Randall Flagg

He's allowed 5 goals or more in his last 3 starts, and in 6 of his last 8 starts.

Was gonna say, I'd almost be shocked to not see Johansson right away one way or another

To be fair, I think a lot of last season's stagnation had to do with that obscene ankle tweak he had. I know he kept playing, but he was a different player at that point, and the goal-less streak before it was purely unlucky (he was still generating a large amount of chances and hitting goalposts like crazy) while after, he simply wasn't playing the same level of hockey. Of course, he doesn't have that excuse for the last 25 games or so of this season, after another hot start. I have changed my mind on this 8 times, but if you want Skinner to play like 9 million dollars, he will have to be next to the guy that helped him earn that contract. He won't score at a level worthy of the money if he doesn't play with Jack. I don't care if we keep him away in favor of Olofsson, but I will try to ignore Skinner's cap hit for the resulting decline in production that will bring him

Lazar wasn't out there either? And Skinner was the guy that came out when the goalie pulled. It is well known that Skinner is a bad power play player, and before that power play, after Ottawa scored the third goal and we needed a goal, the winger to replace Zemgus on Jack's line was...Jeff Skinner. I repeat my initial point. Adding Lazar and then questioning that Skinner is on a list of useful NHL additions is pretty sketchy logic. Lazar has been solid for 20 games, Skinner has triple that time period of ELITE NHL goal scoring for us. Outside of those stretches, Skinner has been bad, and Lazar has been a non-NHLer.

I don't have the attachment to Dahlin, as a fan, that I do to Eichel. As such, I'm more open to this idea with him than with Jack (especially considering I like our defensemen without Rasmus way more than I like our centers without Jack). But I really doubt that a team would put together something convincing enough for me to be okay with the trade.

I know you're not happy with his last 25 games or so, but if Skinner's 51 goals in 122 games isn't useful, then Lazar isn't useful

Hopefully he's watching his the Penguins competing for the 1 seed in the entire eastern conference despite missing Crosby AND Malkin for over a dozen games, and Crosby himself for 28 games. Oh, and taking the fall-off of their twice cup winning goalie Murray in stride, with Jarry.

The Johansson on the power play thing, they just really need Olofsson back. They NEED one timers from that spot, it's a fundamental part of the way they play, and why TBL's PP is so deadly (Hedman-Stamkos-Kuch do the same stuff as Dahlin-Eichel-Olofsson). I know people want Skinner there, but Skinner literally has zero one timer goals as a Sabre. He can't shoot them. Johansson has a couple. He can get those shots off even though he was bad at them tonight. Skinner on the first power play unit drives me bonkers, he rarely makes the right choice and has suspect passing when he does. It's a different story in OT or with a goalie pulled

What happened with Ullmark? No replays and I didn't catch the initial issue. If he's out for a long time, and Hutton is leading the ship, that adds more fuel to the "nice roster, Jason" fire

I lost the belief that he is capable of turning this into a competitive franchise pretty recently, so I agree.

I was so excited to report here when I found out that Jack's name was actually John. I had no idea it was a common thing. Everyone was quick to stamp on my excitement and make me feel stupid : (

Count me in on reuniting GLO. Those guys are so good together, and none are as good when separated. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just got home from the game (stopped at the gym after). The most obvious thing that stuck out to me was that, for the second Ottawa-Sabres game in a row, the Sabres had no ability to peel themselves off of the perimeter with the puck. Ottawa, of all teams, has their slot on lockdown - against us and only us. This continues for the second coach in a row (really, about the 5th coach in a row) and is evidently because we only have about 2 forwards that can hang onto a puck in any area where the possession might be contested, much less do anything with it. Everyone else NEEDS the shield of the boards to have a prayer at keeping it. It is our biggest long term offensive issue. We need to acquire players that can do things with the puck in traffic, in dangerous areas, and who are mentally inclined to drive or get the puck to those areas at every opportunity. Man, Frolik is awful with the puck on his stick. Good PKer from what I can see. This is the team we built, and so it's no surprise that they struggle the way they do. The most alarming thing is that Ottawa seemed just as skilled as we are, and we're supposed to be years apart in a rebuild cycle. Hell, their transitions seemed miles smoother than anything I've seen from our Sabres in a decade. The most depressing thing is watching teams like Vancouver, who made the playoffs in the McEichel year and started a real slide after that, sitting in first place in their division despite their management being the butt of NHL management jokes the entire time, zooming past us in a purported rebuild. We haven't, and still aren't, getting this right. They played Botterill's interview on the way home, and there was so much in there about developing skill, seeing our team get better and develop and learn how to win, but these are the same guys doing the same thing they were doing last October. Every single word he spoke rang hollow and wasn't really supported by anything tangible. My anger at the current state of things peaked in August, so I'm not even mad. Just bummed. Frolik, Vesey, Sheary, Vlad, Pouliot. I understand Botterill's depth forward type preference at this point. It does nothing for me. He very clearly looks for straight line skating speed (and yet we still feel so slow, even/especially when these guys have the puck) and a nice number in the even strength goal column. A good thing in a vacuum, but I don't think the film on any of these guys would have suggested that they could come play together in a depth role and contribute regular offense. I don't think Botterill is very good at watching players on other teams and projecting them into their roles he has planned for them on our team, accurately. It's absolutely killing us, and as a result, we are left with praying that having to fill like 6 forward slots in one offseason will go well enough that we can compete for a wild card spot in Jason's fourth season as GM. The building was emptier than it was for the Predators game I saw during the long winter stretch in 2013-14.

