Randall Flagg

I assume @dudacek is present?

So many people love them and I don't understand

In this addition of "I was wrong"... it woulda been cool to have acquired JT Miller this summer Have we really won just 4 of our last 17? Dang Well we know Reinhart's gonna score tonight, so just have to find 2 or 3 more goals somewhere.

Disagree, they should never wear all red. Fun fact: all red in this game was chosen/influenced by Kim Pegula, who liked the red look in that snow game and figured this one had the potential to be like that one.

This was just to point out that among NHL fans, the consensus seems to be that Eichel's season is not surprising because they view him as an elite player, which is a contrast to a suggestion in the post I was responding to.

Just checked, we haven't won 2 games in a row since October 22nd, or 19 games ago. ?

Yes. Praying that I''ll be able to make a bet like that sometime in the near future!

Phil said the same thing, which is why he used Vlad 4th most of any skater during the worst offensive season I've seen from a Sabre in a non-tank year. Does that appear to have convinced me that Vlad was actually good, contrary to my own eyes? No? Then why would Ralph saying that this year? And I've already said that Vlad is obviously not as bad this year as he was last year, though that improvement almost solely comes in the neutral and defensive zones. And he's open to criticism, but there is no player for which that won't happen at some point, unless he's an all-time legend like Ovechkin. You can be concerned or get mad about it, but you can also set your watch to it, so I don't find it useful to spend emotion when stretches like this happen, even if I'll acknowledge that it'd be nice if Skinner was scoring more. The 19 games you refer to are still at a >20 goal pace, which, if this is a down streak, we should be thankful for that haha. Like stretches like this will never NOT happen for goal scorers, so I just don't get a lot out of tapping my foot and waiting for it to end, I'm more concerned about the fact that we haven't built a roster to cover for the obvious fact that goal scoring is streaky

Who is surprised? If you read the Eichel thread on hfboards, other team's fans are like "well yeah he destroys us every time we play him so it's not surprising he's scoring a lot" Who is debating? This thread has simply shown me that some people define elite as top ~5 players in the game, which we all agree Jack isn't, while some widen that to ~20-25, which he certainly is. Which, like you said, is more semantics, and perhaps we can just call Jack "in the 98.5th percentille" to be rigorous about it. True, but what was ROR's biggest goal when he was here? Does that say anything about his ability to play when it counts? Of course it didn't - the team never provided him an opportunity for a big moment. However, when placed on a team that had its ***** together, him doing the same stuff he did here also meant him doing it in the Stanley Cup Finals and winning a Smythe because of it. It's the same argument with Jack - the ability is obviously there for him to make a huge impact when it matters - a frantic back and forth game between a high-octane Habs team ended in success, a game with like 5 lead changes, Jack leading the way. Primary plays on most of Skinner's late game heroics in the last two years. Lugging us on his back in Boston, not only for his 4 point games that singlehandedly won each game, but his primary role in meaningless-season comebacks from down 2 goals in that building more than once, including October 2017 while I was ducking in a bathtub for a tornado warning and in the winter of 16-17 as well. He leads our team in OT goals by far since he got here. He has a slate of 100 single game performances on the level of the Vegas home game last year that would grant him instant classic status had they happened in the playoffs, and the exact same thing could have been said about Ryan for his time here, and the change to a successful team showed that to be true, just like making this team successful around a man with 39 points and a +10 in just 29 games will allow him to rack up the same kind of moments on a much greater platform.

1.) We're already well down the road of the Sabres sending me in a different direction. "Gain a reputation as an early riser and you can sleep til noon" describes my posting quality here lately 2.) This could not be further from the truth - analytics can create polarization for players like Risto, who most would agree is neither top pairing nor AHL quality, but Sobotka's game tape from last season speaks volumes all by itself. He was dreadful no matter what you were looking for - offensive effectiveness, defensive ability, amount of effort put into hockey games. It's why I was railing on him months before I allowed myself to take serious looks at analytics sites (January is okay to start). His offensive zone inabilities, magnified by his unearned ice time and contribution to the fact that it was the Sabres' #1 on-ice problem for much of the year, reached comical levels quickly. That the analytics pinned him as a bottom 3 skater at this stuff out of a set of 700+ only serves to emphasize the point, because hockey analytics are at their best when you're using them to find extremes among players. They're very good at this, even if they're not good at much else. For Vlad, any puck on his stick either skittered harmlessly wide at comically low speed, or was squeezed out of him along the boards. He was the most obviously offensively inept forward I've ever seen on the Sabres in a non-tank year, including Matt Ellis and David Legwand. It was evident before I ever looked at any stat. And I was saying it BEFORE it caused him to go on a streak of 43 games where he could only score one goal, that goal being a dribbler with 7 seconds left in a game we were down 4-1 with a goalie pulled. He wasn't close to scoring in those 43 games outside of that shining moment, and there was a reason for that, it wasn't a fluke he went that long despite being the 4th most used forward in that time (with less defensive tilt to his minutes than THREE other Sabres skaters who scored goals during that time, so you can't blame it on that)

