Randall Flagg

The reason Phil is sitting Evan is the reason that when he plays he's at the bottom of the barrel in terms of ES ice time, and the reason Sobotka is regularly the 2nd most played center and 4th most played forward - Phil struggles to understand WHY things work when they are working. When Sobotka isn't posting the worst metrics on the team, it's because he's with Reinhart, but when Reinhart leaves his side, Phil thinks it's Vlad and continues to play that (now much worse) line second to Jack's, and we subsequently have trouble at ES again for the first time in 5 games Evan doesn't have a goal yet but everything underlying about his game supports what it looks like on the ice - whether it's 28-71-29 or 71-37-21, he is simply makes things work and tilts the ice

Which is why it's been known for years that expected goals, which are a first attempt at weighting shots based on quality, are the best offensive predictive stats out there Catch: didn't read the article

No idea. I can go look at them. Their fancy stats are in general solid, except the allow a lot of high danger chances against, so Raanta is doing well, but he also did that all last season, so I don't think it's a huge issue.

Remember how bad the Coyotes were 3 weeks ago? They're 6-5 now and they allow the fewest goals per game in the entire NHL

Jacky boy is gonna set him up for the hat trick tonight. Games against the Senators have been consistently entertaining. Their best games of the 15-16 and 16-17 seasons, IMO, were against Ottawa. Jack's first game back in 16-17 was great, as was the one in 15-16 where he beats Karlsson and shrugs off 6-7 20000 pound Wiercoch for the gorgeous wraparound as part of his 2 goal night to win 3-2. 4-0 with a Foligno goal and Jack's filthy pass to Sam from behind the net. Lehner was always so good against them. Let's do this boys! You can win these next two, but like against Montreal, make sure you're skating!! Can't watch this one until ~11:30 tonight. Proctoring a 3 hour mid-term that doesn't start until 730 pm. Who does that for an intro undergrad class??

I had been hoping that he would get lightly banged up or switched out for Remi like several had been in the first few games this season, to make game 1000 at home against Ottawa, but he's been healthy and hasn't deserved to be pulled out. This is cool though. When I picture Jason, I picture him putting up points against Ottawa. Or taking that clapper against Tim Thomas and the Bruins in Boston.

These guys have been trading places in that for years it feels like, always fun to follow.

I didn't know TV could BE and DO what Breaking Bad is/does. And @shrader the only thing that stops me is how sh*t I feel on my morning bike ride if I don't sleep well. And that doesn't always work.

From Islanders fans, he's not totally clicking yet but still has 12 pts in 11 games. Sorta like Jack. I recall looking in the summer and deciding that he wasn't going to hit much of a drop-off because his most played opponents were still tough with Tavares - a lot of teams used their defensive lines against Tavares which sent out Kucherov, Matthews, Malkin, Barkov etc. against Barzal with good results for him.

Barzal needs 3 points in his next 5 games to join McDavid as the only two players in the last ten years with 100 points in their first 100 NHL games. The Islanders are off to a very nice start this season - 6-4-1 with much better defense and goaltending than they had last year.

I was dead wrong about the Anaheim lines though, so I've got some nice spices that will make my hat more palatable.

I would do that in the offseason, when it becomes clear we can add another defenseman. RNH has been excellent the last 90 games or so. But right now, we need depth and bodies, even though I've posted that I think Pilut in the top six and Risto out would make our net top six perform better, and so that's not something I'd do today. There was an offseason rumor floating around that was something like Klefbom and 10 for Risto. I am pained that this could have been a thing, much less Hall-Risto

I will eat my hat if Elie - Mitts - Reinhart comes close to doing what either Sheary - Sobotka - Reinhart or Erod - Mitts - Kyle did.

I believed this for a long time and still probably do deep inside, but I have the patience of a millennial and so I'm ready to move on, with the assumption that since nobody in two separate regimes has noticed that the current setup is an issue for the team and for Risto, nobody ever will.

There are at least 4 forwards in tomorrow's lineup performing worse than Rodrigues this season, but it does appear that Phil thinks he should be the fringe 12/13 guy. It's becoming painful

Sooo why is Rodrigues still out. Even with Phil turning the best ES scoring rate on the team last year into some sort of defensive specialist, Rodrigues was stirring the drink anywhere they put him. ...

