Randall Flagg

Connolly's hands were always among the best in the world even when things were going poorly for him. Mitts, on the other hand, has bad hands when compared to the NHL average

@Thorny you should sim through a season and show us the final stats page

I understand what he was sayin, just fleshing out what is giving me great angst about the Sabres

Definitely. The vulnerability recent real world events have exposed in me has invaded my hobbies/escapes as well.

And if this team lost Jack Eichel for any significant amount of time, the center spine of Johansson - Lazar - Larsson - Asplund would lead them to the worst season in league history. Just cuz the tank was stupid doesn't mean we don't have a ridiculous player that we should cherish and stop wasting The old games really opened my eyes. Briere was good, but nobody on those teams approached the shift-in shift-out impact Eichel has. We play a dangerous game wallowing in mediocrity and taking his level of play for granted

I place you under Sabrespace arrest. your punishment is watching that 6-1 Philly game on repeat, 24/7

Keep Mitts around unless another team wants him included in a package for a good NHL center.

Where would we be without this man

He's already indicated that this is largely the plan. We know Asplund will take one of the fourth line slots. He wants Simmonds back and is ready for Cozens to make the team, both per his last interview. That leaves room for two acquisitions, which history tells us to expect basically another Vesey and Johansson at best. Unless a team wants to gift us a Skinner again, but o don't see any situations like that brewing. Actually, Mitts and Tage could well be slotted in for those spots in his mind. And, just like the last few years, the possibility that it could work exists. The issue is like the last few years there would be too many question marks in critical spots, and too many things needing to go right compared to the likelihood that they do, for us to get anywhere

Believe me, there is neither film nor another metric that elevated Botterill's attempts to fill forward depth over the last three seasons above the bottom of the league. Unless you have that analysis, which I'd love to see. And if you isolate the three forwards' production this analysis ignores, the Sabres are 18th (and if you take injury into account, 14th). They have a fine top 3 that will get better as Olofsson grows, but as far as the point of all of this, they and the only other functional part of our roster is comprised 100% by players Botts had nothing to do with acquiring. And this reads like you're forgetting about the three needlessly wasted seasons our players painstakingly dragged themselves through on these crippled rosters, and the damage that decisions have done to players' developments, both obvious (Mitts/Tage) and not (where would Jack and Sam be as players had they been somewhere where good things happen up and down the organization the last three years? Nobody knows, but it'd definitely be different ). The Pegulas certainly don't forget this, which is why the rumors that Botterill may lose his job because expectations haven't been met are swirling, even though "Hey, we have cap space in the worst UFA season in memory! Even though I got it by burning through three years of Jack's prime for nothing, and now have half of a roster to build after showing I have no idea how to acquire good forwards!" I can't wait to see him use his cap (spoiler alert: he had cap space to try and make those 18 depth additions he failed on) to fill so many spots at once. Track record suggests we're in for a treat alright

Let's track the progress for other teams that struggled in 16-17: San Jose tied us. They then finished: 7th, 1st, and then collapsed to 26th this year. Florida went from 22nd to: 14th, 12th, and then 15th. Boston was 23rd that year, then finished: 2nd, 14th, and then 21st. They leaned heavier on their top 3 and defense each year. Arizona was 24th, then went: 30th, 24th, and then 14th this year. Philly was 25th, then went: 27th, 15th, then 5th. The Kings are a franchise heading in the wrong direction since their second cup win. They finished 26th in 16/17, then went: 26th, 28th, and 25th. Ottawa was 27th, then went: 22nd, 3rd, and 12th. A team that hemorrhaged their good players still managed to backfill far better forward depth under budget than we have. The Devils were 28th, and then went: 11th, 13th, and 17th. Vancouver finished 29th, and under the leadership of a supposed incompetent GM, went on to finish: 10th, 27th, and 9th, taking a clear leap ahead of us in a rebuild that we were supposed to be several years ahead in. Finally, the worst scoring depth team in 16/17, a historically bad Colorado, has gone 20th, 20th, and then 3rd since, capping off a tremendous stretch of competence in working with their young guns and trading away non-fits to build a team that is far ahead of us despite their bottoming out coming after ours, and starting from 30 points below us in Jason's first offseason. The Sabres' depth forwards behind their top three scorers finished 29th, and then 29th, and then 30th after those Botterill offseasons outlined above. But don't worry - we're doing this the RIGHT way. It was SUPPOSED to happen this way, so that we can be good again in 20XX.