This is what having an NHL goal scorer means. Goal scoring is incredibly prone to statistical variation, or in hockey terms, "having a hot stick" and then "gripping the stick too tight." Nobody is immune to it. He went through similar extremes last year, pacing for 60 goals for half a year, then going 24 games or so with just 1 or 2. It's what you sign up for when you have a player whose calling card is scoring goals. David Pastrnak hasn't slowed yet this year, but for example, last year he had 10 goals in his first 9 games, then 2 goals in 9 shortly after, finishing the season with 2 in the last 12. Matthews started last year with 10 goals in 6 games, ended with 3 in 11. Had a stretch of 13 games with just 1 goal, a different stretch of 6 in 5. Ovie last year: 17 goals in 14 games, followed by 1 in 10, and 4 in 16. Pat Kane: 11 in 11 to start the year, followed by 6 in 27. So it goes!

I definitely think the Sabres are going to make a trade sometime in the next year and a half haha, that post was just sarcasm Also I simply cannot afford to make that bet right now. But I hope you're right!

Even if he can't find THE trade, I hope that he can put something together that makes sense on paper, because we do need SOMETHING, and nothing would be the kiss of death for a team that's painfully close to having a chance to make it. The sense of urgency I feel is only increased when I see how much the Canadiens and Leafs are floundering with us. There's no reason this team can't be competing at the end, and getting the leg up we've been begging for would be huge for that. Tampa is lurking and well behind in games-played, so we have to assume they pass us, but that still leaves us within distance of Wild Card discusson. And we know a bad sabres roster has the capacity to fall through the floor, and aren't confident that this isn't another one of them. Man, if he does it and it works, we're buying playoff tickets in April. Come on Jason!!! It's so much easier to forgive effort that doesn't pan out. Josh Anderson. His stats (I think he's stuck on one goal lol) don't suggest he can score, but maybe they'll sell low, because he CAN score. And we know how heavy Columbus plays - he is a big boy. I doubt CBus would give him up though

This is true. The subject of the paper is something i had to give a presentation on last night. I started the slides the night before, and was working on them right up until the presentation, didn't know anything about the topic until I started the slides, and ***** nailed the talk It woulda been way worse if I had started the week before haha

What sucks balls is that if I put as many words into my paper tonight as I did into this GDT, I'd be done with schoolwork forever

Also, "we started losing when he entered the lineup." You'd think that how badly this argument burned a lot of people, just one year ago, would have illustrated how foolish it is. it was a lot harder to stick to my guns in the face of "ROR is obviously a cancer, look at us now (17-6-2) compared to them (last in the league). What changed? He was here when we were in last, now he's there and they're in last." Of course, that was nonsensical and devoid of substance at the time, but it was so omnipresent among Sabres fans that I had to quit forums for half a year, and even then, dining 45 minutes outside of Buffalo on a non-game-day in january, a conversation wafted over the booth about ROR's cancerous nature, and I resigned to the fact that it doesn't matter whether or not things make sense, you just have to deal with the fact that they'll get said My point is, that if I could weather that hockey argument through all of that stuff even with our early success and their early struggles, and emerge on the right side of it while some Buffalo fans could fry an egg on their faces, this one ain't nothing in comparison, and Brandon Montour's presence is not why we're losing lol I wasn't even thinking of Sobotka, because I don't remember you talking about him much last season and he's been nowhere near as disrespectful to the crest this season, but more of your inclination to play devil's advocate - hence the smiley :) Also, I'm the leader of the "don't post single-game advanced stats please" brigade

Challenge - calculate the percentage of my hockey-related posts that have used analytics in the last calendar year. $500 that it's less than half of a percent. Dead serious. Make the bet so I can buy some Bills playoff tickets. Phrased another way: I don't know what the hell you're talking about

