Randall Flagg

I'm going to be disappointed if these guys don't tear it up, even if I'm fully aware we always play worse than fans expect in this thing, it seems. That's how good I think that lineup is.

Everything about his game and underlying stats tells me he's playing-with-non-corpses away from being a 90 point player.

Nope - you're going to like what you see. This is a series of videos the Bills are putting out. They're about 20 minutes each. Of course, the Bills are the ones producing it, so of course it will paint everything in a positive light, but if you like "process" and looking for dozens of small examples of it, those videos are a treasure trove. They're on youtube, I'm pretty sure, and also on the Bills website/facebook page.

I'm not sure what's going to happen this year, but the key part of this is that I've mentioned that this is universal - it isn't a phenomenon from this year. The same thing happened last year. And the year before. And the year before. People put the Sabres in the playoffs in September 2014. It happened un-ironically. And I do have legitimate concerns about the Bills OL, but it's tough for me to see the passing game fall steeply from 31st, and the rest of the roster appears to be the same, whereas the "top ranked prospects in the league" simply have to do so much work just to get Buffalo up to the rest of the mediocre teams first, with their NHLe that gives them what, 35 and 25 points? Sure, this stat is bad, but attempting to quantify this year's Sabres team does not make them look substantially better than last year, and it's all we have besides baseless speculation of could-bes as of now before games start. I won't guarantee a better season from the Bills, but I absolutely have a general attitude that's more positive about the Bills over the past five years than the Sabres, to where your last sentence there, I cannot see it as anything other than shocking. The BIlls are not the Browns of the NFL. Over the last 30% of my entire life the Sabres are literally the Browns of the NHL, worse than the next worst team by twice as much as any two consecutive teams are separated. This is not a negligible amount of time. Super Bowl teams get built and dismantled in this stretch of time. So do cup winners. A crappy Bills team in 2002, or 2006, does not change this fact. I can understand feeling good about the Sabres, and relatively bad about the Bills, but that last sentence is where I lose all ability to put myself in someone else's shoes.

Tough to put that on Pegula when you get a surprise-career-ending-injury and surprise-mental-breakdown from the good half of your offensive line. We'll see how bad the Bills do this year soon enough, I wouldn't let the scrubs at ESPN that probably still think Trent is our QB make us think we're set to go 4-12 like they also said last year.

It's also reflected in our posts about Dahlin - I've been far less over-the-moon than plenty of other people, because I just care about wins come October, and have tempered expectations for what a bunch of kiddos can do, at least until I see them doing it. I wasn't excited about Housley because I needed to see what happened when we hit the ice, but if you read the Housley talk in the offseason, at least half the board was beyond pumped up, and I'm almost positive more than half the board had put is in playoff spots in preseason predictions, just like some would do this offseason, while some of us continually come off as negative/pessimistic in our alarm that anyone could feel that way given recent track records. I'm saying "I," but in general what I mean is that there are two broad segments of fans, and I'm in the one and you're in the other, and that neither is right or wrong but they both experience things quite differently. I'd call myself "pessimistic" but what's really happening is that I haven't had fun watching the Sabres, and have had fun watching the Bills, and have had fun in the Bills thread in the past, whereas the other fans come to the bills thread and talk about how bad and awful we are while planning a cup parade for 2024 when Tage Thompson, Cliff Pu Rasmus Asplund and Casey Mittelstadt are a killer second line

I'm not saying what I do is "true" or "right", but I think I've found the difference between the two mindsets we have, that I originally posted about as being strange.

But this reflects your lack of watching the actual games in the last few years too - I could make all kinds of "here's what the Bills did in the offseason" moments, but those have literally zero influence on how I've felt the vast majority of the last decade. I care about sports seasons, not April in the NFL and July in the NHL. I assumed other fans felt the same way. Maybe that's why the ones that probably agree with me are the ones that hated the Sabres "succeeding" in 14-15, and those that don't would do 2014-15 again in a second

@Neo, have you seen any of "Buffalo Bills: Embedded"?

