Randall Flagg

Raanta is always hurt, so I guess Kuemper is effectively at least a 1b, and you're right that Raanta is cheap enough to make it not matter. Edit: NVM, the salary listed in the google search is way out of date

October is a weird month in the NHL so none of the games are gimmes and none of them are out of our reach. That is true always, but it's extra true early. We're not going to have a good handle on these guys until ~20-30 games in as always. Man I hate being in a division with Price, Rask, Vasi, Bobrovsky

Also, five of the road games are against teams you could easily argue are worse than the Sabres. (though I personally wouldn't make that argument for CBJ)

The Coyotes just gave their backup (to a very good goalie) Darcy Kuemper a two year extension, which is fine. But it's 4.5 AAV. That's really high, isn't it?

They could win anywhere from 3 to 10 of those probably, no idea where they'll fall

Interesting.

Let's be careful at practice today fellas

Happy hockey season! A little something to get us in the mood

***** you're taking all of the stuff i simply wasn't capable of hashing out and beautifully filling in the spaces left in my thoughts. Literally every line of this. Like, I wouldn't put Kyle anywhere near our lineup, but there's a difference between why I've hardly reacted to that versus the Sobotka thing, even though they're playing in place of the same sitting player. And this is the reason. I don't hate individual bad decisions on principle, and don't hate coaches trying things out and failing while doing so. But this decision in particular just continues to cement nagging fears about Jason in particular. I don't think my view and Jason's view of good NHL two-way or depth forwards overlaps even an inch. And I"m not saying I'm right or smarter than Jason, or could run/build a hockey team, but like everyone else, I value and defend my own views and the work I put in to develop them. Show those lines to any Sabre fan fresh off of the season in April and they'd throw something at you. Blue indicates fewer shots taken or allowed, so in the defensive zone, you want a lot of blue, a lot of red is bad.

True and Drunkard and I got a looooooooooooooooooot of push-back last summer for me to buy that the bold was obvious to everyone! ? And right on, eff the tank

Riding with Paul Stastny more than any other player (even defensemen) helped. In the ~10 blues games I watched to scout him and Berglund last year, despite oodles of ice time with Tarasenko, Vlad never really came close to a point, not even a secondary assist, so the point totals were a mystery to me at the time as well (I think I even brought that up in that post)

This is obviously a philosophical thing. Some people are more inclined to trust the coach and less inclined to trust themselves, and others go the other way. The thing that hangs me up isn't that - it's this: If you can justify Sobotka in the top 6 after the last calendar year, and you aren't in favor of criticizing it, you cannot be logically consistent while criticizing any other possible roster move. Every single thing they do should be "wait and see, they could be right." Even if they had decided to trade a first for Alzner and put him on the top pair. Because Vlad was that bad. Hutton and Ullmark were not as bad relative to their peers that Vlad was - goaltending criticism is out the window too. It's a fine philosophy to take, but I don't think people are that consistent. I'm equally inclined to wait and see on Vlad Sobotka in the top 6 in 2019 as I would be about claiming the worst player off of waivers with a "defensive" reputation and doing the same thing. It's logically consistent. And that would horrify anyone here.

That's the message at the core of his post.

For sixty games, we ran Sobotka out with the 4th most ES minutes of any Sabre, as the effective 2C, and collapsed in the standings the entire time on the back of our middle six scoring, which would go stretches of 3 weeks at a time only delivering a single goal or two between two full lines - he himself contributed one goal during the stretch. A goal to end a 42 game goal-less streak with all those minutes. That goal was a dribbler with the goalie pulled while we were down by 2 with 7 seconds left. Nobody is saying Vlad dooms the season, or that other factors weren't at play. I've already given the death by a thousand cuts analogy, and Sobotka was the most obvious self-inflicted wound of the last decade. While it doesn't doom the season, it's some level of indictment on somebody.

This is the most useless comment you can make on a message board designed to discuss and debate sports teams.

?

The bold is so far-fetched and sheer lunacy, though. Why on EARTH is that the case for someone, who is if anything, obviously suited for a depth/defensive role? Who decided second line or bust for him? What is the justification given his skill set as a black hole where plays go to die even when he was effective defensively 3 years ago? And this ISN'T how teams do things. The only teams playing players this season that finished near Vlad in all of these metrics are us, Detroit (because they don't have anyone else) and Ottawa. And even they are keeping these players either scratched or on bottom pairings/lines. In fact, I'm not even convinced Ottawa is going to use Boedkker this year. Montreal waived Alzner. Kesler won't ever see the ice for Anaheim again. Brassard was punted from Colorado. Braun was punted from the Sharks. Perlini became a regular scratch once his contributions became apparent. Carolina dumped Rask as soon as they could. All of these guys occupy a tier near Sobotka, even though he's in his own by himself essentially. And we put Vlad on line 2 instead. But I was posting this in November last season, and we were still doing the same things in March. I guess I can give Krueger the benefit of the doubt, but that doesn't preclude pointing out that it's the same thing that killed our season last year.

And I don't care in a vacuum about Rodrigues on the bench but we're playing two players worse than him off the bat to start the year. we all had this same conversation a million times last year. Like, why the hell do people think we were one of the worst offensive teams out there last year? It wasn't independent of these decisions! It was driven by them!

How is putting up the season he did last year not washing him out of that role? Why are we blank slating this the same way Phil did en route to losing all but one of our first eight games two years ago? This team's entire last decade is a story of death by a thousand cuts, and the most obvious self-inflicted wound of the entire time is the one we make a beeline towards doubling down on right away to start this year. It doesn't make any freaking sense. It's not going to doom us, but why do something so obviously wonky given everything we've seen from October 2017 to now?

It obviously gets on peoples nerves so I'm going to stop harping over and over about Sobotka. I'm ready to watch the games, and I'll have my camera the whole season. That's all I have to say about that

Yeah, It really is the practice factor. And it's tiring having the same discussion over and over again, isn't it? ? -------------------------------------------- Like it really isn't new, I can just copy paste stuff from when we were starting to fall off the table last year: The Sobotka part is in the middle of this post, and he got even worse as the year went on

The right handed Evan Rodrigues, who impacts the game positively at both ends of the ice, PKs as well as Vlad in addition to being the catalyst of all SHGs we had last year, and is currently sitting on the bench in place of said historically bad hockey player?

Fair enough! I know you're not a Vlad guy. But I'll leave the post there given how easily a surprising amount of people seem to be accepting the goofiest roster decision since we blew up our 2017-18 season with a couple of them