Each of these guys are just as quick as most of Botterill's forward acquisitions over the last three offseasons, and he has maintained his desire of "speed" and "even strength goals" throughout

which would I rather have? The answer is yes

I can see this symbolically, I guess my feelings on our playoff chances just haven't been moved by this team even an inch since August

I would be pleasantly surprised if we went 4-3-2. This would represent a slight uptick in our points percentage relative to our first 50 games, which ultimately determines the final standings. Agreed with the first point, though an astounding fact to consider is that all but one skater that was with us for our stunning collapse last season was still in the organization up to the Scandella trade.

I think your last sentence in conjunction with the first post paints a false dichotomy, as far as what analytics are and what information they provide. Where do the analytics say that Mitts should have started in the AHL? There are no analytics on what potential offseason development can do to a player his age, and as far as I'm aware, if you were to list the top 13 forwards on our roster in early October by the previous season's analytics, he'd be in the top 12 and would thus make the team. Now, of course I agree that he should not have been in the NHL this year or last year, with the benefit of hindsight (though I've always been more lukewarm on him and on his presence in the NHL tthan the average Sabre fan) but there isn't some set of analytics out there that presents the binary decision to you, and gives you the rock solid answer, about Mitts' situation or literally any other hockey decision that you highlight. Another example would be Carter Hutton - I don't think their decision to not waive Hutton has anything to do with "not using analytics." First of all, nobody needs analytics to give a full analysis of Carter Hutton's season, and I'm unaware of goalie analytics that are significantly more useful/telling than traditional measures of goaltending, relative to some advanced stats we have for skaters. But Carter has been bad enough that the goals allowed column in his list of starts, by itself, is enough for a non-hockey fan to tell you that he shouldn't be playing. Which obviously means that there are other reasons Carter still gets used. On the head coaching level, they are clear - Carter generally only plays now when we have back to backs, and he's balancing the fact that starters traditionally play worse in a back to back second game than even the numbers Hutton has this year, and so it's worth taking the risk to start Hutton and hope you get a game like @Toronto a few weeks back. General workload concerns for Ullmark will give his backup starts no matter who the backup is, and this has nothing to do with an organization's investments in and abilities with analytics. And on the GM level, I'm sure Jason is well aware that Hutton is trash, and while I'd love for him to waive Hutton and bring up someone else like Hamburglar or something, it's naive to assume that we have a clear answer available and it's really that easy to fix and will definitely work, while doing no damage to contracts, cap, AHL team, player good will etc, and the only thing stopping us from doing this is that we don't use analytics. Everyone and their mother knows Hutton sucks and they are making the decision to keep the organization goaltending ladder stable as is for the benefit of UPL, Johansson, and Ullmark, while hoping that Hutton can rebound to where he was in the first month or so of the season. I disagree with this decision, but I also disagree with the idea that it's an example of faulty analytics use. What on earth do the analytics purport to claim about draft choices? As far as I know no relevant hockey advanced stat is used in the leagues these kids are coming out of, and they'd be far less useful when the goal is to figure out which of these kids will be great NHLers in 5 years than it is to describe already established players in stable and well-known NHL environemnts now, which advanced stats are still incredibly vague and mediocre at doing anyway, even if they do beat out other traditional stats I'd never have brought Sobotka back this season, but he didn't hurt Skinner and Johansson's production, and nobody we've put with them since has done a better job at making that line do its thing, even if they've improved its underlying metrics. Jeff and Marcus are a +2 with Vlad (if you don't like the way I presented that info, then I'll give the same information this way - they have a 57 GF% with Vlad) and are -6, or 12.5 GF% without him. Now, it's true that he was an expected goal anchor for them, and their metrics got better as soon as he got hurt, and I even believe that long term there is no way that Vlad in a top six role is sustainable, because he also did well in that same position for us through November 2018, before the cliff that came after that for him and for us during his shifts, but Ralph's decision to keep putting out a line that keeps winning its matchups is not an objectively wrong decision, and it is not the result of an inescapable binary pro vs. anti analytics decision tree. These stats in general are so touchy and take so long to settle into their peak (sometimes borderline useless) predictive values that getting mad about lineup choices on this basis has basically no merit, and the idea that they should simply go with the best advanced stats lineup every night and would end up with a good record is fallacious, because it would in turn fundamentally change roles and usage to the point that we can't even trust the initial analytics anymore. On top of that, which analytics should we use? Because 90-53-17 had worse Corsi and expected goals, but better shots and high danger chances and actual goals than 90-53-anyone else. So which one is the right decision for Thursday night versus Arizona? The Sabres don't suck because of an analytics problem, they suck because they are incapable, relative to other teams in the league, of finding and/or developing NHL talent, and building it into a cohesive team that can come out victorious over other NHL teams about 54% of the time over the course of a ***** ton of games. Not because they refuse to look at a player's expected goals percentage (I guarantee you they see all these stats and more that we've never dreamed of every time they make any roster decision). They just do too many things wrong or badly, compared to the amount that even good organizations will inevitably goof up. Detailing everything both good and bad about our organization would far exceed the scope of hockey analytics in depth and complexity and none of us would be capable of doing it alone This post got a lot bigger than I intended it and is no longer directly a response to Liger, just points being made in general that outline why I get so sick and tired of the discussion of hockey analytics from all angles. There are obv ways to use analytics that will give you more insight to things you didn't get to see yourself than trad stats. I'd love it if the hockey stats fan community stuck to using them that way, rather than doing what they actually do. Which is use a RAPM chart as if the first and second and third standard deviations grow directly proportionally with the player's standing/competence in that stat, and scrape NHL data for individual games, post the charts on twitter, and insinuate their own superior hockey knowledge because of this, despite the extent of their written conclusions being "x was pretty good" and "y did a bad job tonight." (coughcoughChadcoughsorrybudbutit'sinsufferable) I mean really, the reason we prefer corsi to +/- is literally entirely because of an increase in sample size, telling me the expected goal split of the second period of the game and asserting it tells me whether the Sabres were good or bad in that period literally blows up the entire point of the move in the direction of better stats in the first place