Why is number 5 such a perfect fit for you?

And man, is it so painful and frustrating to watch those games. Flawed teams make the playoffs. More than half the league does. There's no reason outside incompetence we had to miss 9 straight years, or any of the last 4.

I got back in the mood for hockey watching some old games from the 2006 and 2007 playoff runs. A graph shown in the middle of game 6 of the Philly series turned my attention back to our current team. Our forward depth probably ties goaltending for the most-talked-about problem with this team, rightly so. Those old teams were so effective because of their ability to roll their lines and consistently beat up on whoever they were playing against, all game long. The current team features a top line (comprised entirely of pre-Botterill assets) that can outscore its opponents reasonably well (though whose effectiveness really takes a hit if pretty much any skater goes out for a significant amount of time, ie, their depth struggles to step into roles when they have to because too many of those players already are above where they should be) and a bottom line that can outscore theirs while being a good shutdown unit (Larry is a plus 8, and all three of these skaters are pre-Botterill assets as well). The rest is a disaster of acquisitions laid at the feet of Jason, for the most part. As I recently posted: Vesey, Lazar, Sheary, Frolik, Johansson, Skinner-without-Jack-at-9-mil, Simmonds eventually, following up Vlad, Berglund, Elie, Mitts, Tage, Josefson, Nolan, Griffith, Pouliot, Wilson as Jason's attempts to address the forward depth over the last three years. We all watched these teams and saw how ineffective these forwards were, and talked about it at length. I decided that this rainy afternoon was the perfect time to do what I've done several years now - count the total point production of every team's forwards behind their top 3 as a proxy for that team's offensive depth (the production of lines 2, 3, and 4 essentially). It's obviously not perfect as it's rare for a team to stick with one top line all season, and it's not always true that those three players will lead the forwards in scoring. I still think it's useful for fleshing out organizational scoring depth. As a refresher, here is the distribution for the 2016-2017 season, which Tim Murray was fired for. The Sabres were tied for 20th, just outside of the bottom 10 teams, forward depth was not their main concern, though it was a concern: Jason came in with a whole bunch of forward signings that he clearly intended to beef this up, aiming to replace the loss of Foligno, Ennis, Carrier, and Grant. This shouldn't have been hard to do, as two of these guys were awful for us and the other two didn't score points, but we tanked our depth production (while goaltending and defense were also abominable) and it resulted in the dead last 2017-18 Sabres season, which still traumatizes me. Here was the distribution of depth scoring that season: Dallas is about to be a fixture here too, they've been a one-line team riding Vezina goaltending for a few years now. We hang out with a budget Arizona tank-buddy, though they received better goaltending and defense that year, elevating them above us in the real standings. We needed to fix the culture and trade guys who actually get eaten up by losing, and so we made the big move after this year to finally actually fix our depth, trading quality for low-quality quantity, such as Bergy, Sobotka, Tage. We brought Mitts in to lead the 2nd line. After Eichel-Reinhart-Skinner, we had our fourth line (more of a 3rd