I would tune in to watch Pryor play QB. I'd tune in to watch Barkley play QB. It's not that I'd expect them to do well, but given this point in the game, I would presume that the team is trying something and is just doing what it has to with what it has. It would be, in a vacuum, the logical thing I'd expect a team in this situation to do. So I'd tune in. But I know what Peterman is. I've watched his progression. I've watched the horror that this team put HIM through, as well as that which he put US through. I cannot believe that they are trotting him back out there. With what has happened in his previous outings, with him being a national punchline, the worst QB so many people have ever seen, over journeymen bad QBs whose names have at least been tried out and heard of, names that don't come with the emotional and national-discussion baggage that Peterman does. I can't believe they have the balls to do this. But balls is the wrong word, because that implies some sort of courage. I can't believe they have the audacity to do this to us. Take a walk, McBeane. I'm not watching your garbage

Risto got 1/3 of his ES minutes (~6) against LA with Kopitar. The team took 30% of the shots while he was out there, 40% of the scoring chances. Dahlin got about 1/5 of his ES minutes against Kopitar's line, about 3.5 minutes, and the team took 64% of the shot attempts, 57% of the scoring chances while he was out there. But it's not like Dahlin's other opponents are easier, he got the Carter line instead for much of the rest of the time and still had those numbers. Same game, McCabe had more than 1/3 of his ES minutes against the Kopitar line, and the team was still bad at shooting but was over 10% better than when Risto did the same thing, and we took 75% of the SCORING chances with McCabe on the ice. At Columbus, three guys on three different pairings were Bogosian, Risto, Dahlin, against the top line. Same splits: Risto got 40% of his ES ice time against Panarin, 44% shot shares, 27% of scoring chances. Recall Panarin's goal in the second - a scoring chance that was bad positioning on Risto part - connecting the stats to the ice. Bogosian got 30% of his ES ice time against Panarin, Sabres had 56% of shot shares and 55% of scoring chances while this was happening. In less than two more minutes against Panarin than Bogosian had, Risto allowed 9 more scoring chances to that line. It was 12 in 7 minutes for Risto versus 3 in 5.5 minutes for the Bogosian pair. Dahlin's pair only got a couple minutes with Panarin, but didn't handleit well either: scoring chances were 1-3 in favor of the Panarin line, shots 5-2. Against Calgary, ~33% of Risto's minutes were against Gaudreau. Risto's line overall had 25% of the shots, 23% of the scoring chances. Bogosian had 43% of his minutes against the Gaudreau line. On the game he had 56% of the shot shares, 50% of the scoring chances. He played more minutes against the Gaudreau line than Risto, yet allowed half of the shot attempts Risto did in that time. I'm mixing a lot of stats here, and this isn't supposed to be a clear presentation of things, I'm just writing down as I look stuff up. But the point is, it's not as simple as Risto's game getting better with easier minutes. He's always going to have to play against good hockey players, and even teammates that I don't particularly like (Bogosian) APPEAR to my eyes to be playing smarter hockey and handling opponents better than Risto, and when I write these stats down, it appears that the stats show they're handling good players and lines better as well. I just firmly believe the mechanism for this is the decisions Risto makes with and without the puck, and I don't think that's a function of minutes or quality of opposition and a quick peak in the last two weeks at least doesn't disprove this idea. And with that my extended 2 hour lunch break is over

