Randall Flagg

@dudacek still needs to give me my "L" on improvement from the guys that remained on the team from last year. Don't hold back, I can take it ?

I think Risto is still confident after Bylsma plays him 30 minutes against McDavid, and then 31 minutes 21 hours later against Alex Ovechkin. I just think it becomes physically impossible to remain useful after about 41 games of that.

What I'm saying is that they have zero trade value and so any value-driven analysis of the ROR trade, they may as well not be there. It's not saying that Botterill doesn't get credit for them as depth additions, it's saying that when you sum up trade value, it's the same whether they're there or not, and the sticking point I had with the trade is that ROR's value could have been higher than what that sum is had Jason and Phil done/been allowed to do things differently (read: play ROR better, not have to trade by the stroke of midnight on xxx day, giving Doug the leverage of simply sitting there and smiling until Jason has to say okay)

It is not tautology to still be waiting for proof of claims that ROR is a locker room cancer, and to proceed as if message board speculation with a clear source that I don't read as being anything remotely related to cancerous undertakings doesn't constitute such proof in my attempts to understand a situation in a league where locker room cancers exist and almost always have actual trails of evidence. And let's not pretend that every time I stick my head in to the ROR discussion that precedes my involvement, the tone of the conversation has anything to do with your last bold and isn't just surface level nonsense using solely the second bold as the main sticking point. There's plenty of room for discussion of "immeasurables" and when I make long posts I'm not addressing those.

And what I'm saying, is that the bold is a laughable take and I can't help but comment when I see posts with a similar theme. Judging by repeatedly mentioning ROR and Jack over the course of a year as being so critical to having a good team, having two strong centers, often leaving his name in place at the expense of core pieces like Reinhart, yes, I think Botterill loved one of the best two-way-centers in the game, and had a tough choice when he decided that the contract, age, and locker room condition of the team made it worth the immediate downgrade of the position. And I can even happily say that he's right, as long as he knew a Skinner-esque trade was coming to add another top six forward. The Avs had the worst non-expansion-team season ever soon after trading ROR. I'm not letting the architects of that team teach me something that, in all other NHL situations, have been fleshed out on much firmer ground r.e. what players are cancers and what aren't.

They also got a "break" in that, continuing the theme of the night, the refs didn't care that Thornton was hooking the living daylights out of Skinner before Skinner came free to score. Had they been real refs and not hosers, the play would have been dead when Jones poke-checked it to Skinner.

The biggest improvement of this team IMO is that Phil went from pretty bad at this incredibly important thing to it being his best, er, trait/ability, in one offseason. You can survive goofy lines, goofy challenges, or other goofy coach things if you are good at this and Phil has been giving us a lot of good things on top of it.

Without Sam Reinhart, Vlad Sobotka is on the ice for nearly double the amount of shots/chances against as he is shots/chances for, something that is only approached by Tage Thompson - no other Sabre comes close to metrics as bad as Vlad's without Sam, despite three other forwards getting more defensive usage than he does, and four other forwards getting tougher opposition. His on-ice effects are those of tank-depth. If you don't dig stats, the reason for this is easy to flesh out - I put a whole video together on it over the course of several weeks this summer. In summary, his low-event-ness only follows him in the offensive zone. He doesn't have the shot suppression abilities of Zemgus/Berglund because he doesn't close as well on his opponents, and doesn't have the strength they do to maintain board battles as well (there's a reason 22-10-28 can tilt the ice the way they do despite severely limited hands/stickhandling). Furthermore, in the offensive zone he cannot sustainably get open or move the puck to areas where it can be dangerous and useful. This is why Reinhart helps him. Sobotka's primary ability as a "board battle survivor" can be leveraged elsewhere by a player like Sam who knows how to take those pucks and do something with them, but without Sam, none of our other bottom/middle sixers are great in situations where their teammate is engaged in a board battle and not cleanly winning with regularity. Rewatch the SJ game, there was a rush Vlad had where he was open in the top of the zone but was quickly swallowed whole. His shot on the net from a point where Jack or Tage can take dangerous shots and where Casey/Sam can make nifty feeds to teammates was so weak it never got to the goalie. His breakaways and odd man rushes that have dissolved (he can score if somebody is carrying and feeding him, see Erod/Kyle/Sam in Vegas and Montreal, but don't let him be the carrier), or the rare instance he gets the puck near the hash marks and promptly loses it or delivers a muffin that would make 14-15 Reinhart proud, are examples of this. This is not to totally trash Vlad, who has a role on this current roster. He makes a great pair with ERod on a very good PK. After Phil dissolved the ROR role for good when we were 3-4-0, Vlad hasn't been in danger of being in positions important enough to tank the team's chances while he's on the ice the way players with similar metrics on bad Sabres teams last year were. Before that, Vlad was getting top 2/3 ES minutes of all Sabres forwards in heavy defensive contexts and we had members quitting on the season. But Phil learned something and as a result Vlad can remain top 12 in my heart this year. But he has not been legitimately good in all situations. He has been a legitimate depth improvement to a guy like Jordan Nolan or Benoit Pouliot, no more, and no less, and we have the ammunition and prospects available to make him a nonfactor on a great Sabres team next year, and should leverage that ability.

