Randall Flagg

Ralph why

He'd better be right cuz that's a peeper against if we lose it.

Pretty soft goal. No excuse for him to be that wide open though.

Skinner has had a rough couple weeks with the puck on his stick eh?

Team-wide memorandum: NO passing out of 2 on 1s until somebody creates a shot on goal off of one of them.

I just think Minny has given us a lot of space in the offensive zone and that our players aren't nearly as close to the cliff as we are at this point, not that the fans are unjustified That was simply not offside

IMO the Sabres are going to win this game

Dang, this was about to become the most meta GDT ever

?

Olofsson-Eichel-Reinhart Skinner-Rodrigues-Sheary Vesey-Bogosian-Lazar Girgensons-Larsson-Gilmour

I have two comments on that period, both about the defensemen at the point. 1.) For as long as our defensemen try to shoot for the corners and the top shelf, they will not only not score goals, but will miss the net most of the time 2.) Risto had a very nice slap pass attempt for a stick in the slot rather than doing so, with about 4 mins left. Let's see more of stuff like that from up there.

I've watched that guy get erased in every playoff series he's ever played in aside from a late power play against the Miller Canucks, which was the worst team I've ever seen in playoff hockey. And regardless, I'd still add Gaudreau - but you missed the half of the post that points out how much it would gut our team

Neal still sucks, but it is funny watching him score goals for Edmonton after not doing so for Calgary, while Lucic mopes about the ice incapable of playing hockey

The quotes will sound better when the team is better and winning. People here re-posted, loved, and talked about quotes from the 8-1-1 locker room, and quotes from the win streak as well. We tried the armchair psychology last year

I'm one of the more "talent matters most" guys...but man, Gaudreau would both empty our reserves and make our "tough opponent" problem worse...

I don't even think Murray's primary objective with that offseason was fast tracking a rebuild to contention status. It was simply putting a bare bones NHL team on the ice so we didn't have to watch another 60 point team for a third season in a row. Without the moves he made, that team had no goalie, and 3 top six forwards, two of which were set to start their rookie seasons, neither of whom were 20. The third being Matt Moulson, or Tyler Ennis I guess (both these guys immediately sucked post-tank)

The players see the sh*tshow that happens whenever anyone says anything that isn't a typical cliche. I hope we've learned our lessons about arbitrarily assigning value to locker room quotes to be honest They've experienced so much losing here that it'd honestly be corny for someone to be fuming after Chicago. They fumed to no avail last December through February, got no help, then broke, then still didn't get enough help It is what it is

Bizarrely confident that Gilmour will be that 2nd line forward we desperately needed

It's like when you're a kid and you blow up a balloon halfway and tie it off, and throw it as hard as you can at your sibling, and it sails gently in slow motion, getting led astray by a draft going through the room, falling to the ground 2 feet to your right instead of going forward That's Philip Rivers throwing a football

There was a very lively debate here in 2015 whether or not to bring in ROR. The reason some people were hesitant was because we had Zemgus Girgensons - we didn't need ROR! That seems silly now, but at the time, it was a valid consideration - we just had a very young two way forward put up a 20 goal, 40 point pace season on a garbage team. In that light, you want to be careful about how much you spend on a similar type of player. I guarantee the front office had that discussion many times before the trade as well. The fact that it was a concern, and yet turned out the way it did for both players, is EXACTLY why you cannot set yourself so far back like we did. You cannot possibly get all of that stuff right, even if you're the smartest GM in the league. You will whiff and whiff a lot. When you whiff from our starting point, you never get out. However, if you're a competent organization, you can whiff on a Dougie Hamilton trade, and then three straight first round picks in which you acquire DeBrusk, Zboril, Senyshyn rather than Barzal, Boeser, Aho etc., have everyone who just rooted for their own team to tank laughing in your face all summer, and still be a cup contender year in and year out despite drafting errors that make our trading of first rounders look like GM of the Year moves. Those picks we could have kept make no difference in where we are right now, just like whiffing on management decisions for a two year stretch didn't hurt an otherwise competent franchise in any meaningful way.

They've made a couple good moves. The first ROR trade, and the Skinner trade, were brilliant.

We're absolutely going to smoke the Wild.

