Randall Flagg

I also never drink alcohol.

It doesn't help that his (and the other blue tics') contribution to our enjoyment of the sport is purely the type of thing that irks us in all of our real-life social circles. They're all glorified gossips and rarely give any insight into the game itself, often just rumors (many true, some not, some probably politicized/agenda-driven)

It's like two different kinds of bad. Loading your team up with Lucic deals, and blowing it up like trades of Eberle for Strome, Hall for Larsson, the Barzal pick for Griffin Reinhart etc. and creating a roster that looks like THAT versus sitting on your hands and doing almost nothing to a roster like THAT Patience might work out in the long run, but with McDavid's own wearing thin, this has to be a terrifying time for an Oilers fan.

Another reason I want Olofsson to work out is because it'd be the first time in how long? that we took a ridiculously raw 17/18 yo and turned him into a good NHLer. It would be a wonderful sign not just for what Olofsson would bring us, but that somebody somewhere knows what they're doing again.

That's fair. I've read a few things about Jets fans being pretty upset with Wheeler in particular. Something something, he basically demands to stay next to Scheifele all season even though the results are worse than with other forward combinations? The details are hazy, I read this during the season.

The funny thing is, he's on that team right now, and they certainly don't appear to be absorbing it easily

Are Reinhart and Rodrigues, or even Eichel and Skinner with them, better than Scheifele, Wheeler, Little, Ehlers, Perreault? I'm not convinced at all our forwards would be better for him.

I'm not even sure if the things that make Laine troubling show up in his fancy stats. I think our franchise is in a hockey-playing rut. I don't think we're in a goal-scoring rut, or a goals-against rut. I think the Sabres need to improve their shift in and shift out hockey, and that if they added hockey players who "score fewer goals" than the ones they currently have, but do general hockey stuff better, they'd wind up scoring more goals as a team, allowing fewer, and winning more games. I don't think incremental improvement by way of increasing net points or goal totals over the previous guy is the way to do it, which is why I don't feel anything good towards moves like Vesey and keep getting in this discussion with you when the topic comes up. I think the way to do it is to find the guy who has the brains, hands, and feet to play the kind of hockey that will win you games over long stretches of time, whether or not that particular guy represents an "ES goal improvement," over what you have currently. Even if it's a double-digit goal deficit. Say the Sabres had two options this offseason: Signing Brandon Tanev and Evan Rodrigues, or signing Conor Sheary and Jimmy Vesey (pretend none of these guys were Sabres). One duo clearly scores more goals, unambiguously, it's not particularly close. I'd the one that doesn't though, every single time, and nobody would be able to convince me otherwise. Because IMO they are more likely to help improve the things I think the Sabres need to improve, and I think increasing goals for and decreasing goals against will become extensions or results of the 99% of the hockey game that doesn't involve goal-scoring plays becoming more reliably/systematically good. I think this is how the Patriots win. Everybody does the basics right, from the first alarm set of training camp until the final knee taken in the Super Bowl, with unrelenting focus and nothing frivolous on top. Their key is that everyone on every level is pulling for the same ultimate team goal, and understands that their blocking form on 2nd and 9 in the first quarter of a preseason game will play a role in getting to that QB kneel. I think that a Jimmy Vesey or Patrik Laine are more likely to contribute to what continually ails the team than they are to fix it, even if the raw numbers themselves suggest otherwise. The playoff teams still lose between 25-40 games each year. Sometimes the best team in the league gets swept. Sometimes a generational goal scorer takes 13 years to finally have it all go right. The best you can do as a GM is make sure that you have a team that, over 82 games, and then over most of a decade on top of that, is doing it right enough that they can consistently get 42-47 wins instead of 38-42, and that you have as many darts to throw at a playoff season dartboard as possible. IMO the most reliable way to do that isn't to find the goal scorers who improve on the goal scoring of your current winger even if there's baggage, it's to build the team that looks like the same machine in round 2 game 7 OT as they do in period 2 against Arizona in January, as they do three years from now or three years ago (Boston is such a good example of this), and I think players like Laine are the antithesis of that philosophy

I don't think that adds a whole lot of win-loss value with all of his other baggage as a player though. It's beautiful if a player is serviceable or better in all other instances besides the 5 total minutes of ice time that those goal scoring plays make up, but if he's bad in those instances, and (from what I've read) basically incapable of creating those plays without the help of someone else (and that someone else cannot be guaranteed beforehand, as it didn't work with Scheifele and Wheeler at all), well, I think we can do better with our trade chips, even if on the surface the player we gets back scores 10 fewer goals per year.