As far as I can tell, Jason loved ROR and felt the need to change the room was more important for the team than keeping ROR. And that he likes Tage Thompson, and had to work with an external clock. That is reasonable and fits all available evidence, even if it's not what I'd have done. I'd leave it there forever, except for the cancer and "har har blues bad ROR blues ROR bad" comments that make me seem obsessed.

I've asked for anything tangible surrounding this narrative since July and have gotten three different milquetoast interview quotes as a response, FWIW. However, not buying into the line of thinking is equivalent to not believing in the human element of humans, so be careful!

I'm happy for the depth Berglund and Sobotka provided. Though I think Bergy is better than Vlad because Bergy has been a key piece to one of our most useful lines, whereas Sobotka gets tanked and can't generate anything unless he's paired with (and not doing much to help offensively) Reinhart. I expect and would push for our internal and external roster movements over the next 8 months to make Sobotka an odd man out and not a regular piece for next year's team. As far as trade analysis goes, it was well documented that Doug wanted to dump those guys for a year before we traded for them, so they could have been added for something tiny without the trade. So for me, the ROR trade is 100% about Tage, the first, the second. Though what we got is secondary to what we did with ROR while he was here and the circumstances around the trade.

The UFA swap between the Blues and the Sabres is tangibly what everyone desperately wants the ROR trade to be for some reason I've not yet figured out, and am starting to chalk up to the fact that Buffalo fans love to dislike guys their teams trade. ROR gone -> improved locker room is actually Carter Hutton's leadership + Robin Lehner gone -> improved locker room ROR gone -> improved game results is actually Carter Hutton here, Chad Johnson elsewhere -> improved game results ROR to St. Louis -> St. Louis now bad is actually "best season from a blues center maybe ever, somehow making Rob Sanford an NHL player" not overcoming league-worst goaltending and JBo, Pietrangelo, Steen, Schenn etc. playing u t t e r garbage hockey It's one thing to add in off-ice leadership factors, which I've done since the beginning with what we know. It's another universe to actively and proudly shut off all interest in analyzing hockey.