Last year's cup winner dumped a coach when they needed to, and tried something desperate in goal while casting off a major reason their goaltending results were the worst in the NHL early on, which happened to pay off. it would have paid off in the form of winning more games if Binnington was the 28th best goalie in the NHL, given how bad the Allen-Johnson tandem was, but he was better than that. You can get lucky like that if you're not paralyzed by fear and indecision and trapping yourself left and right. It was clear when they were losing that their underlying game was just fine and being sabatoged by goalies and the psychological snowball effect, and the coaching and goalie changes were exactly what they needed to jar things loose - they weren't the moves because "oh that's what struggling teams do," that was calculated by an incredibly smart GM with a pointed vision. In contrast, we rode out Lehner-Johnson in 17-18 which very obviously sent the snowball right off the cliff, addressed that season's depth scoring issues with... Scott Wilson and nothing else, and hung onto Phil despite how lost last December, and then January, and then February, and then March were for our team. Putting these players through those two stretches of hockey, night after night, with zero meaningful change, was the most alarming and tone-deaf thing I've ever seen an NHL GM do, without exaggeration. The roster and special teams issues are tough to solve and I don't know how to solve them but he's burned all the rope any sane person would be willing to give him at this point, and we know what doing nothing will do to these guys, so the onus is on Jason/the Sabres to finally ATTEMPT to fix something they screwed up in the first place. Coaching changes are the easiest examples to cite, as they're the most popular and easy-to-do quick fix, and sometimes work and sometimes don't, but the Kings' trade for Carter won them a cup in 2012, they were on pace to miss the playoffs before the trade and finished 12-4-3 after it, when center depth was their most talked about issue at the time. There are surely countless examples of adjustments on a coaching level, especially to special teams, that change the course of the team's PK/PP in that season, and other coaching things that we wouldn't really know about as fans. Colorado's timely dumping of Duchene, who was a major distraction, wound up working out well for them. After the Jones-Johansen strength-for-weakness trade in January, Nashville went from out of a playoff spot to a 22-11-7 record down the stretch (105 point pace) and win just their third ever playoff series. If you don't think we can make a big splash, in 2009-2010, Montreal added Pouliot and Moore midseason, and Pouliot's 15 goals in 39 games, and Moore's 40 point pace and superb defensive and PK play helped a team that was 19-19-3 at the halfway point make the playoffs and eventually the ECF. There are surely more examples like this, but my memory doesn't contain them. Making changes doesn't always work, but sitting still with obvious critical flaws, whatever they may be, is guaranteed to not work, and I'm not ready to watch Jason do it for a third season in a row. I just like to pick on your Montour criticism because of your routine uncritical attachment to the worst hockey players the Sabres have to offer : ) Also, ink, I'm really sorry for the wall of text response and am actively trying to work on condensing this stuff into a more readable form, but it ain't working quite yet

Confession: I shut this game off at 4-1. Justification: I have my last ever school assignment, after 19.5 straight years of them, to finish. Counter: I'm still posting on Sabrespace rather than working on assignment

There are no trivial fixes in the NHL, but the Sabres under Botterill do little to attempt them in-season. Teams that aggressively address problems they have don't always win cups, but they do win some cups. Teams that have demonstrable systemic issues yet DON'T fix them never aren't bad. - Wayne Gretzky more or less

13-11-5. Gotta ramp it up at some point. Gotta get special teams fixed, said Sabres fans a month and a half ago. Don't just ride this one out, Buffalo Sabres Organization

You be nice to Jeff he's a nice boy

"watching Lucic carve up the defense" was the best we could hope for most nights under Nolan's second tenure, and it was usually much worse than that. The team and its coaching were abominations that cannot touch this team we have today, for all its flaws

I understand that the NHL standings don't use De Luca .500, but the standings i look at most often don't display points percentage. Given the impressive accuracy the De Luca .500 benchmark is for playoff teams, and that adding integers is much easier than dividing them, it's a really handy, quick way to figure out how your team is doing and whether they're good to keep cruising the way they are, or need to put their foot on the gas. Especially when you're looking at the standings with 50+ games left to play - everything is equally useless at that point because so much can happen, but when you're hovering at or above De Luca .500, you know you're in a good place and can move on to more intricate discussions of the position of your team. Plus, the extreme scenarios that illustrate why you can be good enough for the playoffs while being significantly below it literally never ever happen

I know we don't have a lot of assets with high trade value, so maybe we could offer sheet Brayden Point Offer sheet Sebastian Aho Offer sheet Matt Tkachuk Offer sheet Kyle Connor Wait for Cozens to be a top line caliber NHLer?