line), and then a Mitts/Tage/Vlad/Sheary/Smith/Elie/Wilson conglomeration for the other lines all season. Our depth scoring ranked as follows: Still in the tank, off a cliff from the pack, hanging out with the Dallas rubble and the janky Edmonton rosters we've seen of late. A swing and a miss for a second time. Fine - Johansson, which is a good move, followed by an Olofsson growth that pushes Skinner down a line (to play with the lowest event forwards in the NHL all season long, brilliant) and a Vesey addition, should finally get it done! Womp womp. Only the worst non-expansion team ever saves us from last place. Long-term plans aside, there is no escaping the fact that three straight attempts were made, with high volume, to fix what was an issue, though not a league-basement one, and all three have had abominable results, and have been one of two major reasons each of the three seasons were lost before March, twice FAR before March. This is an offense-only view, but no sane fan has argued that this area of the Sabres roster has done its job for the current Sabres in any fashion, or has provided future-season value as far as prospect development goes. Tage and Mitts were set back by their presence in these units. I'm worried that the same thing will happen to Cozens. We are lucky that Olofsson avoided having to play there, at the expense of suddenly having the worst-looking contract in the entire NHL. You can count SO many attempts by Botts to improve the forward group below the first line: Simmonds, Kahun, Frolik, Vesey, Johansson, Lazar, Skinner, Sheary, Berglund, Sobotka, Tage, Mitts, Wilson, Nolan, Josefson, Griffith, Pouliot, Elie. Eighteen forwards, three of which have been good NHLers for the Sabres, in Skinner (who has also had a disastrous season at 9 mil this year), Kahun (for six games so far), and Johansson (who I will combine with Vesey to create one season's worth of a good NHL player, as each have had really bad stretches as well as differing-length effective ones). 3/18 is abysmal WITHOUT the asterisks they each currently have. No wonder a problem became a disaster. It has been seen as a positive that Jason will have lots of cap space and lots of roster spots to fill. Let's look at the spots: Olofsson - Eichel - Reinhart Skinner - xxx - xxx Kahun - xxx - Johansson xxx - xxx - Okposo Five spots to fill, at a 17% success rate, gives us less than one good hockey player for those spots. I am incredibly worried about this offseason. Will he/his scouts suddenly be able to acquire a 2C, a 2W, hang onto Zemgus and Larry, and find one more good depth player? That's what they need, 3 good players from outside the organization and maybe five if 22/28 leave. It's possible, but you'd wonder where it comes from when it's taken three years and 18 tries to find just three solid guys for six of those nine spots that wouldn't have been set otherwise. Why should we trust him to get it right? If he doesn't, especially at 2C, we will punt again, and tie the record for the longest playoff-less streak in NHL HISTORY, wearing Jack ever thinner, tempting fate with the assumption that he will be a healthy Sabre for years to come. This is, of course, an unacceptable outcome for even the strongest Botterill supporters. For the first time we can all at least agree that this team had better be in the playoffs next spring. There is no more time to screw around and put together a roster even us fans can accurately call out as nowhere near good enough before the season starts. If Jason stays, either this gets figured out, or it's going to get exponentially uglier.

