Randall Flagg

Jack with two excellent shifts so far to respond to his tough night in LV.

For sure. Reading all about how Vegas hadn't scored a PP goal yet all day Tuesday....all I could think about was that there was no way they weren't scoring one

I think it's too late in the night for that to happen. I'm treading dangerous waters here since apparently my stream is about 2 minutes behind

Welp, I can't participate in this thread, you guys are way too far ahead of me.

Did that go in off his hand?

Pewp

Nice shift for the Eichel line. That sucks about the penalty.

Wouldn't that be nice. MacK really was looking quite bad in his 4th season.

According to a tweet from Harrington, Hutton is pretty good against the Sharks in his career. 4-1-1, .955 SP, 1.32 GAA. The Sharks have a good roster of course, but they've struggled a bit integrating all of the pieces this early it seems. Winnable game. The Sabres actually played quite well during the California games last year, kept them close. Got their first win in Anaheim.

I think the culture talk has already begun again though.

I DO agree with THAT, but just bombing away from the points appears to be a consistent trend for Phil Housley teams. I'm still waffling on whether or not it's his thing or the thing our players can do without losing the puck, but it's a longer-term concern for me w/ him.

I'll be watching the apocalyptic locker room discussions that take place if/when we hit our next rough patch closely for consistency ? Just messing around. Agree that Thompson should develop into a nice player. I'd prefer that he goes to Roch when we get back to build his confidence back up - IDK if Smith has the points yet, but I'm reading that he just does all of the little things right, and so that would be a good player to bring up in Tage's place that shows rewarding of good hockey play and doesn't screw up too badly the theme of slow-cooking your prospects together in the AHL. Sorry We've, you need to throw at least one full-blown temper tantrum to join the club - this "mature, careful, reasonable, considerate" vibe you put out is too forgettable.

And since ROR trade is water under the bridge, True's right that I have little interest in rehashing it...but we got some lip for some of our takes on the two vets in particular, and yet none of our takes were negative enough to project one of them being a healthy scratch on this roster less than 10 games into the first season! So I won't fault him for patting himself on the back ? I'm also not worried about the healthy scratch. I don't even think it was the right move

Phil seems to need one of these...I just don't know how he came to the conclusion that it should be Sobotka. I'd probably pick 6 other forwards before him, even if it entails lowering a faceoff percentage (haven't seen anybody's yet this season)

Getting to the net with more traffic to me implies continuing to emphasize crappy point shots which anyone can tell without stats is not the best way to run things in the offensive zone

Not fer nothin, but Sobotka has been worse than Berglund in the games he's played IMO. Berglund with Skinner was a good combo, even if most of that was Skinner. Vlad has had no good combos, and yet he gets the defensive role that has given him bizarre shifts with Eichel. Berglund's first game where he was truly bad came from playing with Tage and Vlad, who I think are both not regular NHLers right this second. It's a bit concerning that the result of this is Berglund scratched while Vlad gets more ES time than anyone not on Jack's line.

Another tiny sample size alert: But this team is now out of the bottom ten in expected goals for, after being consistently, like, last for a while. Pretty sure it's because we have two guys that can create offense on different lines. A poster on hf phrased it as "somebody competing with Jack for offensive minutes" being a great thing for the team's offense. Ie, it's literally because of Skinner being here and replacing the top six role of a player that Phil preferred to use as Jay Beagle, needing to be heavily sheltered because of Jeff's lack of defense   xGF correlates better than shots and current goals with future goal predictions, so let's hope that bears out and the Sabres can crawl out of the goal scoring basement.

Over the last ~50 games, Evan Rodrigues is our most efficient ES scorer (points per ice time), is the driving reason why the fourth line is the best line relative to its role for us so far, and is one of the only Sabres winning their tiny ES sample size of goal differential. He did all of this playing with only bottom six guys (though last year Sam Reinhart was his 5th-most-paired-with forward, at a few minutes I think haha). I'm not saying that he needs to be put next to Jack, but if we're down early in Vegas, there's no reason for this guy to be struggling to get 10 minutes of ES ice time when a guy like Sobotka is 3rd among all forwards. Let's see you know your team, Phil.

This team was always going to continue to struggle at ES IMO. They had a steep mountain to climb after a last place finish. Depth additions helped in that there should be no line getting obliterated like our 4th lines usually do, but that was my sentiment before seeing just how raw Casey and Tage still are. There were no meaningful D additions outside of the rook no matter how much it was put forth that a healthy Bogosian and McCabe would change things. However, the team should develop naturally in their abilities at ES a little faster than the average team just because of the growth potential on the roster. Early on lots of teams with an established base of offensive hockey go nuts before teams settle down and figure their defenses out, and then we play that stretch of late November-March hockey that lots of people find boring. The Sabres weren't ready for the hot start but could very well benefit from and use to their advantage this play. Especially Jack - October, off the top of my head, is not his best month. Everyone is at their strongest and fastest, so his main edge isn't as much of an edge as it is in January, when you see a significant increase in his ability to shed off defensive pressure late in their shifts. I just hope we can continue to tread water until things start slowly clicking, because I do think there's a chance this team keeps things interesting if they can.

I'm still waiting for this team to play a close game. Just saw a tweet that there have been zero game-tying-goals in any of the 6 Sabres games, because the team that has scored first (always in the first) has held onto their lead the whole time. And for themost part, the leads for either team have settled in at at least 2 goals most of the way, which is why we either get caved in or are caving teams in, and why those happen in the situations you'd not expect at the surface (better stats when we're getting our butt kicked and vice versa). Anyway, at some point we're going to settle in like all teams and be in for lots of 2-2, 3-2, 2-1 third periods, as always happens as the season goes on.