I've read that ROR never requested a trade, and so until there's hard proof he did I would assume otherwise. No names that have ever broken anything have said that this happened -there isn't hard proof right now, unless I missed it. And even then, if you can find me that evidence, you have to connect that to actively bringing down the team off the ice on a day to day basis, because he was their best overall player on it all season long. I've also heard nothing of the next thing you say, except for off-the-cuff comments from Jack about what good buddies he and ROR are and how it sucked to have to lose the guy. They were put out there by his own desire, he wasn't asked to say anything and feel pressured into giving a nice response. The type of evidence I'm talking about are things we could easily find. It's possible to get them. We do know that Lehner created intense locker room malaise, because of the things that have come out since then. Of course, none of that is his fault. But his situation is absolutely killer. I really don't like the phrase "cancer" to describe any human being, but Lehner was a locker room cancer. Matt Duchene didn't come to training camp last year, and refused to speak to anyone in the organization while playing for weeks before they traded him. That is a locker room cancer. That's stuff we see. Players that bully, that create drama, that sleep with their teammates' wives, that encourage doing stuff that goes against team success, those players are locker room cancers. The only thing I've ever heard that I can come even close to grounding in reality about ROR off the ice is one locker room quote on cleanout day, and of course the TH incident before he ever played a game. As somebody who has given his life to one single thing for the last six years, I can say that "losing love for something" when the grinding is bad is as common as catching a cold, ie, I've done it 24 times in those six years. There are days that physics destroys me and I actively hate it and regret ever trying. That to me isn't indicative of anything cancerous: it's indicative of something somebody would say to spice up the 90th interview they had to give while being a premiere piece on a bad team, whose badness was anything but his fault. Looking for stuff like that in repetitive postgame interviews and citing "vortices of sadness" (Vogl, 2018) is about as far away from actual hockey analysis or just plain reason as anything ever discussed here. I've read one rumor from one poster about him having depression and it being a cloud in the locker room, and I've read the same thing about Kyle. Kyle is here and the guys are somehow surviving - you can't tell me with a straight face that there aren't one or two cases of severe depression on every NHL team. Until we know that ROR is doing stuff the way that we know Lehner almost died, there's no evidence for it other than Sabres twitter and media going utter f###ing ballistic over a meaningless quote and then employing light-years of projection on top of it in effort to try and deal with just how bad we were last year. You see, that's the disconnect here. This board has a habit of projecting with me on this topic. I'm the guy that only cares about stats and doesn't believe in locker room stuff and culture, except that's completely untrue. When I say I'm over the ROR trade, I mean this: Given the bulk of the offseason moves, I would in a vacuum never mention the ROR trade again just because I'm focused on our team now, even though I still think it was gone about poorly and personally wouldn't have made the decision to trade him. You can read through my post history and any time I've talked about ROR since early July, not just in a mild passing comment of which he is not the focus, has been in response to what I believe to be the worst takes I've read on this board in a while. Those takes are NOT what you and others would assume they are, based on remarks I've received as a high-volume-poster who didn't like the trade: I don't think people who wanted to trade ROR or think it was a good thing for the locker room have bad takes. It's completely reasonable to follow this chain of logic, which most people do: Our team loses, it's a problem, it's all they know, and we need to get the stink out. We need to trade a core piece. Sometimes you just have to do that. ROR is the oldest one and has a big cap hit, with which we can use to open space to make improvements necessary to fill his hole (hint hint, Skinner is the way to do it). So peace out ROR. And a fresh locker room will do our team good. It's not the decision I would have made, but it is based in reason as a way to inject freshness to a team that needed it. The reason I wouldn't have done it began being chronicled months before you ever came back here - ROR's usage last season as our second best offensive piece on a team that couldn't score was Ovie-under-Oates level incompetent, and it led to severe depreciation of an asset.If you aren't convinced of this, I'll leave you with two notes: ROR had more d-zone starts (often with the 4th line wings of the worst depth in the league) per ice time played than any player to ever play 1000 minutes or more, and this season, without that usage, ROR has already passed his ES goal total from last year in like 60 fewer games. Coupled with a money-driven deadline, it killed many of us to see our second best player let go in that situation. I know we "whined" and "were haters" and all that good stuff, but I have yet to be swayed that this is good asset management, and mopey-ROR memes won't do it. Anyway, when I step in and sound like I'm not over the ROR trade, it's because I'm reading the BAD takes: That we have proof he's a locker room cancer, that this overcame his on-ice value and is a reason the team was bad, that the team is better because of his absence and not because of improved everything-else (not the same thing as saying a new locker room doesn't do good), and the best part, the implication that the Blues' woes are directly correlated to ROR's presence there. I don't know how to nicely say it, but that's the worst take I've read in my hockey forum life, and I have seen it here more than once since the trade(not saying anyone is presently promoting it). It's even more present on the hfboards doohickie mentions: It proudly casts aside the rigor of actually trying to understand and parse the incredible nuances of hockey teams, often to the faces of the fans that follow that team as religiously as we follow ours. So yeah, I'm going to post when I see things that aren't supported by evidence and get let go by everyone. It's in my nature. You'd have worn out that GIF in 2 weeks during the Bylsma years. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the hfboard experience: I believe Doohickie is accurately describing what he experienced. Venturing to other forums over there is risky business. Sabres fans themselves are actually notorious for being worse about it than others over there. For example: In the Dahlin thread this summer, I dared to question a comment that Dahlin was "the best prospect to enter the NHL since Wayne Gretzky." That comment went 4 days without being spoken towards, and it got some likes. I couldn't help myself. "That is a fairly ridiculous take" or something of the sort. I was bombarded by fans of the same team as me, and referred to as a "Dahlin hater" and "miserable" person MONTHS after that exchange (and one where I said that his floor, his worst case scenario, isn't Erik Karlsson, the best defenseman of a 20 year stretch of hockey). That is what going to hfboards is like. But the Blues fans aren't reacting in a vacuum either. On the main boards, I've read a lot of Blues-Sabres interactions concerning the trade. They often go like this: Thread title: "Your team's MVP" or "Grade your team's players" Literally every Blues fan: "ROR and Parayko", "ROR and Perron." "ROR." and then "ROR: A+, Everyone else, D" etc. Amidst a myriad of fans posting their favorites and least favorites Sabres fan, quoting Blues fan: "LMFAO you guys got hosed. ROR is on your team and you're losing. WHAT A SURPRISE. Eat this ten game win streak" "lol you all are just bitter. You have a cancer and a loser and that's why you're losing." They're responding to Doohickie with lots of this fresh in their memories. It's farcical, absurd, and embarrassing, and I've seen it happen fairly often. This might be the physical scientist in me speaking, but consider me unimpressed and unconvinced.

