Randall Flagg

I'm a bit confused - I can totally see acquisitions of Miller, Johansson, and Vesey roughly meaning two wins more. Youre saying you think it's way more than even that? These guys range from meh to solid, there's nothing super huge there

That map neglects to mention the vape cloud for cover

I can see a million ways in which this is an ~80 point team...in fact I think that's my default guess looking at the current roster.

I will say that watching in-season moves to try and rectify the situation made me jealous! ie firing a coach and bringing up a no-name goalie (though had that failed I wonder if he'd be gone now)

Binnington faced the fewest and least dangerous shots per unit ice time of any goalie to play NHL hockey this year It was important that they got not-worst-in-league goaltending but he wasn't some Savior either. He did exactly what they needed and stopped the shots he should.

The Amerks made the playoffs and won playoff games in Murray's first season. But I'll give it to you since he didn't start that season here, he took over in November or something. They've won zero playoff games in Botts' first two years, even with better regular seasons. Either way, I don't like giving Jason a lot of credit for "fixing Rochester" as it pertains to making the franchise better when the only player he added to this year's good Rochester squad that has any sort of Sabre future is Pilut. The rest of the exciting reasons that Rochester is good in the first place (exciting in that they may help the actually-important team in Buffalo someday) all come from Tim. You're focusing on the picks he gave away, but the reality is that a team that is only allowed 50 pro contracts simply cannot sit and make all of those picks. Like I said before, he brought in players capable of winning trophies and scoring a lot of goals with those trades, so it's not like they were wasted. Those moves in isolation are completely fine. And he still took 2 picks per draft more than Jason on average, and those picks were higher-value picks. They each had 3 drafts, and Tim made 7 more selections than Jason did. He made more picks in the first 2 rounds than Jason has. That number (52) is going to go up as Asplund, Olofsson, Borgen etc. become regular NHLers. And they will, because they're all three good hockey players. You can do the same mid-round draft exercise with literally any general manager in existence, and paint the results to look awful. That's literally what drafting is. Though 2014 was certainly not good, but didn't we all learn that he was hampered in that regard by coming into the season when it was already in full swing? Either way - I'm totally fine with his drafting on the whole, and look forward to the rest of his young players entering the big club. Anyway, I still think Tim should have been fired, so I'm not vouching that he was a successful GM. But I'm not pretending there's a clear distinction between him and Jason either. Jason came into the organization and hired a rookie coach. Both said they were giving everyone a clean slate, and his coach in particular said that they wouldn't be watching any tape from the season before. He made about six A W F U L forward depth acquisitions and the combined result of doing all of this was a dead-effing-last place finish, killing Jack & Sam's last ELC season. He then proceeded to violate literally every tenant of roster-building I've ever believed in with the trade of our second-most-valuable player/trade piece, furthering our forward depth problem with the return, and taking our only organizational strength and turning it into the worst in the league behind Jack. When his team actually showed signs of life, he decided "that's not who they are" and despite well-documented-at-the-time issues (by me and anyone else) that were sure to lead to the season crumbling, sat on his hands and let them finish with by far the worst season any team with a 10 game win streak has ever had, playing out 70% of the campaign with what would project to be the worst record in the league again. Phrased another way, in Jason's second full season, the first being dead last, outside of a 25 game stretch in which the Sabres were bottom of the barrel in any scoring chance for/against metric but bailed out by the first lights-out goaltending they've seen in years, they were a dead effing last team again. And he sat on his hands while watching the 70% even though it could be seen coming from a mile away. Having a good AHL season because of Murray's picks, and players that will never touch the Sabres roster, doesn't cover this up, and neither does supposedly drafting better than the 2014 non-first-rounders. And if 2019-20 looks even close to his first two seasons, he's probably gonezo. We all were fine with Tim until we trashed him after he was fired as if we knew he sucked all along. That's just how this works, and Jason is on shaky ground himself, with a very real chance of becoming the guy we defend in July 2019 but knew was awful all along in July 2020. I just don't want to call our situation "better" until it manifests itself as being better than what was so bad it got the last guy fired, for the first time. Because his first two attempts at it were objectively worse.

FWIW, Murray's Amerks were just as capable of getting swept in the first round as Botterill's are. Each of them has won the same amount of AHL playoff games. Edit: I lied, Murray's Amerks made the playoffs less but won more AHL playoff games to this point. And Murray players are a big reason why Botterill's Amerks were good. Olofsson, Smith, Asplund, Nylander, Guhle (before trade), Borgen. That's not nothin, especially considering that was two seasons after Murray last made a decision for the team. In fact, I'd go as far as calling it surprisingly impressive. Their captain Porter also spent a season with Murray's Amerks before leaving for a couple of years. And while Botterill appears to be able to identify better NHL defensemen (waiting for that to catch up in the most important counting stat: goals against, which was 222 (16th) and 237 (20th) under Tim and 280 (29th) and 271 (23rd) under Jason), his track record for forward depth is abominable so far, even compared to Tim, who often had a problematic fourth line but usually iced three pretty solid ones above them. If "getting us out of TM's bad contracts" means waiting for the Moulson/Gorges/Bogosian ones to expire, while moving the Ennis contract for an equal one in Pominville along with a new contract problem for this coming season in a sub-replacement-level Scandella, then sure. That is hardly a breathtaking accomplishment, any of us could have done the same. Skinner at 9 million is questionable, and it's his own fault that losing Skinner would have been even worse than signing that contract (which would have made every single one of us spit our drink out, horrified and dumbfounded, if we had been told those numbers last September). Reinhart's bridge deal is going to cost us millions per year in cap space in the long run as well. Taking Hunwick was a short-term cap annoyance, even moreso when you consider that it directly leads to us doing things like playing Matt Hunwick. Sobotka in that same boat. And thank god Berglund quit on the team, because that would have been problematic going forward as well. I don't think he's been awful with the cap, but he hasn't been some wizard or genius, either. This is not a clean-cut, binary topic.

