Randall Flagg

Labanc signed for 1 year, $1 mil. San Jose has Meier, Hertl, and Labanc locked up for under $12 million in cap space. Offer sheets are a thing, these guys were RFAs this year (Meier, Labanc) and last (Hertl). Why do teams let the Sharks do this?

Where the hell is the Risto Corsi trade thread whatever? Did Liger delete it or something?

Unfortunately, dark's post was ridiculously vague, and of a nature that can be safely assumed to be the case in one or two of any group of 23 individuals, just based on what I remember him saying. Further, it was used in its whole as an explanation for a state of events (the December NHL standings) that is as far from what actually ended up happening as possible - it was evidence for a claim that was so wrong it's actually comical in hindsight, which dramatically reduces the impact of said claim, and dramatically increases the probability that we just got it wrong, whatever "it" is. Which is itself backed up by a recent blue checkmark on twitter indicating that he's heard the belief that Jason has "learned from his mistake" w.r.t. the ROR trade (I know you'll ask me to find it, so I'm looking), which is distinct evidence (in this world where some unidentified person says the most ambiguous things ever and it gets counted as solid evidence when far more tangible things regularly come out of even this organization) that however the events unfolded, the Sabres were the ones that were in the wrong here. I'll happily eschew the tank - in that case, the Sabres are *checks standings* last place in the NHL in aggregate wins since the tank ended, just like if you include the tank, though it of course isn't by as far. I'll retain my general sentiment (while agreeing with you that the tank sucks balls) No, I mean that in the group of seasons between 1970 and 2011, the Sabres were 4th in win percentage, and since Terry's first full year (eight full seasons, ~20% of the pre-Terry era), they're DFL. Also, even in the Bills' lowest point of Pegs' tenure, they finished above the Sabres in their relative league when no one expected them to, and if you throw out this season, the gap grows quite a bit, and if things go well with one key piece on the Bills, it'll start to grow again. But either way, I don't think the Sabres' struggles have mapped over to the Bills for whatever reason.

I could certainly see Rodrigues falling into a slot next to Larsson and Zemgus in the lineup as a '10th forward', but what four forwards not named Eichel, Reinhart, Skinner, Johansson, and acquired 2C are better hockey players than Evan? I don't see any.

Saw something on twitter that indicated Johansson draws a lot more penalties than he takes, which is a characteristic of quite a few Sabres players. It's definitely worth talking about

And what makes their ownership of the Bills different than that of the Sabres? I have no idea, but the Bills are far better under the Pegulas than they were beforehand, IMO. I believe in Beane and, to a lesser extent, McDermott, more than any Sabres duo since Lindy and Darcy. That sure helps. The sports are so different in so many ways I don't understand, so I wouldn't feel comfortable speculating other than just noting the stark difference between the two franchises

It's probably not a fair comparison to be honest. Simple sample size considerations allow far more variance in NFL records than NHL ones, so I'd shy away from any one-to-one comparisons like I just failed to do except to illustrate that it hasn't been good here.

If there is a trade, I'd much rather it be in the next few days than later on this summer. I'd rather summer discussion be geared towards lineups we're confident in seeing than speculation with the likely-incomplete (possibly in a major way) setup we currently have

Man everyone always talks about zone entries and exits now. I'd love to see some video from one of those twitter dudes whose job it is to tweet and write articles about hockey I tried it once last offseason but it was ***** hard to analyze

It's a reference to every move he's made in his first two years. He made a team that was so bad it fired its entire front office such that its best season couldn't match that front office's worst, and that hampered Skinner negotiations, because it's clear how badly we needed him to stay, and that we don't have something to offer him that winning teams do.

