Randall Flagg

My understanding is that this was a special season for any player, and borderline unheard of for a player that age.

IMO Dahlin is the only thing stopping Pettersson from being the best prospect not in the NHL right this second by a fair margin.

I read on hf that Berglund, Sobotka will wear 10, 17. Not sure how good that info is. Also, i believe they were more sure about Berglund's # than Sobotka's it might have come from that charging buffalo twitter account. I also think 47 is a good number for a defenseman. As is 74. 4 is better though and should look good on Zach (Zack?)

Mild complaint, but my laptop AC adapter cord started displaying signs of deterioration 15 days ago, so I placed an order for a new one. It lasted 9 more days, but I've been without a laptop for almost a week now, and the new one is still nowhere to be seen. It's 2018, how long can it possibly take to ship a 1-pound package consisting of a cord from any corner of this planet

FTR, even though I pretend to know stuff about lines, unless there's something obviously dumb like a top pair of 82-47 or playing Larsson with Jack, I won't complain about anything w.r.t. Lines until something that doesn't work gets kept together for more than 5-7 games

Go bonnies!!! ------------------------------------------------------------ Also Boomer Sooner!!!

I love this as much as I am going to hate six straight months of Berglund-Eichel, Skinner-Sobotka, and Girgensons-Mittelstadt that we're about to witness :P

They're talking specifically about the stat that measures quality of competition by opposing skaters' relative Corsi or something, I assume? That wouldn't be surprising. i assume they aren't making a claim that staring Casey against every top line versus every 4th line would have minimal difference.

Hunwick is what allowed us to get a player with more ES goals than any non-Jack current Sabre over the last two years for a fourth round pick. It's not impossible for those players to surprise in a good way, but it's the exception and not the norm, and a team as bad at hockey as we have been, as we've seen, is usually not helped but the presence of bad veterans, as the bad of the hockey part outweighs any "eat your veggies" vet advice. Edit: dated stat, from before ROR and Skinner trades, but ya get what I mean.

I'm always going to fondly remember TT for the playoff drought being over, and him being a great person/teammate. I'm so glad we don't have to watch him "be a capable quarterback" ever again, though. In 4 quarters of football, the guy passed for 65 yards and 56 yards in two separate games. This is the 2018 National Football League. That is almost unbelievable, and certainly unacceptable from the QB position. We got 45% completion and 130 yards in the playoff game. I understand the positives TT brings to the field, but I cannot be angry at a team deciding to move on from this, to try and get an actual passing QB. He's not going to teach Allen anything about passing that somebody else can easily fill in.

I know it's fun to move onto Dahlin, but on an individual player level I don't think I could enjoy anything more than I've enjoyed watching Jack mature as a person and get better as a player over the last year. I think he's always going to be my favorite. I don't think we're going to get 177 points from an ELC again for a long time. (It would have been ~210 without the injuries)

Thanks everyone for the kind words!

I used to love those "HOCKEYZ BIGGEST HITZ" videos that would pop up, but like you guys, it's just painful to watch them now. The league has less of those hits than anytime in my fanhood so far, and I don't remember enjoying the product more than I do right now (Sabres notwithstanding) And there are still perfectly legal and perfectly fine checks that will be allowed and keep the game physical - but minimizing the ones that make Toews unable to stand up (it's stomach-churning to watch that video) is just more ethical quite frankly

So at OU we have 3 qualifying exams that you need to pass at a PhD level to continue in the program - I had "passed" (it's really an official "fail") my Quantum qualifier at a master's level in January on my "free attempt." I took my first "official" attempts at Quantum and Classical/Stat Mech last week and passed them both at a PhD level, which just leaves Electricity&Magnetism, two attempts if I need them - as many students are faced with second/final attempts of multiple exams at the same time, I am tremendously glad to not have to be in that stressful situation. This is something that was impossible to imagine this time last year. I really didn't believe in myself, deep down inside. I spent hundreds of hours this summer preparing to make it happen and it's probably the most noteworthy thing I've ever accomplished in my life, so I feel preeeeeeeeeeeeetty damn good. I've never hit something so impossible at one point, and worked so hard to achieve something. Especially when I wasn't sure if my large intestine was going to let me stick around just two months into the whole thing. I don't mean to sound braggy or anything, I'm just jazzed up because this is the best thing academically/professionally to ever happen to me

