Randall Flagg

This is laughable.

Lehner: Active manic depressive alcoholic, tanking Sabres games, noted dark cloud in locker room. In his absence, a stretch in which Sabres win 3 games of 16 in regulation, on the power of an entire goal per game allowed fewer relative to last season's save percentages, turns into 10 wins. Chad Johnson: An even worse goalie than Lehner, on record as saying things to the effect of "I can't wait to show my talents on a REAL team" upon arrival to St. Louis. Contributes to worst goaltending in the league in St. Louis, gets freaking cut from the entire team within two months. Okposo: Just as much depression evidence as ROR, team is doing fine with it. Bortuzzo and Sanford: Get into a literal fistfight at Blues practice. Pietrangelo: Worst defending of his career, looks like Brent Seabrook. Bouwmeester: Looks like Josh Gorges at his worst, gets spoonfed minutes. Jake Allen: Spent his first 15 games allowing fewer than 3 goals approximately one time, allowing 5 goals about five times as often as that. Sabres 2nd and 3rd line centers: In a league that is scoring as much as the 05-06 season, the Sabres' second and third line centers are scoring at rates worse than those of the second and third line centers, Flynn and Mitchell, on the tank team. Literally. We have worse center depth than the 14-15 Sabres team. Ryan O'Reilly: Scoring 5v5, already has more 5v5 goals than all of last year as I predicted on the same page of this post in July, and it took him like 20 games. A plus player on a very minus team. A positive possession player on a very bad possession team. Over a point per game 1C, playing the best hockey from a center St. Louis has seen in decades, drawing universal praise from their fans, leaving community holes that Beaulieu actively mentions working really hard to try and fill. Blues fans talking about how valuable his on-ice work ethic is for guys like Tarasenko and other important core pieces. Said "I need to be better" at a per-loss-rate roughly comparable to Jack Eichel last season. Conclusion: The Sabres are better because they traded O'Reilly, the Blues are worse for having him, and Ryan O'Reilly is to locker rooms what abnormal cell growth developing into a ravaging disease that destroys families is to five year olds that want to become astronauts and firefighters. This continues to be the worst take I've ever read on this board. Again, not that a new locker room is a good thing for the Sabres. But that ROR is actively "spreading cancer" to the Blues locker room. It's weak, lazy, and quite frankly rather disgusting. It never mentions above locker room things we actually have evidence for, and it actively avoids even trying to understand hockey teams and how they work. It also reeks of spending approximately 0.0 seconds watching any Blues hockey this year or taking time to read and converse with Blues fans who do (hint, I've done plenty of both). It makes me disinterested in talking about hockey here, to be honest.

If we traded for Seabrook I would stop watching hockey

Good vibes

It is very important to win this game, and we will.

Just Bravo. Standing ovation. The best thing this franchise has ever done??

Did anyone see Mahomes' no-look pass? Look it up if not. Incredible. He's such an amazing QB to watch. Movement under duress, scanning the field, and touch on his passes. Sad face

I love Taron and think he'll be a better player than Edmunds, but he's a nickle corner, no? Is there a difference? Can you just plug him in on the outside and have him deal with the tall 2WRs just fine? And even then, you always need to grab depth corners. I just sorta pictured him covering tiny slot WRs for a reason

Dude, the world is not some utopia where the "good vets" try 100% of the time, the "bad vets" have inherent lazy traits that if you see once they're a blight forever, and there's a clear line delineating these two things, and that good teams see the line and load up on guys on the right side of it. The hockey season is long, and every player in the world makes a ***** ton of bad effort plays along the way. I'm not a KO-the-player fan either, as everyone here knows, but let's at least try to be rational here.

PA trims his fingernails confirmed

dudacek is right, my friend. Taking everything you could possibly take into account with Reinhart, I have no idea how you can describe him as a replacement level player. Or maybe to you "replacement level" means "another good top 6 forward that has skill-sets I prefer to Sam's." But that's not what a replacement level player is.

Yeah, I do not like what Stimson did there. There is nothing in the actual games that suggest to me Reinhart with the top line is a problem other than removing Reinhart's scoring abilities from lines that now cannot hope to buy a goal.