I'm not super sure how to get stats with which I feel comfortable trying to answer these questions. I started opening tabs but I was quickly overwhelmed. I think our team has improved at moving the puck to the point where the sheer number of chances available to our D has increased. I also think they were ridiculously unlucky last year. I don't care how bad your defense is, it's not so bad that it takes 28 games to get your first goal from them. At this rate, they will match last year's D in goals scored by game 34. So part is just returning to being a relatively normal NHL team as far as getting goals from the D, versus being a ridiculously bad and probably historical outlier. I think they've been boosted by the abilities of 50% of the forward roster being overhauled. Instead of Griffith failing to get the puck back to the point, Berglund can get it there. That kind of thing.

My ranking: Risto's goal last night. Eichel OT winner in Pittsburgh. Eichel to Jason to Jeff in Anaheim to get our winning record back. Mitts tying the Pittsburgh game. Skinner off the faceoff to tie the game in MTL. Sam tying the Vancouver game. This is when good feelings started turning into "this might be something special." Skinner tying the most recent Montreal game. Kyle winning the other Montreal game. McCabe from Dahlin in Minny - streak moves to 6, Dahlin breakout game, special play. Risto winning the game in MTL. Epic, but no style points, Price just ate ****. Eichel OT winner in Calgary last January. Love and miss those one-timers. Tage blast. It would move up if closer to the dying moments in the 3rd, or if from behind. Skinner winning the Montreal game. Ugly goal, still deserves a spot. Mitts' first NHL goal. That game was fun and a glimpse at what we're seeing this year. I remember us posting in that GDT and starting to see sun and feel hopeful, even though we lost.

Not it blue

Dude same!! Being home was so epic. My girlfriend's family almost never follows hockey but they've been as riveted as we have. Friday against Montreal, Grandma, her sister, my sister&brother, and my girlfriend are all watching a game that last year I was holed up with the "bad tv," watching by myself. Edges of our seats, lots of noise, it was such a special moment for me. Most of the year I'm here by myself, no family or friends in sight. I've worn like eight Sabres items to campus the last two days and am getting comments left and right. One of my students is a Sharks fan and we had some fun ribbing each other Tuesday - I had the upper hand today! Not only did his team lose, but I was giving him an exam to grapple with for an hour.

Wait MattPie is still here? Jesus. And I've met TBB. sorry!!

This is a lot of words to read and my brain is fried today. Doesn't the filter outright remove bad words completely? That's actually why I originally started subbing in my own - I'd type a word, expecting a ##### to show up, only nothing would show up and my sentence would be gibberish with only a single whitespace where the word was. And whether it does or it doesn't, SDS is fine with us typing Oh ##### it! or something like that right? Just none of the switching c&k in the f-word? Or should I not do that either? Just to be clear.

You're MattPie right? Or have I totally lost track of everyone?

Shootout goals aren't interesting enough to deserve votes IMO. Casey and Tage and Sam had pretty ones, but it's one of like six events that happens to build up to a single game winning goal (3 shots/saves for each team). Since we have lots of epic game tying and game winning goals this year, I don't see how any shootout goal can stand up to them.

What is evidence that ROR was a locker room cancer? Why is the guy that was drinking and doing drugs to go to sleep every night, in a depressive spiral that almost killed him, with boatloads of evidence that this affected his locker room relationships and on-ice play from the most important position on the ice, notoriously absent when the discussion of ROR's pervasive negativity being a reason we're bad, pop up?

12-0-0 when Samson Reinhart scores a point. They really did let the wrong goalie go. But they surely can't think they'd be better with the two pieces that tanked their play on the ice last year, on longish contracts, that they'd been trying to dump for two years, their fifth favorite prospect, when in return they got a guy who is pacing for one of the best scoring-C seasons they have ever had in franchise history, relative to the rest of the league, when their center position has been historically weak? Are you sure that they're bitter about the trade itself?

I think their defensive play, aside from Dahlin, isn't super different from last season. Last season they were in the top half in shots/corsi/quality shots allowed, if I remember correctly. It may have been the best aspect of the team, so it's not too much of an insult to say that that part of the team isn't much improved. There are still lots of coverage gaffs and we give up a ridiculous amount of slot chances compared to other teams. They'll get better. And yeah, the offensive side is a million times better.