Another way to phrase it, since the Sabres decided to start tanking in spring 2013, the Sabres have 18 fewer wins than the next-worst team. Their win percentage is .334. They are in dead last by more wins than double the number that separates any other two consecutive NHL teams in that span. They are the Browns of the NHL. In that same stretch, which includes that 6-10 season for the Bills, they rank 17th in the NFL in wins. They are one win behind Baltimore over those five years, and tied with Atlanta. They don't have as much variance as other teams which makes it feel a little worse, but wins are wins. If you take the last four seasons of the Bills, they have more wins than the last FIVE seasons of 10 other NFL franchises. And in the last 4 seasons, they're 15th in total wins. There is an order of magnitude of difference in how relevant and good these franchises have been, and the Sabres have a long way to go to even approach the ability to win games the Bills have had in the last five years. You'd think it were the opposite if you read any Buffalo sports message board at any single point during that 5 year span. The magnitude of importance of an NFL game means I remember it far, far more than when the Sabres host Philly on Tuesday November 16th. If you showed me every touchdown scored in the 2013 season, I would recognize/remember every play. If you showed me every goal scored in February, there'd be at least 5 I have no recollection of ever seeing

This doesn't make any sense considering the vast majority of sporting events to happen in any of our recent memories, going back as far as 7 or 8 years. As shrader says, maybe that works for older fans, but you and I are the same age and probably hadn't hit puberty the last time the Sabres won a playoff series.

I mean, WC, I guess you don't count because you admitted to watching like two hockey games last year. I bet you'd feel differently if you sat down as much as most here did and invest yourself emotionally There was hope for about two games when we drafted Eichel, before we started 2-8 or something. The Sabres haven't, in that stretch, at any time, had more wins than losses. Not even in game 3. The best they've ever done is go 1-1 to start before falling apart. When was this hope? I guess I don't let how I feel in July carry me through eight months of trash in the fall

What sticks in my head is that my top 10 sports moments of the last 7 years or so are probably all Bills related, including the best sports moment of my lifetime on December 31st of last year. What sticks in my head is pouring hundreds of hours into work showing just how bad we are relative to even other bad teams, 3 hours per night for 400 games of pure and utter garbage that no fan base has come close to being exposed to in that time. No, a bad bills team in 2003 and 2004 contributing to a drought in a league where it's hard to make the playoffs anyway doesn't override the last seven years of utterly disgusting rosters in hockey while the bills team is actually doing something for me.

That makes sense for a chargers and kings fan on the west coast who sees buffalo teams 2times per year total, but not for people who willingly sit through 82 games of being by far the worst team in the league for 5 years straight and it not being close.

Since 2014 the worst Bills win percentage is better than the best Sabres win percentage

I still don't understand, broadly, the mindset of most Buffalo fans. Over the last 5 years, one team has been far more successful than the other, and yet every single season fans will enter one thread to talk about how horrible the good team is and them move to another to talk about how great the proven-worst-team-in-their-league-in-that-stretch-and-it's-not-even-a-little-close will be. And yes, I know the Bills have weaknesses and the Sabres could surprise, but this has been the case every season including ones where one team was trying to lose on purpose.

I saw an interesting analysis posted elsewhere: Somebody calculated the average 82-game point scoring rate for the top 9 forwards on the 16 playoff teams from last season. So, on average, to be a playoff team, your scorers would look like this: #1 scoring forward: 89 Point pace #2 scoring forward: 75 3: 65 4: 52 5: 47 6: 42 7: 39 8: 33 9: 28 Obviously, injuries are why the raw numbers don't often look this good. Here's where the Sabres were, in parenthesis how far away from playoff average: 1: 79 (-10) 2: 61 (-14) 3: 50 (-15) 4: 47 (-3) 5: 46 (-1) 6: 42 ( exact) 7: 34 (-5) 8: 22 (-11) 9: 21 (-7) Coincidentally, right around the bottom is where we fall off the table - among NHL teams I showed that the Sabres' top 6 scoring was only tenth worst, but behind that they were comfortably in last place for depth scoring - so the appearance of the chart might indicate that because someof those guys at spots 4 - 7 in this ranking were having totals inflated playing with guys at the top (like Kyle, Jason) we probably didn't get as much out of the top as we would have with real top line players accompanying them. But either way, we need more scoring at every level of the forward group. our offseason additions wouldn't have changed anything up top because of Skinner's down year, but some of those bottom scores would be pushed out by, say, Berglund. Which to me lends more to the idea that we need to use our depth additions to fix our depth and not to put with our scorers, who already score less than any stat and eye test say they should because they're playing with depth pieces and not good ones