Zemgus, and I dunno.

I think the best hockey the Sabres have played since 2010-2011 is from when Jack came back from injury (late November 2016, I think) until the epic collapse that spring, which started sometime in February. FTR, I'm feeling good about one more big move this offseason, and then I expect Jason to pass Tim in my rankings.

Botterill still has a fair amount of work to do to convince me he's as good as, much less better than, Tim Murray Step one would be finishing with a better record than Tim's actually-trying teams for the first time. I can be convinced that Jason is much better in the area that's cited as a main reason Tim was fired, the "people managing" and whatever. But Tim's problems on the hockey side get overblown IMO. He made more draft picks, and more higher draft picks, in his three drafts than Jason has in his three, he had a deeper forward roster with better players than what we've seen the last two years, and his teams won more hockey games as a result. The picks he traded were moved for a goalie capable of being a Vezina finalist, a player capable of winning a Selke and a Conn Smythe, and a player that can score 30 goals on a team that goes pretty deep into the playoffs every year. I don't put the tank on him as much as others may because it was well underway when he got here, and he saw it through to completion, "successfully." If Tim was baseline average at keeping his fingers on the pulse of the people side of his organization, and Kyle doesn't almost die, and they move on from Dan for somebody else after that dreadful limp to the finish in 16-17, I think we're a much stronger hockey team right now than what we see. We got lucky with Dahlin, but that has nothing to do with the GM, other than indicating his team was so bad that it finished in last place. And I know Lehner probably wouldn't have worked out here given the nature of his issues, but the other two big pieces he added did not get "better" upon leaving, even if their basic counting stats did - Kane was the same player here as he is in SJ, and it was evident that ROR was a Selke caliber forward being cast in the most bizarre role I've ever seen by Phil. Tim deserved to be fired because of the whole package, but he wasn't a crippling GM IMO, and the young players I look forward to seeing the most are by and large his. Jack, Sam, Olofsson, ERod, Asplund, Borgen, Smith. Hopefully Jason's picks start to bear fruit in the coming seasons too.

Mitts is gonna become charizard duh

Mark Stone -> Mew Erik Karlsson -> Machamp

Found the first legendary - Marchand as Zapdos. Mew/Mewtwo are 2/3 for him. I wanna find mewtwo

Oh, I wouldn't move on from McCabe. Unless the typical overpay yada yada I just don't think he's on their guys' level as hockey players, and that's not an insult. They really were excellent for a time. Apparently, to answer the thread title, he's a Poliwhirl

Our lineup: Aerodactyl - Nidoking - Ivysaur Eevee - Charmeleon - Dragonair Drowzee - Dewgong - Bulbasaur Nidorina - Wartortle - Farfetch'd 53 - 9 - 43 90 - 37 - 23 Vesey - 71 - 72 28 - 22 - 21 Pidgeot - Pidgeotto Weezing - Wigglytuff Poliwhirl - Golbat 26-62 24-55 19-Miller I LOVE Pidgeot as Dahlin, Poliwhirl as McCabe, Nidoking as Jack, Charmeleon as Mitts, Dragonair as Reinhart, Wartortle as Larry. They fit so well. Gotta get other regions in this thing also a couple times i took the second-most-like pokemon so we didn't have duplicates

Amazing

I think those guys were much better puck movers than Jake is, and were also more polished with defense fundamentals. Each had stretches of incredible play here.

Haha nah. I've dried up my video unfortunately - only watched 15 games or so This coming season I plan on having a lot more

That's a relief.

According to wikipedia, the J.T. in J.T. Miller's name stands for Jimothy Timothy. Is that real? Thank god we didnt trade Risto for Jimothy Timothy

I like Jake McCabe. I wish he didn't miss so many games.

Yep - removing ROR turned the center spine behind Jack into the worst in the league. Trading Risto won't do the same for our RHD, and even if it did, with Dahlin on the other side it wouldn't be as noticeable. And I'd put a lot of money on the player we get in return for Risto being a better NHLer than any single piece we got for ROR was or will be for a couple of seasons

Hang on though: I don't see how this contradicts anything Aud has said, particularly about the guy being 3 years out from being a useful NHLer. Isn't that a completely normal timeline for any prospect taken anywhere outside the top 2? And him (like others) being a string bean is a major factor in that being a normal timeline for most prospects. This is Mitts' 3rd post-draft season and nobody has any idea whether he'll be a useful NHLer this October, or if it'll take another year or two. A major reason for that is his boyish stature (and wasn't he almost/over 200 lbs when drafted?)

The Mitts one was pretty horrifying. Not that looking elderly is horrifying - but his boyish features combined with that app just didn't work

Would you guys say that the 20-teens decade for the Sabres (and NHL) went from 2009-2010 to 2018-2019, or from 2010-2011 to 2019-2020? Does this coming season count as the start of the next decade because its second half, and stanley cup awarding, will take place in the 2020s, or is it still part of last season, and the first full season to take place in the twenties is the proper first season of the decade?