What did I say was a plan? Brother, I've been perhaps the only one with you in the Housley-skepticism camp from day one. Don't put stuff in my mouth I didn't say after pulling it out of your ass. I have very few positive things to say about any coach since Lindy. You said we were ready for a playoff run after watching the team play 2 months of hockey at a pace worse than they finished this year and getting their entire front office blown up. What about that screams "ready for playoffs"?

We've had this conversation before. The last 31 games of 16-17 saw the team play at a 55 point pace. What on earth makes you think they were set up for a playoff spot?

If you like Bogosian when he's healthy, you'd loooooove Faulk - Bogosian with some offensive ability. He was a lot more dependable 2-3 years ago. Now he plays sort of like a Shattenkirk-Yandle hybrid. ie, you can add him to a solid defenisve team in a very sheltered role, feeding him offensive minutes, but you'll get real bad results if you pretend he's a regular, normal, competent-everywhere top 4 D. We can't afford ANOTHER defenseman that requires such nuance, so unless it's at the expense of ever seeing Bogosian again, and adding another RHD that can play defense, I'm not interested in seeing a right side of Risto-Faulk-Bogo and neither are any of you, even if you think you are! Karlsson would be worth adding current-player-Eichel (not current-trade-value-and-potential Eichel) to Faulk to upgrade.

He should. If by green you mean currently not ready and currently playing terrible because of that, I agree.

I hope it's just preseason stuff, but I hate seeing this staff have Bodine/Ducasse above, like, anyone else, but especially Groy. And Teller looks way better than Vlad Hope Kyle is okay but I don't think he (or Star) will be good this year. They look old and immobile. Like True says, preseason is preseason. Browns were 4-0 last year before losing every single real game, but you can see things like how bad Ducasse is, or how raw Edmunds still is. And I've seen it said fairly often that Allen's pocket presence and ability to keep his eyes downfield are bad, but those are the two things that stick out as POSITIVE to me, besides the laser arm. He lingers on his first read a lot still (though I've seen a few progressions) but on that TD, that was objectively impressive eye-keeping-on-field and pocket poise. He's got the tools, if they can develop him right and he can keep working his ass off. Murphy looks decent too. Our linebackers have played horribly today. Wouldn't be surprised if Edmunds sat to start the year.

The thing is, tank "success" has already been redefined, and we ain't even out of last place. I've gone back and read the polls and posts. The third full season post-tank was going to, by literally everyone's standards, involve playoff series wins. I posted it. You posted it. He posted it. She posted it. It was the consensus belief. I have posts in the past where I actually pull the quotes out, and it's pretty amazing. But that didn't happen, we finished in last place. So by our own original definitions, the tank failed. We are the worst team in the league going into the fourth full season after the tank ended. Jack might be an important piece to a cup team. I'd like to see him get within 15 points of the playoffs for the first time in his career before I fully believe that, though, and if and when he finally does, the things that will have contributed to that team winning a cup will have been so far removed from the decisions made 2013-2015 that giving that success to the tank rather than the GM who cleaned up the mess of the tank and rebuilt the franchise depth destroyed by the tank will look profoundly silly.

