Randall Flagg

Was just going to post something about this. I definitely think it's his son. I wonder what we can glean about Ralph - surely Justin is his own man with his own opinions, and reflexively siding with family is a natural thing to do, but I wonder if conversations with his father have imprinted these anti-player views

Noticing that the Anaheim Ducks guy conspicuously left out Boudreau, the only one of the three that coached the Ducks. Did you hear things through the grapevine that turned you off of him?

I love this outline. It takes a step up from vague comments about systems. Someone should hit the film and show us where Ralph fails in these areas and compare them to a new coach, if we get one.

I don't think the existence of a player on a team is proof that the GM believed that player capable of performing acceptably. I think it's entirely possible that no options he viewed as upgrades were available for a cost that wouldn't hurt the franchise more by his calculation than maintaining status quo at 2G

I think Dan is the best in a pool of coaches we've had since Ruff. His competition is Rolston, Nolan, Housley and Krueger. This says far more about Terry, Kim and the Sabres than it does about Dan People positively compare the 2013-14, 2014-15 hockey quality to that we've seen this year. Not just the emotional appeal of the teams in an abstract, but the actual hockey quality. This is because the weight of past failures is heavier on this team than it was on that team, and time dulls all wounds. The mental place fans and the players were ACTUALLY in during the spring of 2017, and not our fond memories of that bleak time period (besides from the Blues and Jets games), well, there was no real path forward then, so no, we wouldn't be a contending hockey team with a different mediocre coach being kept on in the face of all of that rotten energy. A coach that hasn't gotten a HC job since and likely never will again So your answer is probably the mid 80s option then right? That's basically what I'm aiming for people to give here, if we had everything the same but a 'good' coach, what is the standings difference of this team

Maybe in the next six months, the narrative becomes that Adams gave conventional, mainstream Sabres wisdom one last shot (Hall is good, Staal was good just 5 months ago, guys like the coach, we don't have money anyway, I trust Ullmark to stay healthy enough to not sell the house for his backup in a stagnant market) and got a 25 game taste of just how rotten things have become before embarking on the quickest addressing of a midseason meltdown we've seen in a long time (firing a coach during the actual season with real options available rather than waiting until everyone and their mother has been hired elsewhere), and pulls out a Sakic-like revival.

This articulates why I felt compelled to make the poll, I'm looking for a little more pushback like PA was giving in another thread. I'm ready for Ralphie to go just because of how dire things have become but I wonder what the odds are that it makes incredibly little difference, and Boudreau just becomes the latest thing the Sabres touch that turns to poo

Too many variables to isolate in a 1-dimensional spectrum for sure. SDS needs to start adding 2D polls! I getcha though If Gallant, Boudreau, or Julien got the offseason and training camp with this exact team, Eichel injury issues (and maybe more) included, how much better do you think we are right now?

Eichel for Thomas, Parayko and Kyrou

This conversation would be so much easier if tom webster was able to give us a liiiiittle more info! There really is too much speculation to be sure. I just have a better gut feeling/trust with Kevyn than I did with the last couple guys, at least. It makes my worry barometer a little lower than yours. I think we are in full agreement on what needs to be done though. I'm just as pissed as you that Carter is still on this team, though I still haven't fully processed my anger that he made the 2019-20 team