To tie this all back into the thread topic... IMO a lot of the driving force behind the assertions that ROR was a tumor upon franchises and the reason for the Blues' woes was an inherent belief that the Sabres wouldn't make a mistake that big without a good reason. Never mind that there was nothing to glean while we regularly hear of requested trades, drug issues, or mental health and locker room issues from actual players on the same freaking team! It always came back to that in these discussions - "well we obviously did it for a reason!" With a handwave towards the idea that maybe we are bad at identifying what needs to happen to be a good hockey team. A similar handwave to the one that got applied to the supposed nefarious and ill-defined force once "whoops the blues are winning" started happening. This is not the only place where this sentiment peeked through. I never walked the walk, but in the preseason thread about which team would have a better season, the Bills or the Sabres, I made a post wondering how, even given the dead cap and roster situation of the bills, anyone could think about picking the Sabres. The last I had checked, not one person picked the Bills. And every single interaction with said post was to do anything from question it to laugh at it (not in a disparaging way, mind you, this is not a complaint - people were reasonable and amicable as always). The sentiment for years was, the Bills suck and the Sabres not so much, and that has carried far into a time where the reverse is true - the Pegula Bills are in the middle third of the NFL (I think even still after this past season) in terms of total wins. The Sabres? Since 2013 they lay claim to a stat that even the Cleveland Browns of the 0-16 and 1-15 era through now can say "at least we aren't them." The distance between Sabres and the next worst team in aggregate win total is more than double that between any other two teams in the ranking. Again, not even the Cleveland Browns can lay claim to that level of incompetence. We are essentially the Cleveland Browns until proven otherwise, but nobody wants to believe it, because they all think every season that the Sabres will be better, will be solid, reasonable, will join the rest of the NHL, and it never happens. I wish I walked the walk, but I recall abstaining from voting in that poll, because while the Bills had a real plan in doing so, I was aware of the dead cap and roster problems they had. And still, they drafted 9th, while the Sabres slotted in 5th last before the lottery. Sabrespace didn't do so well. I just checked the results, and ultimately, two posters had the Bills as better, while twenty six got it wrong, and a couple handfuls said neither. SS whiffed this prediction badly, showing on some level a fundamental disconnect from where our teams actually sit. Because we believe, to some degree higher than we should, in the competence of whatever structure they have put in place since Terry took over. I don't care how many meddling claims get shot down, or explanations about how his obvious inability to understand NHL hockey at anything more than a rudimentary level doesn't impact anything, SOMETHING about the structure hasn't been right. And it's not the "had to do it" sentiment that appears in Aud's post I first responded to. All over, Sabres fans are inclined to make it seem like "well, there was nothing we could do! we just got a rotten luck of the draw, had to trade our Selke player for scraps, had to do this, had to do that!" as if this level of awful was forced upon the poor and helpless, but no, I swear, competent! management structure. (I don't mean to say that Aud is or ever has implied this - but I think this encompasses the 'sabres are good' culture that exists out there and that I'm talking about now.) The Sabres are the Cleveland Browns, and it's entirely their own doing, and on some level it can only be traced back to the people at the top, who have been there the whole time, who sound like they do when trying to talk hockey in interviews, who took the 4th most winning franchise in NHL history and, in the entirety of their tenure, have made it the single worst by twenty three wins. Wouldn't it be nice if Krueger was the jolt we needed? What are the odds he is, versus just another coach that thinks it's good to play the heady vet worst player in the NHL more often than all other players outside of the top line, and reverts to spouting cliches that make his offense the least dangerous in the entire league, before getting canned and casting more doubt on the few pieces left we should have been building competent hockey around the whole time and have abjectly failed to do so, while they're the only part of this organization that has been pulling anything close to their expected weight all along?

I think that if Jason had done his job adequately elsewhere, Skinner would have less leverage - we very clearly needed him to have any semblance of offense, and didn't have the "well we're a good team" pull. He would no doubt love to play on a contender. Jason had to fight through issues he created to make sure he kept a player he simply HAD to keep. But that doesn't take away from the fact that I view the Skinner trade and signing as a complete positive and have zero qualms about either overall.

I completely agree with every single word and wish I could sum it up like that. You know what situation is coming up on the horizon in my ongoing Sabre nightmare that has been the last two to six seasons? Going into this season as constructed, finishing with 78 points like this roster might suggest, and then deciding to move the third player you talk about for more culture purposes as a result.

