Randall Flagg

That's a tough iteration of our Buffalo Sabres to go into Tampa with.

I could definitely see them regressing to a point where they miss. They're going to slump like all teams do, and it's possible that the green-ness of this team makes it harder for them to get out of it. I'm not saying that this is supremely likely, but it could happen. If they don't clean up in front of the net and Jeff gets cold, or Jack gets hurt, there will be problems on the horizon

No he was also an excellent shutdown C last year, I'm just saying that boosts his value to the team slightly above Kucherov. Kucherov isn't outscoring him enough to be considered better right now IMO. Full disclosure, I've seen a lot of Tampa highlights this year but only two full games so I'm really just trying to be different here. Yeah Stamkos, relatively speaking, has forgotten how to score goals? But he's turned into quite the playmaker. He's still real good but he's not on the same tier as 86/21. And 21 isn't just playing lights out because he gets to play with 86, though it helps. He had over 30 goals and almost 70 points getting tougher minutes than any Atlantic center not named Bergeron or O'Reilly or Barkov(I think) last season, in just his first full season at 21 years old.

History is yours for the taking, boys. Hot take: Brayden Point is Tampa's best player this year. One point behind Kucherov, and shut-down-centering versus playing wing. Let's do this! Games in Tampa have been wild the last couple of years.

Rielly deserves huge money too, the guy is over a point per game and playing very solid defensively. A legit top 15 1D, if not top 10. I just hope all of these guys wring every dollar out of them they can, and you're right that Nylander basically has to be traded. Worth noting that Jack-Jeff-Pominville have probably only been a thing for ~17 of our games.

I saw that stat column. I really don't know anything about goaltending or their stats. What is the difference between high, medium, low danger?

Do it!

Good luck and best wishes man. I can't imagine how scary that is.

Landeskog-MacK-Rantanen broke the 100 point barrier as a line faster than any NHL line has since Heatley-Alfie-Spezza in 2005. Not sure how interesting that is given the propensity for teams to change their lines a lot, but those guys are ridiculous.

In the late 90s I was learning how to tie my shoes and speak human words

I just showed that Hutton by himself is responsible for 25 fewer goals against than last year's goaltending would have given this team through 25 games this year, given how many shots we give up and where we give them up from. That's not nothin. Though, of course having the makings of a super line with Skinner-Jack and revamped depth forwards that don't drag two lines to tank metrics, and being on pace to get more goals from our D by game 35 than we did all of last year, help too. Not sure who would lay blame/credit for teams getting better/worse all on one player. Actually, I know exactly who likes to do that! (kidding)

I showed that Dreger made tweets about teams being hot on Kane and making serious calls a month before Dreger eventually said that there were no serious calls made on Kane until the day of the trade deadline. If you find something similar with Friedmann and Berglund, let me know. Like I said to duda, I don't WANT to use insiderzzzz as evidence, but I'm in an argument where postgame interview quotes lay insight into the woes of the St. Louis Blues right now. What's it about, sizzle?

It was in Friedmann's 31 thoughts, or some other segment that these guys like to do, often. Not only did I read it directly regularly, but I've seen it discussed on several forums among several fanbases. It definitely happened. If you reeeeeeeally want me to I'll start looking, I should back up my claims. And if you provide evidence to suggest that Doug Armstrong discussion among those guys contradicts other claims they'd made, in a manner similar to the evidence I showed about that being the case with Dreger and Kane's availability, I'll lay off that talking point. And you're right that I hate twitter buzz as evidence, but in a context where we are parsing the phrase "i need to be better" and the projections I see people okay with dragging out of that, a tweet may as well be a five-sigma discovery at CERN.

The raw number is only up like .5 chances per game. League ranking up to 25 from 31. We're still a low-event offensive team compared to the rest of the league. Of course, that stat isn't a be-all-end-all for describing offensive hockey. And so the numbers I used above shouldn't be taken as gospel, but the gap is big enough to be worth looking at. The finishing has certainly been better, and we look more competent/dangerous in the offensive zone by a pretty big margin, a lot of which goes directly to Jeff Skinner IMO.

I always pictured you as a Gregory.

Ooh, I have one of those for 75-76. I'm not sure how or why.

