Randall Flagg

Their floor is wild card team until they show me otherwise

Love the baseball game story

Lance has never said anything interesting. It's like he gets paid to say, "Kevyn is looking but won't overpay. As such, I expect [mediocre current veteran who didn't do the job well enough the previous season and is the reason we are talking about the position in the first place] and [unremarkable prospect] to compete for the spot." And to say it with cool, rational tones, to pass it off as smart and pragmatic "There really is just no other way that makes sense, there never has been, 12 year drought was just programmed into the determinism of the universe"

Picasso's did not make their own dough in 2012

In 21/22 he played what, 6 games? Off the top of my head. His league that year was the AHL and he threw up an .880 or something. These numbers are made up because I can't look them up right now Barely cracking the top 50 is exactly what I'm talking about lol, I don't care what akira Schmid later did behind an elite nhl team the next year. upl's track record is now a bunch of consecutive years of bottom-of-the-barrel goaltending for whatever league he played in (not had a cup of coffee in for a couple weeks)

UPL has been one of the very worst goalies in whatever league he's played in for about 5 straight seasons now Thanks for pointing that out @tom webster, it is a great fact for highlighting the lunacy of our goaltending situation

Thompson doesn't have to vanish to experience statistical regression. He could put up 35 goals and 80 points and vastly improve his defense, but that leaves the team short 14 goals from last year 47-47-94 was a CRAZY season for Tage and should by no means be expected as a baseline even if he is capable of more in theory. That's part of why I'm still so mad we wasted it due to problems obvious before last October

Aren't all the rumors that Matthew doesn't want to leave?

For the record, if the Sabres miss the playoffs this year with the majority of important players being reasonably healthy, not one person should have any interest in giving KA another summer to play with the roster

Most projections based on statistical models will not like the Sabres this year. Not because they're young or unproven, either. Nothing the Sabres did move any of the metrics that matter for the models, and the goalie situation is a red flag for them (as it should be for sane humans too) The models see about 6 outlier seasons driving our great offense and say, what are the odds that all happens again, oh and BTW your 2RW will be MIA for a while

This has been true or said to be true for all of the 12 years of not making the playoffs. If they miss this year they are off track, something went wrong, and a lot of bets are off for what the circumstance will be the following year.

If this is their team and it misses the playoffs this coming year, there is zero reason to believe they are only ONE year away then

Every new conversation on this site is just a slight alteration of the same core conversation The differences are just window dressing

I'm so much worse at this than i thought i would be I used lindback for sabres lightning lol

Any idea who it was?

Everyone has been clear this entire time that we are engaged in fantasy, so it's unnecessary to point it out If McDavid asks out, the Oilers will trade him. They don't want to and don't have aw much leverage as you think. My trade and his are only off in value by one great piece. If we come with that offer, what team is beating it, and what's the offer they make that beats it, knowing that the Oilers don't have a lot of leverage?

I'm only still posting because i do NOT accept the reality of work tomorrow

Trade: Tage Thompson, Henri Jokiharju, Matt Savoie, Isak Rosen, Jiri Kulich, 2024 1st, 2025 1st for Connor McDavid Skinner - McDavid - Tuch JJP - Cozens - Quinn Mitts - Krebs - Greenway Rousek - Z - Okposo (this is a YOUNG forward corps) Dahlin - Samuelsson Power - Clifton Johnson - Boosh (This is a VERY YOUNG defense corps) Levi ( a VERY YOUNG stud goalie) goalie Benson, Östlund, Neuchev, Novikov etc. Sabres fans: idk bro, im a little worried about our 2028 depth when the 2025 first rounder should be hitting his stride. Better to finish this year with 93 points imo

Channeling @SwampD, "who needs a 60 goal, 155 point 5x Art Ross, 3x Hart winner?"

Again, we'd have more players of that pedigree than most teams for the era from which we are abandoning the assets, so there isn't a real hole there. sure we are trading some 22/24 picks away in that pile, but we still have Krebs/Cozens (2019), Quinn (2020), Power (2021), Östlund (2022), Benson (2023) in that scenario. Where is the hole? That's the POINT of doing what we did! And I don't care what McDavid did or didn't do in Edmonton. Imagine what he'd do here with our stacked roster vs their collection of nobodies

Like most things Buffalonill says, it's more likely/correct than his naysayers will ever consider because he has developed a reputation. The Sabres getting good and then getting over the hump with a different coach would be in line with so many stories of rebuilding teams across all sports

There isn't a clean way to quantify how scoring decreases when teams change their philosophy, but many players speak openly of the phenomenon, including Buffalo's most recent Colorado expat. Scoring wasn't an issue this year directly because of the thing that also kept us out of the playoffs. Great, we finished 3rd in the league in goals in 2022 - we also finished 3rd worst in franchise HISTORY, in goals against, and had scoring-chance-against/xGA/etc. metrics in line with the Bedard-watchers. To fix that to a reasonable degree will require some unknown curtailing in a lot of what drove our scoring, and that is abandoning positioning for the rush pass that often never made it there (but was awesome when it did) I don't know exactly to what degree McDavid could help a team remain elite at scoring while transitioning styles to become a championship contender, but I know that he is surreal to a degree I won't see again for decades, and that a coach who, if nothing else, can get the most out of his players, would be incredibly interesting to watch as he tries to figure it out Again, teams are trading for guys the Oilers have put on their 2nd and 3rd lines the last few years and then immediately buying them out, because Edmonton has spent the last 5 years putting together garbage rosters. They literally have McDavid, Draisaitl, and fourth-liners/tweeners. It's disgusting. I'm not interested in team-level metrics because of that. The fact remains that nobody has impacted the game like Connor has when on ice since people started inventing new ways to measure that 20 years ago. And nobody has come particularly close. I'm not promising anything, but i'm not scared of anything either, especially because in theory it would be possible to do this and still have a full roster and a full prospect pool, thanks to Kevyn's stockpile, off of which he has so far refused to budge

My strategy would still leave more first round-equivalent players from 2019 through 2023 drafts than the average team accrues during a span of that length, and doesn't touch any 2nd, 3rd rounders etc. so explain where the "large holes" and "risks" lie, aside from the terror of things mattering right now, which I'm becoming more and more aware of as the offseason drags on McDavid dragged a bottom 3 roster to a WCF last year

I don't think it's as simple as "fixing a statistical problem we don't have" A huge part of our defensive issues come from the way we play on offense. Fire-wagon hockey. When we calm this down as we should, we simply aren't going to score as much Unless we have a transcendent talent who can play the part of the more mature, winning style of hockey, and still score at historic levels This could unlock an unprecedented ceiling

I'd LOVE to use those assets for a goalie and defensemen. But just like my thought experiment, that's not gonna happen Which team is beating Tage plus 4 first round picks? I don't think we'd need to add Quinn or JJP. if we did, take out savoie or something I agree that the most logical path to immediate cup contention is to add D and goalies, that we don't in a vacuum need more scoring. I just view a potential mcdavid addition as a worthwhile detour off the path. The Sabres would be uniquely positioned to have probably the best shot at Connor if he asked out, and while the cup is always the main focus, there is something mystical and franchise defining about adding a historically great player, who is doggedly chasing a legacy It could be a two birds, one stone scenario And it would help in other ways. We are on Pesce's no trade list. It doesnt matter if we have piles of assets that would not be here if we made a trade like the above. We will still never be able to get him. Is that still true if 97 wore blue and gold?