At the risk of derailing a thread...maybe nfreeman can move this... There was a time where this take had one true leg to stand on, out of all things that can possibly be found out by our own eyeballs on the ice or by words with blue checkmarks next to them. It was a brief two week period where the Blues were at the bottom and we were at the top. Of course, it still didn't have a leg to stand on, because anyone watching either team could give full and complete explanations for the situation as it stood without invoking evidence-less voodoo (which they did), and those explanations wound up holding so much water that the farthest possible thing from this supposed reality that could happen in the hockeyverse, ended up happening, just months later. A freaking Conn Smythe and SC victory for a team previously as stricken as the Sabres. Think about this in the context of what the exact Sabres fans who are still willing (somehow) to chime in on the issue were happy to say about the fundamental character and personality of said hockey player just months ago. How firmly the hockey gods dropped the hammer on all of this is jaw-dropping. Now that everything has happened, and more than a year has passed without anything more than vague whispering like this (when all other actual ills, in the locker room and outside of it, get regularly bandied about as common knowledge, including that from players on our own team (Berglund, Lehner etc)) which only implies to me that Ryan understood how inept our entire franchise is, but was still completely willing and eager too stay and help based on all available evidence (which has now had over a year to come out via those obnoxious blue checkmarks that need the gossip or else they don't have anything of value to add to the sport or its analysis), as we still wallow in ineptitude, I can't believe that anyone would still be inclined to think this. I really can't.

Or if we do have something else going on. Skinner - Eichel - Johansson Gusev - Cirelli (teehee) - Reinhart Olofsson - Mitts - Vesey Girgensons - Larsson - Rodrigues

Cuz this may well not have happened and we may now have more evidence than before that Botts' pro talent evaluation is whack

Being 100% honest here - the ROR trade was as far from my mind as the price of toilet paper in Cuba while I was making that post. I'd be happy to find the posts where that exact same justification was made though, because it happened a thousand times over, and one of the two guys was a major reason why we sucked so bad anyway, so it really isn't always the case that these moves are good for the team even if it seems like it at the time. And as far as your last point goes - I'm aware of the standings improvement of last season's team to the one before, but it's that type of squinting and broad-brush-painting that makes a team continue to be awful, and people who look at things moreobjectively continue to make predictions like usage-tweaking the "cancer" leading to 75 point Selke seasons, or nailing down the final standings points within 1 correctly before the season starts ? . Is that really how you'd like to analyze things? keeping coaching equal, it's really replacing a Selke caliber 2C with the worst center depth situation in the league that led to the improvement? That's the implication of all of the information you chose to include in that sentence. It wasn't a stretch of goaltending that we haven't seen in years, during an early part of the schedule, after which we were the worst team in the NHL still for about 60 games? A stretch in which the math shows that a return to previous season's goaltending would have made the results indistinguishable from the previous season in the standings as well? A stretch in which every metric said we were the worst in the league at generating and preventing chances? It had nothing to do with our most important player being paired with a 40 goal player that wasn't here the year before, a pairing that finally made him a net positive player in all meaningful areas, instead of a winger that scored less and with which Eichel paired to be one of the worst goals-against duos out there? A fourth line that went from tank-level bad Jordan Nolan and Pouliot and Josefson to actually getting ***** done? The addition of THREE puck moving defensemen that are all better than 4 of the regular defensemen we saw the previous season? Let's employ some nuance here duda I was okay with the first four times we made moves to do things like this, but I have a suspicion that Vesey is worse at hockey than Sheary, and that our needs have moved far past the point of needing to "upgrade" what will probably actually be Sheary's spot with Jimmy Vesey

I did kind of lose the context of the discussion in my reply there. FWIW I've always speculated that it was as much Terry's decision as Jason's, because Jason has gotten his clock cleaned in a trade exactly one time, and that one time occurred after a full year of salivating over our center spine without prompting, including ROR by name, and because the trade rumors began way before anything remotely interesting happened (was it Lebrun who mentioned a couple times that we were shopping him at the deadline?). But I'll always treat it as speculation, since that's what it is But I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's also the Kane situation. "We still suck with these two, and they're embarrassing to me, get em outta here" - maybe TP (and a lot of the post-trade justification by fans, as if your few good players are always to blame for the rest of your roster being ungodly levels of trash) But youre right that as far as evidence goes, we just know that Terry prefers, should a trade happen, it happens before the bonus.