Okay, but he has been in the organization since June 2017. Like I said, the format I use for this lists "Key additions" as players who are new to the organization as of June 2018. It isn't "key additions to the starting lineup of the big club from all possible locations," it's what transactions with other teams, UFA signings, and draft picks have you made since last season ended that will likely play otherwise I have to go back and change the additions to every other team and add lots of players, but will have no idea who constitutes that for most of them

I used The Hockey News as the source for most of the lists including that bit. They must define addition as someone who wasn't in the organization last season but is now, not someone who will likely make the team that didn't last year - hence Guhle/possible rookies not making it on that list either

This was going to be my question for the forum. Has anyone here used NHL.tv on a PS4? I just bought a PS4 for the first time and was wondering how good the streams were. I'd like to be able to post on my laptop and do homework and stuff while watching, which I can only do if I can use the PS4 to stream the hockey games, but I've read things in years past that indicated it was quite laggy and stuff to stream it that way.

Buffalo Sabres Record last season: 25-45-12, 62 points, last place in NHL Playoffs: ? Coach: Phil Housley GM: Jason Botterill Captain: Vacant GF: 198 (31st) GA: 278 (29th) PP: 19.1% (20th) PK: 77.9% (22nd) Top 5G: 1.) Jack Eichel (25, 67 games) 2.) Sam Reinhart (25) 3.) Ryan O'Reilly (24) 4.) Evander Kane (20, in 61 games for us) 5.) Jason Pominville (16) Top 5A: 1.) Jack Eichel (39) 2.) Ryan O'Reilly (37) 3.) Rasmus Ristolainen (35) 4.) Kyle Okposo (29) 5.) Sam Reinhart (25) Top 5 PTS: 1.) Jack Eichel (64) 2.) Ryan O'Reilly (61) 3.) Sam Reinhart (50) 4.) Kyle Okposo (44) 5.) Rasmus Ristolainen (41) Key Additions: Conor Sheary (LW), Vladimir Sobotka (LW/C), Patrik Berglund (LW/C), Jeff Skinner (LW), Tage Thompson (RW), Rasmus Dahlin (D), Matt Hunwick (D), Carter Hutton (G) Key Losses: Ryan O'Reilly (C), Robin Lehner (G), Chad Johnson (G), Benoit Pouliot (LW), Victor Antipin (D), Jordan Nolan (LW), Seth Griffith (RW), Josh Gorges (D), Justin Falk (D), technically Kane? Projected Lineup: (Just a guess as what we'll see, who knows what it looks like) Sheary - Eichel - Reinhart Skinner - Mittelstadt - Okposo Girgensons - Berglund - Rodrigues Wilson - Sobotka - Baptiste/Pominville/Larsson/kid You all know who the prospects are knocking at the door Scandella - Ristolainen Dahlin - Bogosian McCabe - Nelson/Guhle/Pilut/Hunwick Hutton Ullmark Top Prospects we might/might not see 1.) Rasmus Dahlin, i think his name is. 2.) Casey Mittelstadt 3.) Brendan Guhle 4.) Alex Nylander 5.) Tage Thompson We'll probably see all of these guys this year. My thoughts These are well-documented elsewhere. It's certainly a completely different team from the one which finished in last place. Let's hope for the best!

I also think we can start 2-0. I won't buy into the national media's outlook until I see it happening. The Bills, after being firmly established as a 5-7 win team, have now spent four consecutive years firmly established as a 7-9 win team, and I will continue to assume that's the case until something on the field shows me otherwise, especially when everyone was just as enthusiastic about how bad we were last year as they are this year. Some things stay the same: Last season: This season: Go make those guys look dumb again boys!

Football tonight, Sabres prospect scrimmage tomorrow and Saturday, and Bills on Sunday. Hell yeah.

I didn't know this either but it was pointed out on hf last night as well, which is a nice way to save a few bucks.

The weak part of Peterman is his right arm, particularly if he has to throw a timing route outside of the hash marks