They also will perpetually need DB depth. They have 1 good starting CB

Elf is so bad and made worse because from grade 5 to grade 12, whenever it was time to watch a Christmas movie the last two days before break, every single class chose Elf by an overwhelming margin and I was stuck watching it 3+ times per day. And the original cartoon Grinch is better than the Jim Carey one. Christmas Vacation indeed kicks arse This is probably true. The Polar Express is the worst Christmas movie besides Elf

Nice goalies Dougie. Though Chad isn't the one that instantly ended their chances against VAN with 3 goals on the first 6 shots. ---------------------------------------------------------- The Senators adding another chapter to the Sabrepede Series

I'm 97% as done with Sam-at-C as We've, and yet I am almost thinking about wanting him to be moved there, because continuing to use Casey in a 2C role is quietly submarining this team as much as anything else is. Our center depth (not center spine - Eichel saves that) is the worst in the league as far as I can tell. It's Jack's 4th season already and we really need to get playoff games for these starved players, it'll be as important to their development as any "one more year" first round draft pick that takes 3 years to become what Alex Nylander is right this second

I don't think it worked for the streak. I'm not sure Sam played with them for more than a game or two of it.

My best friend's mom shared a post about this on facebook. Did the team post something about it? Hope she finds it.

They've given us seven straight losses after twelve straight wins

ST has once again completely changed the momentum of the game. Crossman, WTF? Stop kicking to him? They single-handedly lost us 1 or 2 games already.

Josh taking advantage of the free play, throwing deep, and drawing the PI, is all I've ever asked of a Buffalo Bills QB. Still mad at Clay for that drop, but hopefully the fumble reminds Allen that running should be his absolute last resort. He's getting hit too much. He's doing a great job this week of finding his checkdowns instead of taking hits and running all over the place. ***** the Jets

Do you remember how the game in San Jose got away from them? This 3rd was like that one. Only we started from a 2 goal lead. Hopefully facing the Kings next, like after that Sharks game, has the same results.