I still think there's a reasonable chance that the cost barrier to goalies that teams apparently had no interest in moving (because nobody moved any goalies despite a plethora of rumors, or any other notable skaters really, of interest all offseason, with notable chatter that teams were reluctant to make big changes given the circumstances) was so high that it would have been a ludicrous move to look at in hindsight with how bad the team is. I understand if you don't think this is true, since I'm basing most of my belief in this on circumstantial evidence and my gut intuition. This shifts focus to why we are so bad in the first place then. Results are all that matter for sure, and Kevyn is GM during this horrible stretch of hockey. But I've skimmed threads from the fall of 2020, and I don't think anyone saw anything like this coming, and I don't think it all has to do with the inherent quality of the incoming roster (Jack is dogshit compared to last year's MVP-chatter performance, which is massive. Skinner is dogshit. Hall looks like dogshit, and Staal fell off a cliff). Many people attribute this to coaching, which Kevyn has control over. But he also acquired a roster that apparently loves their coach, which combined with his boss's lack of desire to pay another fired coach when the fiscal situation is what it is, make it seem completely reasonable to have made the decision to hang onto the coach. I have a hard time feeling real emotion over this decision, or tying what I see on the ice to anger towards Kevyn. When Jason Botterill was GM, I could see for myself in real time the ridiculous mistakes he was making, and spent my time watching the team just knowing that things were going to fall apart any second. With everything that encapsulates Kevyn's few months in charge, I don't feel that same sort of thing playing out. What read as post-hoc excuses to some people seem like legitimate explanations that I actually wondered about at the time (can a GM really operate with such a limited staff? even tom webster made sure to caution against being 100% certain a goalie change was coming, despite is belief it was almost a shoo-in. His reasons seem to have merit, as these goalies didn't just not get moved the Sabres, they didn't go ANYWHERE). It's not that I think he's good or anything, or doesn't deserve criticism. This situation just feels more like Joe Sakic circa 2016-17 than it does Bad Sabres GM circa 21st century Fleury was a guy I forgot about, I feel like the story on his availability always flip flopped by the day. How "available" was he really, because they certainly don't want to trade him right now.

Yeah, I've been out of it, but who the ***** are these players lol Oh, building a proposal for Jack around some guy named Kirby Dach? Huh? *checks out who Kirby Dach is Maybe I'm crazy, but getting players like these back would also require at least one top line forward coming with them, no?

Carter Hutton is certainly bad, but what guys like Liger were posting just a week or so ago suggested that even if the Sabres had average goaltending, the other factors of their game (namely 5v5 scoring) were such a problem that it wouldn't have made a meaningful difference on our season. With this in mind, if Arizona decided "well, I'll just keep Raanta" then would it really have been prudent for Adams to say "wait, how about this, I'll upgrade this pick to a 1st rounder in 2021 with no protections!" or something? I really don't think it would have, IF we are presuming that the things I've read are true. In this circumstance, given all of the stipulations about this specific offseason I outline above, I'm less inclined to be down on Adams' addressing of goaltending in October of 2020 compared to, say, what Jason did to the center spine in the summer of 2018, or even Jason bringing those same goalies back in a normal offseason (2019)

Would biting the bullet and adding value to a trade on a middling goalie that may or may not perform behind a new team have also kept Jack here? Would it have made a difference? Advanced stat folks are telling me that our goaltending doesn't come close to accounting for our bad record. Keep in mind that I do want a goalie, and wish those talks about Gibson had gone much further.

For the sake of being concrete, assume the new hire gets general approval from the fanbase, and doesn't come off like a Mickey Mouse hire (I heard Adam Mair as a suggestion recently, as an example of that). Gerard Gallant I haven't decided how I feel quite yet. But if we let go of Ralph, I don't know how different things will feel from when we let go of Dan to bring in Phil, let go of Phil to bring in Ralph. I worry that we won't cross a meaningful threshold without something much bigger than a coach swap (which may also be necessary). Sorry for the wordiness of the options, but I tried to cover the spectrum of potential opinions as best I could

I think a lot of our dump-ins this year are because our players are comically bad in transition. This absolutely can go back to coaching, but I don't think he's telling Jack "make sure when you it the red line with speed you rip that puck into the corner"