I’ve been collecting some low-quality video on Sobotka, Berglund, and little bits of Thompson over the past little bit, to try and learn what these players are about. I was going to post the results in the thread dudacek made about Berglund and Sobotka, because it flows nicely, but I ended up continuing on to write about broader topics than just that, so I figured I’d stick it in my own thread. It’s just my take on what we should expect from these two and what I’d like our mindset to be when building lines. Patrick Berglund First, a general thought. The functional difference between good and bad hockey players is often not as stark as gets painted in discussions about them. Berglund on the power play makes bad plays, and he makes good plays too. The same goes with Tarasenko. The difference in value might look tiny if you kept these counts, how many times each player successfully gets the puck to the point or on goal, but there’s no question who you’d rather have out there, and there’s no question that the good teams, much better than the bad teams, simply have a few of these small upgrades in a few key spots. So in a video of highlights, lots of players can be made to look like the best of the best, and lots can be made to look terrible. This isn’t what I try to do. I’ll try to show what these guys can bring and describe the relative pros and cons. Note: I apologize for the poor video quality. I don’t know what I’m doing and am living off of saltine crackers and peanut butter, so upgrading software is out of the question. And Berglund is #21. Vladimir Sobotka Bringing this all together I feel that so much focus goes on what we think good teams all have, and who on our team best represents what that is, and then smashing those things together and letting it stick, but the reality is that teams are built quite differently by necessity and scarcity. Nashville certainly doesn’t have a franchise 1C but is able to win games. Ottawa was one game away from the SCF with a single ridiculous defenseman, great wing depth, and nothing else of note. I think you need to survey your organization, roughly “rank” the players you have in terms of positional importance+their individual skill, and then do some variational calculus to get the maximal performance out of your roster based on these characteristics. I think the consistently good teams and coaches are the ones that are the best "mathematicians" in this regard. An example of this could be the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Penguins buck all stereotypes for how to build a consistently winning team. They load up on an unfathomable and unrepeatable amount of HOF talent and have a defense corps often in the bottom-half of the league in raw hockey ability, in part because of the top-heaviness of their roster. The player usage and systems and luck haven’t always been there for them, though. Their most recent great seasons saw incredibly specific roles for players who were sought after for these niche skills/traits. The most famous example is Justin Schultz, who was dreadful in Edmonton and fit like a glove with what Pittsburgh was doing. It is well known that Sid has a hard time playing with high-skill wingers. Every single skill winger they've brought in to play with him has wound up settling next to Malkin or lower. I can recall him trying to play with Iginla, with Neal, with Kessel, with no expectations being met. Who does he play with when they win cups? Sheary, Rust, Guentzel. Guys who aren’t fancy, but can keep up and find seams. They play a simple game and they mesh with him perfectly. Meanwhile, Geno absolutely demolishes whatever line is lucky enough to miss Crosby, but not lucky enough to miss him. And instead of 94 point Phil Kessel being “Duh, he’s our best winger, he goes with Crosby,” he winds up playing with Hagelin and Bonino when they win their first cup. Their 1W is on the 3rd line, because he doesn’t mesh with Crosby, is a huge liability defensively and a puck drain from Malkin. But he can drive a line with two very nice defensive players. In this way, the three most important forwards on the Penguins are simultaneously in their ideal situations. Sid:gets the grinders that complement his playstyle Malkin:gets matchup advantages for days, with cleanup-snipers like Hornqvist and Neal Kessel:controls the puck and has very little defensive responsibility This all seems obvious and makes sense, but for a good 6 years there you could not say that the Pens’ best three forwards were being optimized, or that things that weren’t working were being tossed to search for things that did. That is where I see the Sabres right now. The Sabres are stuck in a trap that spans several coaching staffs. “Good teams have a 1D that eats minutes. Risto can eat minutes. Ergo, Risto is our all-situations, top PP top PK, opposing top line player.” “We drafted a man who is going to be our franchise 1C. He is supposed to make players better. Ergo, Eichel will face no single player more often on his ELC than he faces Sidney Crosby, closely followed by Bergeron/Stamkos/etc. With variations of Pominville, Girgensons, Foligno, and Moulson on his wing.” “ROR is a great two-way player