Both Ryan and his father said, after the comments, that he loves Buffalo and wanted to be a part of the solution there, and so even if your speculation was true privately, the situation is less untenable than what Matt Duchene did in Colorado to a mediocre general manager, the entire world knowing he wanted out, who still managed to keep him in the lineup the following season until he got a trade offer that suited him (and blows what we got for a better player out of the water), despite coming off of an even worse season than what we were, and the pressures associated with that (FORTY EIGHT points!!). Jason deserves all the criticism he gets for the trade, full stop. And until we know anything about the owners, all we can really assume is that Pegula said if you're going to trade him, try and do it by July 1 so we aren't paying him to play on another team

I like the principle of Sheary and Scandella trades too, but the fact remains that I'm comfortable with exactly three Sabres NHL forwards in more than marginal roles on winning teams, and when we keep adding to the pile of ones I'm uncomfortable stating the same, it starts to get a bit tiresome, especially as the pitchforks are starting to come out on the good players (one already gone, and the spotlight on other three are coming shortly whether it's their fault or not (and it won't be, given all roster considerations these 5 seasons)) because of this other stuff not being nearly good enough. I get that Sobotka sucks and Brassard may well be better, but that doesn't mean I have any interest in trying to make that trade. I feel the same about Vesey and a hundred other NHL players. Hindsight tells me that about Sheary, ESPECIALLY since Bott's lack of inclination to waive vets (or even worse - an actual appreciation of Hunwick's game) meant I had to watch a bunch of Matt Hunwick as well. You talk about constant incremental improvement, but I don't think hockey works that way with the type of players we're talking about. You rapidly hit a ceiling on what your team can do if you only make moves like this (not saying we are), and that ceiling is not a playoff team, it's whatever you'd expect from a lineup of Jimmy Veseys, Conor Shearys, Patrik Berglunds, Vlad Sobotkas (because these two were sold to us the same way by the same people and posters this time last year). There comes a point where I'm not interested, and that point is right now. I'm not bitching that Vesey is here, but let's not do any more of this, because the lineup is now full enough with this kind of player that any additional Vesey or Sheary trade will essentially be a lateral move at best. And it's moved us from a 78 point team to a ...76 point team with a win streak after two years, and the current roster looks like a 78-82 point team.

Vlad was right. What that role requires far supersedes what Vlad brought to the table.

Since, and including, Terry's first full season as owner, the Sabres have the fewest wins of all NHL franchises, and are 23 wins behind the next-worst team in that span No ***** it's time to start winning eh Terry

If I was knowledgeable about hockey and the NHL in general, but was shut off from everything about Sabres hockey in the last 7 years except for hearing Terry Pegula's interviews and knowing he is our owner hearing Jason Botterill's interviews and knowing he is our GM I would almost certainly (correctly) put money on the Sabres being the franchise with the fewest total wins over that span of time (obviously not counting the stunning success story that is Vegas) I'm not saying their public speaking skills are the reason we are bad, b u t hard not to wince reading/hearing this stuff

If no other moves are made (though I think we're still sitting on a big one) then a fully healthy Johansson might be my 4th favorite Sabre forward for the 2019-20 season.

I don't think they're incredible though. Difficult, impressive within the bounds of the sport? Of course. But I've never seen a dunk that has made me want to see even a single replay, and the same can be said for almost every instance of elite ball-handling/shooting/whatever. I got to see Lebron's block, Kawhi's winner, and I've watched about 5 games in between those moments, and there wasn't a single thing that happened in the NBA in that span that I regret missing out on or would even be interested in seeing a highlight reel of The sport just doesn't do it for me