To put it more concisely, the average organization has X amount of value in NHL assets, or assets with NHL potential. You always want to stay near this number, even in a rebuild. The Sabres were okay on the non-NHL asset side, but they reduced the NHL part so much that they were at, say, X/2 in organizational assets. They didn't deplete their organizational pool of talent and potential, they severed a massive chunk of it incredibly rapidly. And what little value they had left, was all in the non-NHL parts. Which are notoriously horrendously difficult to turn into NHL skill and talent. No matter how big your draft pick and prospect pile, very few "new" elite players enter that tier every year, the same goes for very good players. It was all they had to work with. And their talent pool is still way thinner than it should be today because of it, it's never recovered. It's gotten better, arguably every year, and they're still woefully behind because they kneecapped themselves so hard at the beginning. You ALL see it when you make comments like "man, I want to improve the forward corps...but what do we have to trade that would actually do it, without blowing holes open elsewhere?" This is literally from the tank, because our organization looked like 4th line 4th line AHL line AHL line AHL prospects, lots of draft picks It is more or less IMPOSSIBLE to turn that into a winning NHL organization no matter how many picks you have, unless you have a string of the best drafts in NHL history, period. They were fixable from where Darcy left them, even though it was a bad place. They took eight steps further and made it unfixable, to draft a guy nobody even likes anymore, and never had a ***** chance in the first place. Any flawed player taken in this spot, and every player outside McD or Crosby is a flawed player, wasn't going to win early in this situation, and was going to have the fans turn on them. It was set up the moment they decided to do what they did to the roster for two years. I guess that wasn't really more concisely

The tank was indeed a horrible move, and is ultimately what our problems today stem from. In order to finish below a 56 point finish for the Coyotes in the McEichel year, we had to obliterate our organizational depth to a degree that nobody has seen outside of an expansion team. In the two short years after the tank ended, the Sabres added: a 56 -> 75 point center in Eichel (the latter was his pace in the second year) a 40+ point winger in Sam a 25+G, 40+ point winger in Kane a ~60 point center in ROR a 45 point winger in Kyle Okposo Which is a talent swing in two years that you can more or less never guarantee happening again. It is incredibly rare for a team to see that much top six capable talent added in such a short span. And that team's forward depth was still among the worst in the league. This is with getting solid depth performances during that time from additions like Gionta, Foligno's development (remember, in 16-17, the FLG line was our best possession line at times). Girgensons shifting out of a 1C role. Since 2015, the sheer number of depth forwards we've brought in is ludicrous, but the crater we started from was so far below average and acceptable that we haven't been able to catch up to league average in this regard yet, nearly 5 years after the tank ended. Take a team that didn't tank but was mired in an extended stretch of mediocrity. It could be the Hurricanes, it could be the Flames. These teams, for a long time, didn't have great management, but they eventually got to a point where their middling forward additions coupled with nice development of prospects like Aho, Pesce, Slavin (no different from Jack/Sam's development) turned them into effective forward corps, but it took each team probably 5 years of having bad forward depth to do it. This is starting from far, far above where we did, when we had a 3rd line, a 4th line, and 2 AHL lines at our healthiest. It was never going to be an easy fix unless literally every single move over a 5 year span was the correct one, which isn't something you can realistically come close to guaranteeing for any NHL team no matter how good the management. They haven't been perfect, and have NEVER fixed the forward chasm, even with plenty of GOOD moves for GOOD players at all levels of the forward group (ROR and Skinner and Kane were good-to-great top 6 additions, Mojo is a good middle 6 addition, KO was good for a year before his injury, and was fine as a 4th liner, Sheary an annoying but reasonable depth addition, Gionta had two nice years etc.) No, Coin White, Jack Roslovic, and JT Compher all together would not have made the difference. Not even Brock Boeser, and using hindsight on these draft picks we "could have kept" (in reality, having kept them, we would have entered post tank seasons with depleted TOP SIX as well as depth, which was untenable for a fan base asked to sit through 164 purposeful tanking games) is a joke considering you'd be trying to shoot down tank hindsight with the same logic. Most teams miss most picks as far as impact players go, and we're no different. We intentionally made the starting line 5 years back of what usually takes years to develop from in the first place by choosing to tank, and in doing so acquired a center that more and more people turn on by the day anyway. In addition to his partner in crime, who half the fanbase has already been lukewarm towards for years. I love Jack and Sam and never want to trade them, but not even McDrai is enough to pull a team out of the abyss, and we gave up so much ground organizationally to get them and they're nowhere close to McDrai. Even if you take every single one of the big mistakes out of the last 5 years, this team isn't close to cup contention, despite the fact that the timelines of every single tank intellectual are documented here for all to see (me included) and had cup contention as starting, like, last year, after a nice playoff run the year before (when we finished in last again). The average tank supporter had cup contention within 5 years, liked/justified most of the team's moves along the way, got angry when some of us didn't, and then pretend now like they've had their finger on the pulse of this thing all along despite being incorrect about virtually everything

wint is the best twitter account in the universe