I keep the gameday programs for every game I go to, but I always get the weird players. Berglund, Larsson, Leino, Dagostini, Dalpe, you name it. I just want an Eichel god dammit!

Sorry MattPie.

Hfboards has some fun units like this. Speed is measured in units of Brad Browns. I don't remember why. Any time a player would celebrate or do anything against the grain of good ol' canadian boy culture they'd get a score of "classless Subbans" in a vein of picking on Don Cherry/people who don't like fun in their hockey. Risto's celebration yesterday? That's an easy 5/10 classless Subbans And then there was Claude Giroux-adjusted points, I don't remember what that was about

The good news is our "unsustainable hockey" has been propping up an "unsustainable win streak." No 10 game streak is sustainable otherwise it wouldn't be this special. We were playing sustainably good hockey before this recent stretch of games which lends me to the belief that we'll find it again and be a solid hockey team all year, boosted by banking 20+ of 20+ points in the middle of the season. And that's how most good teams do their work. Rare is the team that night in and night out takes the opposition to task and snuffs out any attempt towards their net.

The Leafs are an NHL team unlike any I've ever watched.

I dunno. To be honest, that foray into navigating corsica.hockey along with other sites (corsica makes you refresh and re-apply your filters if you leave the page for more than a couple seconds) has broken me for the night so you'll have to do it yourself ?

I'm not super sure where to do this, but I am thanking the lord (actually thanking Botterill) for Hutton. Carter is my team MVP right now. Carter Hutton is second in ES high-danger-save-percentage of all goalies with at least 15 starts, at .873. I recall Lehner being 30th or so, even in the season where his overall SP was .920. Ullmark is at .853. Both are top 15 in all situations. Their overall save percentage is .920 (532/578 shots faced for Hutton) and .926 (213/230 for Ullmark). The Sabres this season have allowed 632 shots against at 5v5 in 25 games. 25.3 per game. Overall they have allowed 813, or 32.5 per game. Both of these numbers are bottom ten, though might not be if all teams had equal games played, I don't have time to normalize, and it's not important for what I'm doing. 283 high danger chances for, 222 at 5v5. No Sabre goalie broke 80% in high danger save percentages last season. Replacing our goalies' overall save percentages with last year's goalies' and changing nothing else about our play would give us 12 more goals allowed than we already have through 24 games, or one goal every other game. We'd have 80 and be solidly bottom ten in that regard. However, if we take the high danger chances we've allowed this season (the rate is worse than it was last year) and applied last season's high-danger-save percentage, ie, if we plugged in Lehner/Chad for the things we're giving up more of now, the nuts and bolts of how NHL goals get scored...Through 25 games, instead of allowing the 33 of these goals we've allowed, they'd have given up SIXTY. 60. That's a net difference of 27 more goals allowed in these 25 games. Playing the same defensive hockey in front of the goaltending we got on those exact shots last year would place us bottom 5 in GA this year. Considering that we are giving free passes to the slot during this win streak and winning by one goal every game, I don't think we'd have won ten games in a row, or ten games yet this season. Hence, Carter Hutton is the team MVP, and letting Lehner walk/signing Carter the cake as best roster move by any GM this offseason IMO. No other move has given a team such a direct boost in the things that win hockey games, goals.

1. and insert hockey player here's interviews, just like any hockey player's interviews, are "I want to go home and take a goddamn bath" interviews. 2. No, because to this day I fundamentally cannot see where the twitterverse is coming from in the way they blew that up. The insinuation that it was part of a master plan to orchestrate his way out of town is in "vortex of sadness" territory of hockey analysis, in that it isn't, and I'm really done treating it like it is on a hockey forum I guess. Which should be music to SS's ears, as I understand that it's tiresome to read my posts about ROR.

I don't recall tweets from Friedmann and Dreger several times over the course of a year about how Jack and Sam abruptly quit the joke they were in the midst of as Snook enters the room, fearfully glancing over their shoulders. I do remember tweets from Friedmann and Dreger several times over the course of a year about how Doug Armstrong is trying to dump the contracts, first of Berglund ( that one probably ran a year and a half) and then for Sobotka. If that helps explain where I'm coming from.