and can play center, so he will get a role that is most-often suited for other teams’ Jay Beagles and other 4Cs, breaking records for the amount of defensive zone starts per game among “top 9 players,” which take 200 of his ES minutes and throw them into a trashbag of no-upside offensive minutes for the second best offensive player on the team that can’t score goals.” See, chart (http://hockeyviz.com/fixedImg/zoneDeployment/1718/BUF/): It all makes SENSE on the surface, so we don’t really talk about it or focus on it, but if usage tweaks can improve Giroux’s point totals by 60 while he’s simultaneously a full step slower, or turn Ovechkin from the worst +/- in the league and a defensive nightmare into a fully-optimized machine that goes on to lead the league in goals by 10 over the next 3 seasons, they can get more out of a team with the pieces we have than we have seen to this point. Eichel hemorrhages goals-against, especially with Kane. When together, they were our first line, but should have been either split up or treated the way most of us would treat a Mittelstadt-Rodrigues-Nylander line. With so little top-end talent, we should have either given ALL of it to Eichel and had him with ROR on the wing and Reinhart on the other, or relentlessly searched stylistic fits (the best we found in three years was Zemgus) while chasing low quality opponents as often as possible (and it is possible - compare Matthews’ most-faced opponents to Jack’s, it isn’t even close, even though when the other team gets the choice they try to snuff him out with their big guns - see the Bergeron line in the playoffs in Boston when they had the last change). But Jack was our 1C who is supposed to make players better, so we watched him get shelled for over 150 games dragging one of 17-18 KO, Pominville, or Moulson around the whole time, changing nothing even though he obviously couldn’t flip the ice. ROR is our Bergeron, so we should suppress ROR’s even strength productive potential as his PP points keep his overall point total at a rather remarkable 61 and every underlying metric suggesting that he had 10+more ES points to give. Risto’s ES numbers, any you can count, advanced and otherwise, cannot be described by a nicer word than abominable, but we are fine with that performance taking up almost 50% of every single game, rather than treating him as a worse-offensively Tyson Barrie like he is. But who takes those minutes then? Well, it’s about 4-6 too many per game, and you have two other pairings. Give them 2-3 each. Sure, they suck, but their splits are actually better than Risto’s anyway because of what you’re doing to Risto. You can clearly get more out of Risto in 21 minutes, while not actually functionally downgrading the ones you take away from him, even though “conventional 1st pairing thought” tells you that OMG BOGO IS GETTING 1ST PAIRING MINUTES FROM RISTO. We don’t have a 1D or a franchise 1C (YET - keep those pitchforks down) just like Pittsburgh didn’t have a #2 or #3D with a rapidly declining #1D, and Nashville doesn’t have a 1C but still make things work because they don’t pretend they do. They understand what they have and do everything they can to get a whole greater than the sum of its parts. What we do have is an outrageous talent who can be groomed into a 1C role but is currently a high-event player struggling to stay afloat by himself, a glorious asset that can be turned into the 1D with care, and a decent PPQB. We have more too, and so let’s take a look piece by piece. Again, we’re abandoning the following framework: “Who is our 1C? X is our best C, he will be a 1C. Who is our best winger? He’ll go here right next. What is the rank of everyone else? That’s how they fill in.” What do we have? How do they play? What are their strengths, weaknesses, and how important are they to the success of our team relative to our team’s overall strengths and weaknesses? Team Strengths: We have some very good individual talents, and our defensive depth in spots 5-9 is probably decent. Oh, and Jack.* Our team’s problems: They were obviously depth scoring (worst in the league), a missing top end piece or two, and probably 2 top four defensemen missing. And of course, goaltending. *Jack Eichel Jack is goddamn good. More accurately, he's really goddamn good offensively and really goddamn bad defensively, I read an analysis that called him a bottom-10-percentile player in the league in this regard. Anyway, look at this: These are pretty damn obnoxious stats. But they actually aren't really "fancy stats." "Shot contributions" basically keeps track of how many times you or the person you pass the puck to takes a shot on goal. They normalize that number by how much ice time you have. It's saying how many shots on goal you generate for your team per amount of time you're on the ice. That's a pretty damn handy number. And Jack is in the 98th percentile of all NHL players with this. If you were in the 98th percentile of mcat scores, you're probably filthy rich and wildly successful right now. That's where Jack is at shot/chance generation. Now, his numbers don't show this, because the benefactors of those generations are largely Matt Moulson, Zemgus