general needs by assessing what you have in the pipeline. IE: drafting UPL to be your goalie of the future knowing he'll need years to develop. And to some degree certain positions are always "in need", such as defenseman & centers. But other than that you need to draft BPA. It just takes too long to develop these players to draft for a need now where in 6 years your team needs can & should very well be different by then. Only reason why we've been desperate for Center help for what feels like forever now is because we traded our 2C away & didnt adequately replace him after the fact. Leaving the need there for multiple years until Cozens or someone else is brought in.

On the brightside, if we all die from the coronavirus, we won't have to suffer watching games like tonight anymore

Very well couldve been. Theres been fears for a long time that a virus could escape the facility there. Highly coincidental something like this occurs where their top lab is located.

Feels like i'm watching the Sabres play an All Star team

Hope Vesey is alright. If we have any hopes of trading him he's gonna need to be healthy

Dahlin does a lot of little things that i think go largely unnoticed by the average fan. Little plays to get himself out of trouble when a player has an advantageous position on him. Or sneaky plays at the blue line to keep the puck in the zone or create space. As he gets more reps, he'll learn more of what he can do & what works at this level. Not to mention adding more size & becoming a better player & all that jazz.

Nice to get a goal at the end of a period & not have it happen to us for a change

Bogo the Bozo. I bet Bozo was one of the names kids made fun of him with back in the day. I say one of the names because there must have been many!

This game has the feeling it could get really ugly really quick

I hear ya, the Avs were sure fun as hell to watch back in the day... Now if you were a Nordiques fan thats a different story

Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

Still seeing too much of that trying to make the perfect play. Just fire it at the net, crash the net & good things happen. Rebounds, deflections, dare i say even goals. Whatever those are

Speaking of Grosek, i remember back in the day saying: "Juneau, I've got some Zhitnik on my Peca, do you wanna Smehlik? It's pretty Grosek." those were the days

Starting Hutton is the only choice coach could make. But if he gets lit up then it won't be long before we see Johansson. Coach also has the added benefit of seeing how Johansson looks in practice too. So if he feels he gives the team the better chance to win, then he'll get the nod. But theres no way he would get the start over Hutton. It'd just be horrible optics & would adversely effect the locker room imo. It'd send the message that you have no faith in Hutton or the teams chances with him at all. Lets save that for if/when Hutton plays poorly. It'd be easier to go from Hutton to Johansson than the other way around.

If all things work out & if we get back a player or players as good as those sure. But thats a lot of if's. Of course Quebec only traded Lindros because he wouldnt play for them but yeah trades can work out for sure. But i just see the same argument here for Dahlin that we made for ROR, & all it did was make our team worse. I think fans here had unrealistic expectations on Dahlin from the get go & expected him to have like 30 goals & 60 assists a year before he hit 20 years old. But he's gonna be an outstanding player going forward & we haven't even seen the best of who he is yet. Im not worried about his next contract, nor his play. There are other pieces i'd move before moving Dahlin. Namely the players we don't want. I get the idea of moving him & if you were running a team on Xbox & could make a blockbuster trade in your favor then sure. But with real life & Jbots, i'm not a buyer to this idea at all at this point.

Seeing some of the comments about how this could be a good idea & how it'd jump start our improvement & all that jazz, has me think of O'Reilly & how people thought the same thing then. That didn't turn out well & now we want to try it again but with Dahlin? I think all these years of missing the playoffs has made a lot of us crazy.

This is nothing about the OP but I wonder whats the over / under on the amount of 'Jbotts needs to get fired' threads being made thru the end of the year? 30 or so games left so im guessing say 19 more threads on it? I still don't see him leaving until next season at the earliest. They have their plan & theyre not gonna bail from it now.

Jack Hammer, Jack Attack, Captain Jack, Jack Frost, Jackie Chan or something with Eichel, like Iceman or simply "Ike". Eich Daddy, The IkeMan Cometh But yeah since his birth name is John his nickname is already Jack.

Cool to see Anderson on this list. I was gonna mention him yesterday in another thread but didn't. He is a pending RFA, but if he gets traded this year the team that picks him up will have another year of his services before having to give him a new contract. If Columbus waits til next year he'll be an UFA & will be moved as a rental. So it makes sense for them to try to move him now & apparently he is someone who is in play. He has shown in the past that he can put up some numbers. If he were on a 20+ goal clip right now I'd be all about it. But his lack of production this year is concerning. Does he have an attitude problem, lack of motivation or is it just poor usage or a combination of those? Idk. But if he can be had for cheap or for Bogo (which is pretty cheap at this point) i'd say go for it. If its for Mitts in a package i'd say no.

No. I just see it not only as near impossible to implement at this point given how the sports leagues have formed to get to the point where they are now, but also there is not any real incentive for them to do something this drastic. However for things like Esports this practice was used all the time & worked well. But now that theres been years worth of investment & developing & refining the industry & tournament structures, various Esports leagues have moved away from a relegation system into a more structured & permanent system. I really only see relegation as beneficial to a major sports league thats starting out. Where youre not sure which teams will be viable or good enough to compete at the level you wish. Or for a sports league that has a ton of possible teams that wouldnt fit into a typical format. Something like college football for instance where theres 130 schools in Division 1. For something like the NFL/NHL with millions/billions of dollars involved with each franchise, its pretty much don't rock the boat.

Well the lineup for sure looks better with Skinner on it... just not as good as I would've hoped. Still its great news that he's healthy & back with the team. We desperately need him to come back rejuvenated & light it up.

Skinner being day to day is the best Sabres news i've heard in awhile. If he can come back for this crucial stretch of the season coming up, it'll help us immensely. In theory ?

Totally agree & i know most others do as well. He may have found a role for himself in a checking role, but when you're paying $6 Million per year on a player, you need him to be above average at something. IE: you need him to score 20 goals per year. He's the 14th highest cap hit for RW's in the entire NHL. On par with Patrik Laine, David Pastrnak, Radulov, Loui Eriksson, Dustin Brown, Brock Boeser, Ryan Callahan etc... I could go on because quite literally there are much better players getting paid the same or even less than him out there but you get the idea. Okposo is the 3rd highest cap number on our team & offers nothing in terms of production that any of those players do. If we could magically swap out him & his contract for one of those other players, the look & composition of our team improves dramatically. Think of what our forward group would look like if we could allot that $6 Million into a different & real quality Top 6 forward? It'd be night & day with what we have now. There for sure are other areas of our roster we could focus on to improve, but there is no doubt that KO is an albatross & a dead weight that hamstrings our team. Regardless of how well he does in a checking role.

less... but hey you never know

Cirelli would be a good target. I know he's a name we've mentioned for a couple years now. He's one of 6 RFA'S Tampa will have to deal with heading into next year, in addition to 4 UFA's & they only have $8 Million in cap space to do it... so someone has to go. He is arguably their best 2 way forward & I have no doubt that we would be interested. Its just that other teams will be interested as well. Toffoli would be another potential target & I know his name has been mentioned from time to time. Its been said the asking price for Toffoli is a 2nd round pick & a prospect, so that seems like a pretty fair ask. But I believe he's an UFA going into next season so we'd have to be confident in signing an extension with him. Jason Zucker is another name you hear quite often. He won't wow you or anything but all he does is play a consistent game & put up 20 goals a year. Has a modest cap number of $5.5 mil thru 2023. Seems his name is mentioned year after year. I gotta figure at some point those rumors pan true & he's moved... that whole where theres smoke theres fire kinda thing. There are options out there, but with so many teams coveting quality forwards there'll be bidding wars so to speak, with teams trying to maximize their returns on guys like these.