Randall Flagg

I don't think any particular day of the streak was quite as exciting as that draft day. Didn't we add a Vezina finalist goalie, Selke/Conn Smythe center, and The Franchise all in a span of a few hours?

I'd rather have Stastny miss 40% of the season than have [actually nonexistent competent 2C] miss every second of ice time this year! I get it though. I'm not thrilled to be in this position either as you might have been able to tell from some of my posts this week or last July

realistic non-Stastny 2C options for next year: Sobotka Mittelstadt Rodrigues Turris? Bonino? Brassard? Haula? Wennberg? What else is conceivable in the real world? I can't pretend I've seen a lot of Stastny recently, so I don't have a huge amount of details and could be mistaken about what he is, but his deal is golden for the situation we have (completely out of our hair after 2 seasons, which is enough time to find a long term option or develop Mitts into one) and he's got all the fancy stats that would tickle you pink unlike pretty much every other player on that list. He just seems to be a tier or seven above every other realistic option that pops into my head. Oh ***** I didn't know about this *****

Hoss my man you have me daydreaming Paul Stastny

The one thing I've learned about sports is that this means very little

Myers is not good lol Maybe I'm being a little unfair, but that contract is absurd

I'm not good enough with the cap or contracts to have a worthwhile take on the bold. If it turns out the way of your last paragraph though, we'd better be first in line!

I think Point's trade value is top 10 in the league, unfortunately. I don't think we could get him without one of Eichel or Dahlin. The man scored 41 goals and 92 points in an ELC season, and every model that exists has him as a top 10 overall impact player in the league, sometimes top 5. I know he plays with Kucherov, but Kucherov didn't go from ~PPG to 100 point player and then to 128 points by dragging along Point - Point's ability (I stress, while being a legitimate shutdown center) allowed Kucherov to explode. Adding Foote just makes it harder to match value. I'd be completely comfortable throwing a 12 mil offer sheet at point, without even thinking about it

I would really like Stastny as a stop-gap 2C. Now that Karlsson is re-signed, and since Cirelli is just my own pipe dream, Stastny might be my favorite realistic target to play this fall.

I think the above discussion is why Jason's words give the impression that any big changes will be via trade rather than UFA, though I don't have the quote on hand.

Tiers of players that we could possibly court or sign: Yes please Artemi Panarin Joonas Donskoi Ryan Dzingel Brett Connolly Brandon Tanev one of Jordie Benn or Patrik Nemeth or Tim Heed Sure, fine Matt Duchene Sergei Bobrovsky SJ Joes Gus Nyqvist Marcus Johansson Anton Stralman Zucc Oscar Lindberg Richard Panik Gardiner Michael Ferland Ryan Carpenter No Corey Perry Jason Spezza Dion Tyler Myers Anders Lee Dan Girardi Marcus Kruger Filppula Troy Brouwer Wayne Simmonds I know I missed plenty of names but yeah. This is obviously not ranked in order of how good I think the players are, just their fits on Sabres teams of the next few years as UFA.

Yeah, I know the name but just don't know anything about her. I'll hit youtube

If Pysyk had ONE other notable trait, whether it's a booming shot, lightning speed, mean streak, whatever, he'd be thought of by everyone as a really good mid-pairing defenseman. As it stands, he still* has a role to play on a good NHL roster, but will polarize fans everywhere he goes *unless he's fallen off a cliff in the last few months since I've seen and thought about him

I keep saying Koh-zins for some reason But I'm pretty sure you're right Im just going to call him Cornelius anyway

Which was always strange to me because Tage was never ready and handing off a bunch of primary assists to the our opponents via dumb passes or failed toe-drags in a two week stretch in November probably should have told them that - if his on-ice results consistently being horrifying didn't. I feel really bad for what they did to Tage. By February the dude looked completely broken and without any confidence It should have been a Pilut situation because he never showed anything close to Pilut's highs, even within the games he scored a couple of nice goals, and there was a lot of "wooooooow that is bad" Sobotka was quietly an offensive black hole, Tage did it out in the open for all to see --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think the Sabres' being awful with a bunch of players' usage, including Tage's, doesn't impact his status as a prospect He's just a prospect who was out of place all year where they put him

I'm not sure how they did it but they have so many legitimately good hockey players. I think they're easily in the WCFs if that major penalty doesn't get called. They were playing some of the best team hockey I've seen in a while. And I think they'll contend again next season. What was Karlsson making before this contract?