He's just doing that because he identified the important parts of his roster skeleton (a second line with at least two decent-to-good offensive players on it) that he wants to keep intact even through injuries. It's not about giving Zemgus a chance at the top line, it's about keeping two lines that can produce together, and honestly Zemgus is a much safer choice for that spot than most of our other forwards while we wait for Olofsson to get better. And Eichel is historically fine offensively with Zemgus as his LW, so as a stopgap it's not a bad thing. Though I'd keep alternating Vesey in there every once in a while ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I confess to not paying as close attention to games as I used to, but I still get confused about Colin Miller's treatment just based on what I see when he plays. Like, if I was running a franchise on NHL 20 and watching these games, he'd have been healthy scratched zero times this year, along with Dahlin, Risto, Joki, and Montour (and Scandella before he got traded). I haven't seen any stretches of hockey from Colin significantly worse than the bad stretches these guys and any other decent NHL defensemen go through. But Ralph is now the second coach to have him as a healthy scratch, and Ralph does it pretty often. I'm deferring to Ralph on this one because he has generally earned my trust to this point, I'm just wondering what I'm missing about Colin Miller's game. Sometimes he takes ill-advised shots while passing up a better passing decision but again you can find tics like that for any player

No disrespect but I'm a little skeptical you/any Sabres fan watched a meaningful amount of those games, which include a bunch of losses in which they allowed 5-6 goals to every good team they played, while losing the narrow games to trash heaps like Detroit and NJ(twice) So I don't really trust the claim that they looked good in those games Which is different from saying that Ottawa can beat us tonight if we don't play well, which I certainly agree with

I agree that it's completely useless. But it's closer to Swamp's idea than anything else we could ever have access to, and was jogged into memory when I read his post lol The insufferable parts of hockey analytics twitter regularly post this updated chart with the importance of a normal person keeping track of their bills in a spreadsheet or something it's kinda silly

Found it: Of course, this list gives us zero information about the nature of the work these guys do, and how their GMs and coaches apply it

I'm gonna look for that list that compiles each team's "analytics" employees. Then you can just skim it and compare the size of the department to the team's recent success

Who also coincidentally aren't the guys having their worst seasons as Sabres You do not. They are 1-6-5 since beating us the game before Christmas.

My first game of the year. Gonna take my sister to one of the Detroit games early next month too, the tickets are so cheap

Things can change, but this year looks particularly tough as far as getting into the playoffs goes. There's a team pacing for 98 points that does not hold a playoff spot, which would break the record that keeps getting tied by teams in OUR division. (Boston a few years back, and Florida a couple of years ago) The worst team in the eastern conference playoffs today is pacing for 100 points. This is unusual, even just midseason, so even though there's no guarantee that the bar stays that high there's a good chance that it's on the higher end of the historical spectrum this year. There almost certainly won't be any low 90 point teams in, much less the 80something point teams the west has been sending recently.