This is why he's the perfect litmus test for if things have actually changed in organizational development abilities, which have been abysmal for well over a decade. You have a guy with an NHL-elite skill set, and with good enough skating. He NEEDS to become a player that you can put out there in the NHL and not get tanked with, you NEED to develop him into a real player while he's down there, and everything that comes with that, so that he can come and score 30 next to Jack. There is zero doubt in my mind that this would happen in Tampa, in Toronto. We'll see if our guys can do that. I'm not asking them to turn water into wine, here. There is plenty to work with in Olofsson's case, now get it done for a change.

That's what I was confused about. I'm still not sure, but if he lost the puck I would picture him locking the breaks and turning back to try to pokecheck it, or at the very least looking back to see what happened to the puck he lost.

This should probs go in the first period thread, but this is where the conversation happened most recently so I''ll put it here. I'm watching the first ten minutes of each game. The awful terrible Bruins game where we "weren't ready to play" had the Sabres with 3:33 of neutral and offensive zone possession to some extent, including board battles (I stopped counting the minute the defending team regained possession of the puck and made a transition move with it). The Bruins had 1:48 of the same puck possession. The Bruins iced the puck five times, the Sabres iced the puck zero. But about 6 minutes in, Boston scored on one quick breakdown, and we "weren't ready to play the game." Now, the Sabres only generated one real chance that wasn't a crappy point shot in that possession time because they aren't talented. The way to high scoring areas and to opening up space there is not some magical coaching dust. You need guys who can thread passes, stickhandle in tight to draw defenders in and then get the pucks into the space that gets opened up. Our guys regularly "survive" board battles and play the puck to the point, and that's the only offense they're capable of creating. It's not laziest - this is the most physically demanding way to play. It's also the way you have to play if you can't do the good stuff. Berglund was the perfect addition in that regard: that was the offensive play he made like every single shift I saw him in St. Louis. Whenever these guys try anything else they lose the puck or get rubbed out on the wall with a whimper, or they just skate to the slot and sit still covered, except for Rodrigues, who got the only slot shot off in that time. This problem follows them all game, it isn't a relic of their mythical slow starts, and stems from an ability to both think AND stickhandle/pass in less-than-wide-open situations like good players on good teams can. I said it all summer and I'm gonna keep saying it until our players can do that. Game 2: Buffalo: 1:58 of possession in these areas, no icings, Rangers had 1:14 and an icing (and a power play they didn't do anything on, I'm counting ES here) Game 3: Buffalo 1:50, LV 1:32. Buffalo had a power play in there. They'd score later in the period and go up 4-1 before coasting to the finish, another game where we were notably better until we had a big lead and yet our corsi wasn't good at the end so it was a "bad" game that we barely hung on in (yah right Vegas had like 2 scoring chances combined in the first 2 periods) Game 4: Now, this one was an anomaly - Buffalo still outpossessed Colorado 1:47 to 1:18 in the first ten minutes. They iced the puck twice, Colorado didn't at all. But Buffalo had 3 main possession stints that contributed to that time, all the Eichel line, but none of them were remotely dangerous, whereas Colorado kept coming in 6 second spurts that were all incredibly dangerous, but Hutton survived the first ten minutes, freezing pucks and deflecting them out of play. Colorado is mainly a transition team which is why this was skewed - we were overwhelmed by their speed early on. But weren't playing any worse than we did the rest of the game. They got 2 power play goals in the next few minutes and put the game out of reach right away before we dutifully made the corsi look good playing from behind. Again, why single-game-stats don't tell you much (I think this was our best advanced stat game of the year and it was clear we didn't belong in the same building with these guys). But not anything I would call a slow start or problematic first period w.r.t. how the rest of the game went as measured by the talent on each team both showing up and coming to play. Game 5: Sabres had 1:59 of this possession in the first 10 minutes, Zona had 1:23. It was easily our best stretch of the game, as the tide started turning towards the end of the first and they comfortably out-controlled us. Ie, our start/first period was the best part of the game for us, and the meme continues to die. Game 6: I am out of time, but safe to say that we would be thoroughly dominated both effort-wise and time-of-possession wise in the first 10 minutes for the first time this season. Taking all of this into account, like I've said, in plenty of these games they weren't getting the more dangerous chances, but it's not as if the effort wasn't there. They were skating and working. I'd argue they even were in Vegas, they were just so hungover that it was pathetic and sluggish, which is of course unacceptable. But the narratives that involve Phil and leadership not getting them up for games, well I didn't buy them before on the first watchings, and the rewatchings showed that this wasn't our problem at all. They show up, they play as hard as usual, there's nothing particularly bad about the first relative to any other period they play, and quite frankly, this time of possession thing makes them look more dangerous than they are, because they struggle with opening space and making plays in the zone that matters. Because they're fairly bad. Not because they're mad. Not because they're sad. Not because Jack coasts to cash his paycheck, because Phil is too soft. Because in offensive zone time they can't consistently, meaningfully generate real chances, because of their combined skill sets and processing speed. I'll shift away from naming players because it's the same ones I've talked about always, and I don't want this to be construed as me being a mean nasty h8er. Just pointing out what our guys can't do and why it leads to problems, and that if we want a good team, before addressing perceived intangibles, how about we start adding the things that actually do work on the ice for a change And that this is what our real problem is, is a good thing. Just make some decent roster moves, and you'll help fix the hockey. You don't need to worry about trading the rest of your players and tanking again, or being completely doomed for the next decade no matter what because of our sluggish captain (who is, I am hearing, dealing with some knee issues - recall him being injured in the preseason and nobody talking about it). Just stop assuming corsi equals quick-twitch decision-making, and that the mood that comes with a locker room of players that aren't good enough for this level helping the team to last place isn't the driving factor of bad play, but rather the consequence of it.

Did McDavid mishandle, or is he just ridiculous?