I was actually going to make a thread about these haha. They're used enough everywhere now that it's worth going over what they are. So RAPM charts give the results of regression analyses performed with target variables of the things we see on the chart - goals for, expected goals for, corsi for, expected goals against, corsi against. These are all stats that most people are happy to look at individually, so it's nice to have them all in one chart. Further, the regression does something a lot better than just comparing the raw numbers on a chart - regression analyses can be used to isolate the impact that one variable (player) has on these "target variables" or stats. They build a matrix that contains every NHL player and goes through every shift (defined as a period of time in which no changes are made and ES hockey is happening (or maybe 5v5)) and keeps track of these stats. the regression analysis gives a coefficient for each variable (player) and ultimately tells you the impact THEY have on their team's GF, xGF, CF, CA, xGA. Isolated completely from other players, both teammates and opposition. So when you look at that chart, roughly, you can say that "this already takes into account the fact that Mitts got to play in the offensive zone a lot against other team's bottom players, and that Larsson has to face tough opponents in heavily skewed minutes." It's certainly far from perfect like any hockey model,, but no statistical model ever claims to be perfect - just useful. And regression is an objectively useful statistical technique that tells you things. So it's not just that "ROR or Bergeron have a good +/-" - it's that "ROR or Bergeron by themselves contribute a LOT to their team's goals for and preventing goals against compared to the average NHL skater." Keep in mind that the stat which is the best at predicting future team and individual level goals-for is expected goals, and the stat which performs the best at goals against is CA. So it's got the two best predictor stats on there. And then it displays the results in terms of standard devation from the average NHL player. So that means a few things. The size of the bars should not be viewed as uniformly increasing or decreasing in impact on the stat. If you're at +1 STDV, your impact on the stat is better than all but ~15% of NHL skaters. If you're at +2, it's better than all but ~2.2% of NHL skaters. If you're at -1 you're in the bottom 15th percentile, and if you're at -2 you're worse than all but ~2.2% of skaters in terms of impact on that stat. And with a sample size of however many NHL skaters there are, this chart then tells us that Sobotka's impact on expected goals, because it's so hard for him to create or use space to set teammates up or get shots on net himself, is only better than maybe 2-3 skaters to play some amount of minutes in the NHL this season. He's approaching the bottom 0.1 percentile. (and we used him as our 2C by minutes played and 4th-most-used player for a significant chunk of the season - but anyway) So if the bar is between 0 and +/- 1, you cover a lot more ground in rankings with small movements up or down the bar than you do towards the extremes. So Vlad is nowhere near as negatively-impactful (words) on those defensive metrics - perhaps he's in the bottom 20%, but nowhere near the bottom 0.1%. And Larry's impact on defensive metrics is top 10%/top 3% of all NHL skaters. ie, ~68% of all NHL skaters fall in this circle, so stuff i there is a bit more muddled than stuff on the edges. So to answer your question, I like the charts because of everything they bring to the table, and they make it so I have fewer awful data tables to look at, and does a lot of the comparison work for you. It's far from perfect of course, but even if I had the TIME to gather the context for any player comparison in the league I wanted to make, watching game after game to discern usage and impacts myself, I'd be just as flawed as the regression is in my own analysis. They're quite useful, do a lot of work for you, and like any other stat, you should focus on looking at extremes and ask yourself what hockey characteristic you think may be contributing to or influencing the result. Slap a few of these charts down, add a dash of your favorite counting stats, pull up some film and you've got yourself a neat little hockey analysis

I'll reiterate the point I'm trying to make - Tim did not ruin a rebuild by squandering a bunch of picks, given that he made 4 more picks than an average team does in that span. If he did, then Jason is doing even worse "rebuilding with picks" which hasn't ever been mentioned by anyone, since he also trades picks AND has taken an average of 2+ picks fewer per draft than Tim, and they are lower selections than Tim made. I'm not trying to give everything Tim did a passing grade, far from it - but that's one narrative i'm not interested in. No GM was ever going to make all of those draft picks, as you can only have so many contracts in your organization at once. That was the whole point of getting a bunch of them - to make draft picks AND use them in trades for players. Considering our whole problem the last four years has been NHL depth, not doing so would have been even more crippling. Completely agree that Murray was a mess on the "managing" side of things, which is why I agree with the decision to fire him. I just think I'm more scared about the current situation than anyone else

He trades at weird and abrupt times. Which isn't fun on draft day but is surprise fun plenty others. Skinner was in August right? Scandella, Sheary were each randomly before the draft, ROR was on free agency which sometimes has trades but isn't known for it Montour was a quasi-deadline deal but not super close to the deadline I think

I think he's got KHL production that suggests he could translate similarly (though not a guarantee to be at the same level) to the way Panarin's did. Actually, his KHL resume is more impressive than Artemi's. He's super skilled and has been wildly successful internationally, which helps that argument - 12 points in 6 games at the Olympics last year, 16 points in 10 games at Worlds a month ago. But we need to see it translate before we can be sure ya know? And fair. I wonder if we could do something smaller with just Miller or just Stastny to help out their cap.

Add Gusev to Vegas's side maybe? Or something more NHL-sure?

Risto for Stastny and C. Miller, pieces added as needed

Yes, but that's not the narrative I'm attacking. And he used them to acquire guys who are good/great pieces on good/great teams. See above post for more fleshing out

Red are the picks that Murray made, and blue are the picks that Jason made. I just don't buy the narrative (not saying I've seen it here since I haven't been here, but it's prevalent in the Sabres fan base) that Murray ruined the rebuild by trading all of our picks, and Jason is "doing it the right way." Murray made more picks, more higher picks, while still acquiring a Selke caliber player and a thirty goal scorer via trade, so that he improved the team 27 points, and hit two seasons of standings results Jason has yet to see. Now we have fewer draft picks and thus fewer prospects, and a worse pro roster, and worse pro results. This is not a claim that Murray's drafts were better - we won't know that for years until we see what happens to Jason's picks. It's also not a claim that he shouldn't have been fired. He should have, which is why I'm perpetually uncomfortable about the current state of the franchise. I guess my point is, Jason deserves heat and shouldn't get any excuses for any aspect of this team

It doesn't really bother me, but Tim Murray "blew through all of our picks/prospects with dumb trades" according to some GMTM and GMJB each have 3 drafts and Murray made 7 more picks in that span