The game described by those who know and have seen Samuelsson is something that would make our defense corps unbelievably well-rounded, especially if Borgen can also stick around. Puck wizard, offensive prowess: Dahlin Puck mover: Montour Two-way, all-situations guy: Jokiharju Nasty, bone-crushing checks: Risto The Carlo/Cernak: Samuelsson Additional edge and defensive-focused play: Borgen NHL quality depth that fills some of these roles, not as well as the idealization of the players listed: Miller, McCabe Obv not all of these guys will be here one or two years from now but still. This is my rosy view. My nightmare scenario: This contract is signed as one last-gasp attempt by Jason to show the Pegulas that HE is why the team is finally going to take a step it hasn't taken yet - all of Samuelsson, Cozens, Tage, Mitts are shoe-horned into a roster spot too high for their abilities, while one last botched D->forward trade underwhelms playing alongside one last Frolik-quality depth acquistion, and we are left with yet again horrible depth and a bunch of traumatized, lost prospects whose next two years will look similar to Casey/Tage's last two

Straight comparison of those stats doesn't tell us much. Wasn't it as recently as a week or so ago that almost nobody in the US could get a test? So you're comparing a post-analysis count for hospitalizations and deaths as a fraction of known cases (which they're likely far more confident in after they could do things like the antibody tests they're talking about developing for coronavirus) to numbers of known coronavirus hospitalizations/deaths (pretty well known) as a fraction of a much more uncertain number, that is DEFINITELY a tiny fraction of actual total US (or anywhere else) cases, since we just started testing people like a week ago. It's pretty meaningless until we get more data on how many Americans have contracted this disease. You'd need to compare to a couple weeks into an H1N1 scare, and even then who knows what similarities and differences there were in our ability to get data on either of these diseases in real time. The big scary numbers should almost certainly be a LOT smaller once we have real data. I'd put a lot of money on the 3-4% fatality rate being an order of magnitude too high, and possibly two. This isn't to say that coronavirus is no big issue - obviously we need to bulk up our hospitals should this thing stick around for the long haul, because it is causing chaos and scary amounts of death and permanent lung damage, etc. The biggest issue really appears to be the fact that we don't have the resources to care for all of these patients in addition to our typical number of patients. That's why "second-wave" doom and gloom isn't as scary to me as it is for others - no, we don't need to sit in our houses for the next 18 months, because it's not like a brief summer respite will be spent by humans forgetting everything that happened and just waiting to get walloped again - we will be more and more ready for each successive wave (This is all opinion, I am an expert in nothing)

Sabres fans would like him a lot more in today's hockey than they did back then for sure. I was so upset with this game that in the final regulation commercial break I wrote an "L" on the playoff schedule on the fridge. My grandmother called (she does this for exciting sports events it's really fun) and found out and was furious with me, and never let me forget it once we tied the game

That graph is honestly so funny I'm picturing all NHL teams in a race. Jason comes along, kicks the Sabres' knees out so they hit the ground as other teams keep on going. He helps us to our feet, saying, "there, being on your feet is progress compared to being on the ground" ignoring that we're in the same spot we were in before he got there, and that nobody else needed to fall to the ground in this race. He then gives us fight milk and ratty shoes and claims we are set up to compete again with those teams way up ahead

I thought I saw that Chinese television and cell data suggests that millions of users are missing from their typical numbers. i also remember videos coming out on tweeter showing people dropping dead in the streets of Chinese provinces that had no recorded cases of coronavirus at the time, according to the Chinese government so yeah, they're full of *****

The crowd that insists GMTM is solely at fault for not being able to rebuild organizational depth that was deliberately set two full years behind in the intent to lose, when our depth was so bad that we'd demonstrably need about five grand slam moves per offseason, batting 1.000, for several years to get back to a reasonable state at the NHL level, is inexplicably the same crowd that is fine with Jason batting about 0.017 over the last three years, pretending to see some method behind a consistent and persistent inability to bring in forwards that are anything but mediocre-to-terrible, and letting our key young players go through ghastly amounts of time in festering-rot quality low-importance hockey (it is unquantifiable, but so meaningful, for our kids to play in hockey that matters, and we have let seasons collapse in soul-sucking fashion to ensure they wouldn't) This is no defense of Murray, who deserved to be fired

Idk about college but I would bet everything I own that the 2020 NFL season happens in some capacity.

I would emphatically not re-sign Simmonds. He is more of the middle six mediocrity that Jason has stuck us with all three years. As an aside, 15 goals appears to be the universal hockey projection for a player that will almost certainly NOT score 15 goals. When people broadly predict a player will score 5, 10, 20, 25, 30 goals, they are usually on the money. When people claim a guy will score 15 goals, that player almost always sucks and misses that mark. (This is completely unscientific, just having some fun.) But notable "will score 15 goals for the Sabres" predictions made by more than one or two posters over the last few years include Mitts a couple times, Tage, Berglund, Johansson, Kyle this year (and I like Kyle this year), and so on. Non-pessimists can nail every single prediction except for the guys they project 15 goals for

If they have a season next year, they will have had the draft, a free agency, things to get teams ready for next year. I'm of the belief that there will be some form of season next year. Even if that time to get teams ready is abbreviated or abnormal, there will be time for teams to make management changes should they wish to. Nothing about quarantine and coronavirus makes Jason's ***** forward depth any better looking. If they want to fire him they're still going to fire him, it's just hard to imagine when on day [single digit] of an extended quarantine which will see some ugly stuff in hospitals close to home.

People really be arguing with a dude that, in late July of 2019, after our full 2019-2020 team was assembled, called Jason Botterill the greatest GM in team history

I just checked and it is 7th by points percentage too. ImPrOvEmEnT Stay safe, SSers. I'll be back when there is hockey to talk about. Get your reading in, eat your veggies, protect your loved ones, start a new hobby.