The natural counterpoint is, if Arizona decided they no longer wanted to trade Keumper or Raanta, is it smart to change the second round pick for a first, or add Olofsson to the deal, to try and change their mind? Are those players that valuable, will they even be good here? It seems like the goalies that have changed hands this summer are on disappointing teams (Holtby, Markstrom, and those guys got to choose their destination) I'm just saying that in this particular season, with a fraction of an ideal scouting staff, in a league that was loathe to make big changes during the offseason before a bizarre, ***** covid season (i scanned the list of trades this offseason and the biggest names I see are bottom 4 D and bottom 6 forwards), I might actually buy that we were handcuffed in a unique way, and so my leash for Adams (which is longer than Jason's from the start because of initial impressions I cannot shake) is a bit longer than it would be with similar on-ice circumstances in a normal season. But, I'm asking these questions in the first place because I'm still trying to flesh it out and confirm or rebuke my feelings. If Adams does something that feels like a good decision in the midst of this catastrophic collapse, I will start to believe we are in a new spot. I know we cycle coaches nonstop and I don't believe that we are simply the implementation of a supposedly objectively good system away from being good again, so it's not because of that, but simply because this franchise normally just lets a situation like this fester for weeks and then months, making underwhelming moves in the offseason.

Taro is good. Spending time away from SS for Lent, will be back.

@tom webster was telling us that he was 99% sure we weren't starting the season with Ullmark/Hutton, and outlined deals falling apart on the other teams' end as one of the only ways he could possibly see this happening. Other nuggets from different channels I can't reveal have convinced me that this is what ended up happening, so I trust that Adams had the right idea. I understand if you aren't willing to go there, because I'm just rumor-mongering without proof.

How much does a GM rely on PROFESSIONAL scouting? Can Adams be absolved of a lot of blame for the underperformance of Eakin (not that we should have expected much, but every other 4th liner on this team looks fine-to-good at their roles and he looks bad to me), Staal, and Hall, because of all the cuts and firings that took place during last year's bloodletting? Botterill's staff was huge and he still brought in Frolik, Sobotka, Griffith, Nolan, Pouliot, Tennyson, Beaulieu, Montour etc. so I was comfortable bashing him because one way or another, he either chose the players or assembled the staff. But I highly doubt Adams has his "ideal" scouting staff right now. But, maybe GMs all watch thousands of hours of films themselves, are supposed to, and should know these players' up-to-date on-ice tendencies and impacts by heart too, in which case it's definitely his fault and I have to feel perpetually uneasy for the rest of the time he's employed. My initial instinct without knowing the answer to this is that I still have a fair amount of trust in him and I like him, largely because I've seen him lure a top free agent, haven't seen him bomb a trade yet (he's only made one right?), and he actually sounds intelligent when he talks. Plus, I believe certain posters who have indicated that goaltending was a huge priority but teams kept backing out of deals we had lined up, and we didn't want to get stupid with the trade return to try and reel them back in. And his tenor in the most recent PC was appropriate, I thought. Whereas the first time Jason opened his mouth, I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

If each of you had to guess, how many points do you think would be left on the table by not "optimizing" line combinations, over the course of this 56 game season? With these changes being relative to what Ralph has created, assuming that he'd continue to make similar decisions the rest of the year. PA is free to assume that maybe Ralph's line combos actually made this team better than its baseline if he is inclined, in which case you can give a negative point value. My guess is that PA would say somewhere between -2 and +2 points could have been gained with "better" or "optimized" forward lines and defensive pairs (-2 meaning that Ralph DID do better than an average coach would, that a proposed "optimal" group would actually be worse, +2 meaning that we would only gain 2 points at best on the whole season if we listened to the Sabrespace/twitter experts), indicating that he doesn't think it makes much of a difference either way, and Liger would say we would gain 10 points or more with better lines. But that's just my guess, I'm curious to hear what you both think.

Kind of baffled at how difficult the play that finally broke Skinner's drought was, compared to the million layups he's inexplicably missed over the last 2 months.

FWIW pi's source is like an Anaheim Ducks equipment guy or something if I'm remembering correctly lol

That and I think there's little reason to believe he would consider Buffalo if he did want to test the market

IMO we shouldn't get our hopes too high on Brindamour specifically