There is no line quite like 10-28-22 in terms of its ability to be leveraged as a tool by the coach. This is not to say that it's our best line, or that it's going to score a lot of goals. But putting our best two shot suppressors on the entire team together, with Larry, who is also no slouch defensively and on faceoffs, does two things. 1.) It keeps defensive minutes out of the wrong hands. (Casey, Jack&Skinner, Rodrigues, Pominville, THOMPSON) 2.) It minimizes these guys' severe lack-of-hands or any offensive abilities whatsoever. And when this line is together, they don't exactly do a bad job of facing top lines either. These three forwards have the toughest QoC usage of any forwards, they chase top lines all day, keeping them away from our vulnerable defensive lines, and the do a fine job. If you're into metrics, they're our best Corsi line we've had this season, despite playing all their minutes together against tough guys and predominantly in the D-zone. They approach 60% of shots, and in terms of weighted quality of shots, their xGF% is also well over 50%. They've only allowed 5 goals together in 125 of these minutes, which comes out to, if you play them 10 minutes per game at ES, chasing top lines the whole time, every 2.5 games they'll allow a goal. I'll take a goal from other teams' top lines at ES every 2.5 games, thank you very much. They do legitimately great work together. And if you don't like the metrics, close your eyes and think back, and surely you can see them cycling endlessly in the offensive zone, because that's mostly what they do more than anything else out there. I've said fifty times how great and important that is from a fourth line, so I won't do it again. Spreading these guys out would look a lot like the Sabres of the last few years, having a set or two of stone hands and zero offensive creativity/instinct on every line. But when this line is together, not only do we bottle up and minimize that, we actually get something functional and useful out of it from the line that has given us problems since we decided to tank. The main problem for the normal NHL coach is that when he gets a line like that, he rides it a little too much. Picture Babs and Draper. Babs and any 4th liner. The Islanders giving that 4th line a lot of money and 20 minutes per game a few years ago. Our coach's problem with this line actually is something different. We have "depth" to a point where there's a fairly regular healthy-scratch carousel. When posters' favorite players are up, they get angry, and that's understandable. But this carousel regularly a.) skips over the two comprehensively worst forwards on the team b.) throws a stick of dynamite in this 4th line to do so, turning every attempt to build a 4th line in its wake a disaster of possession and defense We effectively ate it today to make sure we play Vlad, sticking Tage in Zemgus's spot so Zemgus can sit. Zemgus, of equal point total to Tage Thompson despite getting zero offensive usage to speak of. Well, Tage can't play defense, and was in for another 30% shot share, which is actually pretty damn high compared to his usual defensive-focused-line outings, which are lucky to get out of the teens in any sort of split you could ever want, chances, goals, shot attempts, shots. Tage can help us win games and scores goals for us when he's playing with Mitts, with Sheary, guys like that. But in his 4th line games he's got about 1 point in 20, and posts metrics that make the tank Sabres look great. Literally. Appeal to the eye test all you want, because it was something else today. I'd happily record everything if I had the time. I just don't during finals. So jerking around with Tage, who is a main source of secondary scoring in the last ~10 games, is only hurting both his play and the team's chances. And it's important for Phil to keep an eye on what Tage he's getting. When it's Tage like today, he should absolutely sit. If 10, 28, 71, 22 can be healthy scratched, so can 72. When it's good Tage, let him play with some good players. ---------------Sobotka time-------------------------------------------------------- And I know Hoss and nfreeman are going to yell at me about Vlad, but I've been explicitly watching him for about 12 games now, looking for two things. A scoring chance put on net by him, or a shot-assist for a linemate in a good spot by him. In 12 games, I have seen zero instances of either, without exaggeration. And this is with oodles of ice time with Kyle, sometimes Sheary, sometimes Reinhart. I've seen him get wide open looks in the slot that dribble wide, get blocked, and have not once hit the goalie. I've seen passes into OUR slot directly onto the other team's stick (Nashville). I've seen decent PKing, but in general it's the most obvious spot for an easy roster upgrade as soon as possible. I get not trusting your eye test if the metrics say different, I get not trusting the metrics if the eye test says different. I don't understand when both are dreadful, by far the worst on the team outside of bad-Tage. Despite a whole line of Sabres getting notably tougher minutes, no Sabre makes more than half of the players they play with worse, let alone making every player 10% or more worse in any statistical category split, the way Vlad does. This is 16-17 Nic Deslauriers stuff I'm seeing out there, with marginally-lesk-risky decision making that has stopped paying off when our secondary scoring has dried up. These are Vlad and Tage's percentiles among all NHL forwards for various things. Expected goals and shot shares are scraping the bottom of the entire league's barrel for both of them, but you can clearly see how Tage's shot is an asset. Which is why selective coaching for Tage is required to maximize the lineup each night. If he's feeling it, get him in situations where he can use that shot, and don't put him in situations where he's just defending. And include Vlad in the pressbox carousel, at the very very least. Can you imagine what that would look like if Rodrigues didn't give him two tap-ins in Montreal? These are event charts for guys who see the press box over Vlad, who has not been healthy-scratched this season. Four forwards get non-negligibly-more defensive zone starts than Vlad and flip the ice, while he gets absolutely cratered and obliterated. Those players all bring things to the table he doesn't, but I'm not even asking that he gets regularly sat. I'm just asking that he's treated more like THIS batch of players than getting more ES TOI than Okposo, Sheary, and Mitts, ie, stop giving him the 4th most minutes of all forwards at ES maybe? And surely, stop blowing up a good line to keep him in. -----------------------------End Sobotka time-------------------------------------------------------------- I like Reinhart up scoring with Jack as much as anyone else, but he was coming on before the move happened, and even if Jason isn't quite up to the task, I didn't see him slowing Jack and Jeff themselves down in the last 5 games of the streak. Furthermore, Pominville is utterly useless on a depth line, for all intents and purposes. 53-9-29 scores so many goals and allows very few, winning ES matchups in a huge way. I see zero reason to do anything other than 53-9-29 xxx-xxx-xxx xxx-xxx-xxx 10-22-28 With chemistry and hot-hand-balancing dictating the middle six. Hopefully a callup or two if Nylander, Smith etc. keep playing well. When we use these lines, things work, for reasons that are simple to explain and understand, that play out on the screen in front of us. Explanations which are directly observable. Since we first created the checking line, we have used it 13 times and neglected to use it 10 times, most by choice, some (~3?) because of injury. These are fairly large sample sizes in terms of in-season line analysis. And took about 3 hours to procure In the 13 games with the checking line: The Sabres' Corsi is 52.14%, the non-Eichel-lines' Corsi is 51.25%, and the Sabres' non-Eichel lines average 1.62 goals per game, scoring 21 times in those 13 games. In the 10 games without the checking line: The Sabres' Corsi is 43.59%, the non-Eichel-lines' Corsi is 41.75%, and the Sabres' non-Eichel lines average 0.9 goals per game, scoring 9 times in those 10 games. Scoring increases 80% whenever we use the line 1 and line 4 scoring-checking balance with 22-10-28 and 53-9-23/29. When we throw dynamite into the 4th line, we lose that much scoring and our possession as a team and below Eichel drops about 10 full percentage points, which is an amount that separates top three possession teams from bottom three possession teams. These are shot attempt sample sizes of anywhere from 600 to 1000 shot attempts through 10 to 13 games. Use the checking line Phil, and don't scratch Zemgus while tripping over yourself to avoid scratching your two worst forwards.

I would definitely do a Rakell for Reinhart swap (we'd add) but I doubt Anaheim would ever do that

If you're into post-game interviews, Jack's was "pretty good," if I am understanding how to value post-game interviews correctly.