I just don't like doing something with the justification that 'we're set at center' until we're set at center and see the results of it on the ice every night

The Sabres roughly scored a 5v5 goal every single game with Jack and Kane on the ice between 16-17 and 17-18, but the pairing allowed even more goals than that, so it was kinda useless on a team level even though nobody else on the team came close to the regular production that they could. Not all 30+ goal scorers are made equal, and I think Laine is on the wrong end of the distribution as far as that stuff goes. A guy like Matthews would occupy the good end

Do you think that a 30-40 goal scorer can be bad for his team on the whole? And if so, how close to that line do you think Laine approaches? I think he's pretty close, but I can be convinced otherwise.

Not trolling or anything, I'm pretty ambivalent about that Honestly believe Laine would rapidly become this forum's least favorite player

My thought is that the hole is already there, and it's been bleeding for a year, and the plan should not be Eichel - Mitts - Cozens just because even if it does work, that's years of waiting

What's terrifying is proceeding under the assumption that those three unknowns will make a fine center corps when our team has no other strengths (relative to average-to-good NHL teams) and we have just seen 3 other highly drafted centers not pan out under the exact same assumptions I struggle to map anything we've done to make our team the way it is right now (both good and bad) to where Tampa was. They brought Stamkos onto a team with the likes of St. Louis, Lecavalier, were good briefly, and then retooled quickly with the most absurdly good drafting in all rounds that I've ever seen in my life We're 1 for 4 on high-first-round centers, have one that is only twenty, was a bad NHLer this year, and never did to his peers what you'd expect given the projections people make for him, and another that was just drafted and is currently 18. It'd be completely reasonable for them to both work out not until age ~23, and I have plans for the five years between now and that scenario in which I'd consider us lucky

Can you flesh this out a bit?

Every time I'm on my laptop I hit F5 every ten seconds waiting for this

Thinking like this terrifies me though

Wouldn't they have negative cap space if they signed Gardiner? With a Marner left to re-sign?

Are they? Any fresh new updates?

So let's turn that package over to Florida and try to get Hoffman and some other goodies! (Though Hoffman may well be just as problematic as Laine, so maybe not)

I think Jeff Skinner is an example of a guy who provides goal scoring without tanking your team elsewhere (even though he's bad at defense). Laine is a complete headcase in trying to figure out how to minimize his problems, BEFORE you even touch the fact that the leadership group in Winnipeg is sick of his "lack of buy-in." And talk about streaky - I'm pretty sure he scored 21 of his 30 goals in November. So in the other five months, you got nine goals out of him, while kneecapping yourself in every other facet of a game where 98% of all things that happen aren't goals I like your idea of focusing on goal scorers if you can, I just don't like Laine hehe

Dammit true

Just to show the difference in the RAPM charts of two seasons I'm picturing: Or Ovechkin's 3rd season (this was Laine's 3rd) This is a statistical extreme if I've ever seen one, and I think it's safe to buy into its conclusion that Ovechkin was essentially the best offensive player in the league (or at least top 2-3)

These guys really aren't particularly close in play style and overall effectiveness on the game. When Laine isn't being fed (generally difficult to make) passes by good teammates in high-scoring areas, he's a huge drain on his team. He can't drive play alone, whereas that's kind of Ovechkin's entire thing, being overwhelmingly puck-dominant and ramming the play down the other team's throat single-handedly (of course, he plays a little different now than he did in 2007). The best hockey player I've ever seen was 2007-2010 Ovechkin. Laine is like the 200th best hockey player I saw this season, and it's only above ~500 because of his shot which really can only be consistently used on the power play lately.