I don't think Reinhart belongs on the ice in 3v3 OT, and he made a bad read on the play too. But Like dark says, Risto has carried the puck down from the point about 1,000 times in his NHL career, and I can picture one goal that happened because of it, in Calgary during his hat trick game in the 15-16 season. It doesn't work, and Jack had space, and the defenseman in 3v3 OT should NEVER find himself in a situation where he's sitting on his butt behind the other team's goal line. That is inexcusable. Furthermore, as a "we should have traded Risto 2 years ago" poster that this pushback (and IKP's) is geared towards: It is a statistical fact that since Risto started being used as a top pairing defenseman, the team gets caved in when he's on the ice. Relative to his teammates and his bad-possession teams, not just relative to what is good. The team doesn't score, they don't take shots, they allow a lot of shots and a lot of goals. Of course, he is young, and should never have been put into this role in the first place. But a.) We've had two completely different coaching regimes continue to do it (It is NOT necessary - not every team has a defender that gets 26 minutes per game like this, so many spread their minutes out if they don't have a Norris winner) over the course of four years and not learn by noting that the team is handicapped for 30 of 60 minutes because of it, so there's no reason to expect this to stop any time soon unless Dahlin is a Norris candidate next year, which could happen but doesn't look like it will quite yet b.) At Risto's age during these seasons, 20-23, there are plenty of defensemen that have been that age and have handled equally defensive minutes correctly (Slavin&Pesce, Jones, Provorov etc), if 2 or 3 fewer per game (which are largely PP minutes in Risto's case) Even if we can be vague about Risto not handling the minutes well in a hockey sense over an endurance sense, over four seasons we absolutely can start to connect the statistical sh*tshow to things that he's doing and that these other defensemen DON'T do. I've seen Risto throw the puck blindly for no reason up the boards, to have it picked and turned into a glorious slot chance, at least six times in this young season, and I'm not even watching for it. I've seen about six goals against where his positioning was wonky and played a role in it being allowed. The patience that's being displayed by Bogosian (!!) on transition plays, to find the right move and not just directly hand it back to the other team, dwarfs Risto's regular effort. When I was counting our defensemen's various plays last season before the project fizzled out, Risto was like 200% worse than any single teammate in terms of just chucking the puck to the opposing defensemen in the NZ despite having 2+ teammates in passing lanes staring at him with their stick on the ice. And this stuff doesn't happen to defensemen that aren't as "good" as he is - guys like Nelson. It's not some force field exerted by good players that make Risto's numbers worse. It's stupid things he does that we yell at him for in the GDT 30 times per game. It feels like Risto is a good NHL hockey player because he has the physical strength to handle tough opposing forwards, the lungs and quads of a machine which let him keep getting back out there, and the PP QB ability (which has vanished this season) to get a lot of power play points, but the actual ES production for him and his team, both real and expected, is dismal, ranking well below 100th among defensemen last season in some categories likes ES points per minute (in a sample size of ~200). The reason why that physical package can't handle what others can at ~2 minutes less per game is in between his ears, and we neither have the sample size of him against reduced opponents (though if you go to NST and look at any other Sabres defenseman's numbers over this time even against specific hard opponents like the top lines in the Atlantic, he gets outperformed by bad defensemen on his own team) nor any reason to assume that his inability to think, position, pass at the speed of an NHL game will perform meaningfully better against slightly worse opponents (Hagelin and Brassard skate just as fast as Sid and Hornqvist/Guentzel) he'd see in a regular 2nd pairing role. He'd get less tired but the functional reason for our team doing miserable while he's out there doesn't stop when he's fresh at the beginning of games and seasons, it's what he's been doing since he was raised in a disgusting tank environment. The view of us is that, rather than giving a slightly smaller chunk of Sabres gameplay to bad hockey that has consistently been worse than what the team itself can put out, that there's absolute hard evidence that "addition by subtraction" is possible in this case as opposed to other situations where it's dubiously and vaguely proposed wrt ill-defined off-ice effects, which is happily accepted by many. Watching other teams and other defensemen in today's NHL, they are playing a different sport compared to Risto in terms of what gets done offensively (the rush from the right point down the boards into a board battle in the corner, Risto, ISN'T the only thing that D can do to create offense, don'tcha know?!) and defensively, say, at the line on zone entries (Risto is one of the worst in the league at breaking up zone entries at the blue line statistically). It's not that his replacement will be stronger and more physically capable of playing around with Ovie and Lucic, but those isolated incidents don't win teams games the way smooth, heady defensemen do, even if they're weak and tiny, and the things Risto does every day actively prevent teams from winning.

Extend it to the 2nd period even. They kept up in the 1st but Calgary basically uniformly took it to them the rest of the game. Agreed that it felt just like last year.

His hockey IQ is low, and was never groomed because his job for his first 2 years was to shovel the puck out without any care for where it went, as long as it was out. He doesn't make the right decisions in coverage/positioning, in moving the puck, or in carrying the puck, and as a result for half of the game he's out there the Sabres are regularly outshot and outscored by a large margin compared to most NHL defensemen.

I know I'm years late, but I'm still on my first watch-through of Breaking Bad. I go dormant with the show for months but then pick it up and watch quite a bit for a week or two at a time. But I'm going to finish it out on this stretch. I've been doing an episode after work before bed every night. Just finished "Crawl Space." My god this show is on another tier from anything I've ever watched in my life. I'm sitting here with goosebumps and my eyes wide open still and the episode ended 15 minutes ago.

Jack will never be confused with Bergeron, but I thought he led tonight. He was backchecking like a fiend. Good work Jack.

Ah gotcha. Those are 5v5 or ES numbers.