Randall Flagg

How about this: A team constructed under the ownership of Terry Pegula has never made the playoffs

Honestly this game was fun and in successful seasons would have been seen as unlucky but a fine effort, don't worry, we'll get back on track Friday with our 5th win in the last 8. With the context of this season and last and the one before and so on it's impossible to see the game with this attitude This team just lost Swamp f*cking D Can a hockey team get lower than that? I don't mean that in a bad way, just there's no superfan more resolute in the face of the ***** this team gives us

I've already braced for the fact that we're going to see Eichel in Boston before his contract runs out The talk has started among fans, and it never goes away/doesn't accelerate once it starts

I think I found a better way to phrase it - Dahlin's rookie year was spent as a good player, with flashes of top-pairing abilities. His highlights are in line with what 1Ds can do. McDavid, MacKinnon, Matthews, had top line (top pair equivalent for forwards) NHL allstar baselines whose flashes were of "nobody else on this entire planet can do this" territory. This difference was tangible. it's why Matthews was like 10th in Hart voting in his rookie year, 2nd among all skaters in goals, and why McDavid in a full schedule would have competed for the Art Ross. MacKinnon's production was lower, but still 70 points in a season where 85 wins the Art Ross. And he was blowing people's doors off, especially in the playoffs. The defense equivalent of these things is measurable and not something Dahlin approached. He was of ~3D baseline, and showed flashes of 1D play on occasion. These guys were All star, top line player baseline, with flashes of best on the planet at what they do.

Without a doubt. That's why I'm going to fight like hell against the idea that the rotten core needs to be blown up when we haven't even put together a serious core of good hockey players yet We've won 11 of 25 games. Ottawa can say the same thing

That playoff run can't be counted as his tenure, can it? That team bottomed out at 14-18-4 in December, and had already started the run, going 13-5-2 from that point to the day he bought the team. He didn't really touch anything until the offseason right?

Since you mentioned him earlier...you can see how he plays differently from the rest of these guys right? His hockey is a holdover from strong teams' brands, that have left their mark on him. Good teams play hockey that way, and then the bold in your post is the thing they have to work on and worry about the most. When they fix it collectively, they win cups. For us, not only do we have the same issues with the same nature as this urgency you refer to...but Marcus Johansson is the only guy on our team that can play that hockey in the first place, and when Marcus Johansson is wowing us in that regard, we're in it deep! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think it's more likely that Botterill is allowed to be this bad this season AND next season than it is that his seat is getting warm

Risto couldn't catch a pass from Ullmark that hit him right in the stick. We never touched the puck again

I'll always tell ya how much I like Jake McCabe I'll rarely try and convince you that he's a good player lol

12 (plus whatever else he gets today) points in those 7 games, and we may well lose 5 of them in regulation

Right, and when ROR was here doing it, the ONLY faceoff discussion that ever happened in GDTs was "why aren't we winning faceoffs" I remember many times "ROR wins faceoffs but it only feels like he wins the not important ones" when no, that's just what 60% looks like, slightly better than half

Brindamour lost many important faceoffs, in addition to winning a few more than that. It's just the nature of the thing that you don't even realize it when you DO have that guy because even that guy never feels like he wins the important ones

Nobody does that When ROR went over 60% for us and broke the record for faceoff wins in a season, he also lost the 2nd most faceoffs of any skater in the NHL, behind only Crosby It was regular talk around here how he never seemed to win the important ones, when in reality winning 60% of your faceoffs (objectively great) and carrying that to maybe a few important ones per game means the best of the best can go great lengths of time seemingly only losing important ones (like ROR in the last two rounds of the playoffs)

Comical at this point that these are all forward injuries. If that isn't the hockey gods telling Jason something

I trashed Joki so hard in September and he's already my favorite Sabre

He remembered how to finish breakaways!

MacKinnon was closer to a superstar forward his rookie year than Dahlin was a Norris defenseman, by a fair amount. Though MacKinnon's trajectory is certainly a reality check. If you can't tell the feeling I'm talking about, can't feel the difference between Dahlin's rookie year and those other guys', we can't really get anywhere with this discussion. I'm not assigning much value to these differences because those guys are exceptions and Dahlin plays D, but the sentiment is a real feeling and incredibly frustrating for fans of a team that lost for 5 years and tried to collect high end talent while doing so

Sick mitts (TM)

The position wrinkle taken into account, yeah. But the other guys were on highlight reels and in award discussions, not the Calder, at this point. That's what I mean by NHL impact

If you booed a team every time they were losing after a period, even the cup winners would be booed by their fans a few dozen times, which doesn't strike me as reasonable. They should be booed when endless listlessness and effortlessness result in bad on-ice results which wasn't the case in this game and isn't the case in most of them IMO.

Yeah, I thought we were better than them. We're gonna score 4 Trying to seed this into our brains are ya??

I get inkman's sentiment. It seems like all the top picks we get just aren't quite the same as the top picks we see other teams get. We did "better" in our 2013-15 tanks than the Oilers did, and yet Eichel and Reinhart are a shadow of what McD and Draisaitl do together. Dahlin's impact on NHL ice is nothing like that of Matthews, McDavid, MacKinnon. Though Eichel/Reinhart/Dahlin are more normal in that regard, while the guys taken all around ours are generally the exceptions.

Miller sucks! We're going to score 4 tonight.

Dunleavy calls every play as if he's trying to justify what the Sabre does as the right choice.

Every single member of our team is comically bad at 3 on 1s and 2 on 1s