Randall Flagg

Bills, Sabres, who else?

He probably gets paid for his Die by the Blade articles, but I don't think he does any of his own stats/websites, so nothing about what he tweets should provide him with compensation. He's basically just a dude who made me think he had sources a while ago, but hasn't broken anything ever and has pretty boring hockey takes to come with an elitist attitude provided by stats

Agreed, I thought there was a fair amount of luck to it just based on the absurd direction the puck took from the heel of the blade, but it was definitely a move meant to get the puck to Conor.

42% of Sheary's goals, 38% of his points, came against the Metro division last year, who we only played 29% of the time. That's honestly not a large enough discrepancy to be remotely interesting, but since I looked it up, I'm posting the results here dammit

(Just to Sean already posting his charts, not to you linking them) Chad was ridiculous on twitter last night. Like 15 minutes into the game he's all "the underlying metrix confirm what my eye test is telling me, that 53-90-17 is getting caved in." People got on him for that because the line, like all others, ended up being fine, and he's all "guys that tweet was 15 minutes ago!" as if duh things change, you can't hold me accountable to what I said and believed 15 minutes ago! Not recognizing the fact that if you read along with your finger under the words while watching a hockey game, you're going to twist yourself into logical knots every single night and not have any clear structure to any of your beliefs, just because of the nature of the game. There's a reason why the best stats still take weeks and weeks to stabilize. Hell, even last year, people who did this at a team-level in December based on months of play wound up burned in April, May, and June, w.r.t. Buffalo and St. Louis. Stick to your principles for viewing and understanding hockey, watch carefully for months and months, and don't get too high or low (on an analytical level, of course you should celebrate wins with impunity and rage at losses), and when new trends appear take them into account. It's that easy. And if you're tweeting hot takes while watching heat maps develop in real time instead of watching the game, getting angry at people who call you out because of how fast things can change in a game, you've completely lost the plot

Derek Grant scored a goal tonight, musta heard me roasting him this week

I use and enjoy many hockey fancy stats. But I have a lot of twitter accounts to unfollow if we're going to get corsi updates and shot charts every 7 minutes. My first trip to NST for anything other than seeing what lines were used against whom, and ice time distributions, will be sometime in mid-November

Mostly just trying to get this to 1000 for PA at this point. Okposo's hair is cut pretty short.

Yeah but that was in July

McCabe is a MAN who eats minutes for BREAKFAST

While true, a Geno/Sid PP is just not something that's worth that trade-off.

And I know Swamp's going to disagree with me, but though I enjoy the chippiness in Risto's game, he can't take a penalty like that with two minutes left in the game. Just skate away. Or at least don't let your stick whack the guy in the face, be physical without that part.

Ooooh, here's something else I noticed. Skinner in Olofsson's spot on the power play was...not great.

Gonna call line 2 Jobotker. Also Skinner looked exactly how he did in the seven games before moving to Jack's line last year. Not, like, bad, but he's gonna be sniping goals with Jack before too long.

Matthews has 27 goals in 33 career October games

Johansson-Asplund-Olofsson is the preseason line you're thinking of. Johansson at C

You know who was almost completely missing today, despite usually being a staple in these games? Sidney Crosby. You know who Jack played against more than any other forward? Sidney Crosby.

Yeah, the "almost never" is a reference to what Doohickie mentions or when we need a goal. In general, I like the idea of trying hard to get Jack as much offense as possible, and spending effort on the PK is valuable but not in that way, and we have good PK forwards

I could honestly buy into Dahlin being sheltered a bit. I wouldn't make him last in ice time or anything, but let's see what fine-tuning Ralph has in store for him. Surely Ralph noticed the propensity for hand grenades last year.

Love that Jack is willing to, and seems to be able to, kill penalties. I read somewhere that when Auston was asked if he ever had, he basically said "no and I won't ever." That said, I would almost never use Jack on the penalty kill.

Maybe. I'm relying entirely on fuzzy memory there.

If Callaway is this excited, it was a good night to be a Sabres fan

You can find lots of individual wacky TOI deployments in random games any given year, I wouldn't really take them to heart for another few weeks.

A pretty natural spot for Evan to step in if KO gets the pressbox. He scored goals with those two the last time he was with them IIRC, and has similar shot suppression metrics. Probably our only other forward that wouldn't hinder its ability to do its thing.