Girgensons, and Jason Pominville. Similarly, Jack is essentially in the top 3 transition players in the entire league, but we've seen that stat more often on television and twitter. We already know that very few people are better than he at getting the puck out of, and into, the respective zones with possession. What is the point of this? Jack is good at these. But remember, Jack is really bad defensively. It makes sense that numbers like these would project Jack to be on the ice for a lot of goals for, but he's so bad defensively that predictive/projecting stats STILL make him a "minus player." What does Phil do with this volatile tool? He plays him against no player more than he plays him against Sidney Crosby, that's what. To make Jack "grow up and be a franchise C" he put him out there with those "weapons" time and time again. I guarantee you that Lindy of the Dumont-Hecht-Briere days, or any coach worth his salt, employs a bit more nuance than this with Jack. This is not to say we shouldn't expect Jack to progress defensively and ultimately someday be on the ice what the epic centers around the league are for us, but I'm interested in winning hockey games right this second. Sam Reinhart Sam Reinhart makes simple, heady plays, and his play appears to be relatively impervious to his opponents. Furthermore, he possesses a property that makes every single player he plays with score more and give up fewer goals. That being said, he's not a wizard of any one trait. His skating is average-to-slow, his shot is some degree of muffin, his passing is nice, smart, and crisp, but otherwise unremarkable, his defensive play leaves stuff to be desired, and yet good things happen when he's on the ice, and he can play with a lot of players. He'll be valuable in this discussion due to this. Conor Sheary I don't know a huge amount about Sheary. I wanted to do video projects like above for him and Skinner but time is not our friend. I do know that he was the stylistic fit for Sid that they've been craving for years. He's streaky and isn't super physical, but scores ES goals and is more than quick enough for our fastest skaters. He skates in straight lines and does the simple thing. He won't wow you with defense or with physicality but probably won't be a black hole defensively or a soft piece of tissue paper. Jeff Skinner Bad defensively, unreal skating ability, a bit of a tendency to do things by himself and not "use" his teammates which may go deeper than his linemates being mediocre. ES goals for days. Another volatile piece you have to handle carefully. Casey Mittelstadt One of the guys that makes this interesting. Is he a physically intimidated rookie that struggles to get 35 points? Or is he Clayton Keller, ready to impose his will offensively? He will probably be a bit of a headache in his own zone but may well give us some fun times. Patrik Berglund I already talked about him a lot. Low event. Can score, has trouble finding teammates with meaningful passes. He will score his goals no matter who he's out there with, they're the tip-ins, dirty goals, things that aren't dependent on how skilled his linemates are. It is important to distinguish between a player like this and a player like Sheary, whose numbers plummeted without Crosby. Evan Rodrigues If Evan takes another step this offseason, he can legitimately be a 40-50 point guy. If he can put on some strength, you can start to see if he might be a stylistic fit for Eichel or offensive line 2. Right now, with what we know, he's a chance-creating water bug who plays with his hair on fire and sometimes is a little too ambitious for his skillset. He's, at worse, depth scoring for a team that sorely needs it. I'm sick of bolding names and wasting space, so I'll just list the rest in a paragraph. Kyle made everyone worse in literally every conceivable way this past season, and if things don't reverse, I have to think about him riding the bench for the balance of the season. But he showed some brief promise at the end with Casey and Evan. Sobotka is a drag who can still make some things happen. Zemgus was identical to Berglund in effect on teammates - he didn't make them better or worse, but made far fewer things happen overall. Wilson was the opposite - more things happened, good and bad, with whoever graced the ice with him. Pominville was the most bizarre player in the world. All kinds of stats tell you to play him more, but my god did he ruin everything the Eichel line ever tried to do, and my god it is sad to watch him struggle to cover his man, to get to a puck on the boards before the defender closes, or to do anything of use. He's simply not in my starting 12 no matter what. Unfortunately for Larsson, every single projection stat tells you he has the worst upside/least room for improvement, which is pretty bad considering how bad his numbers were on their own standing. Tage Thompson may be ready now, but he did not look like he should have been in the NHL in the videos I saw from him. He's a tall, lanky, lumbering skater - he's one of the least-aesthetically-pleasing hockey players I've ever seen. But someday he should be able to get things done at a middle-six level. I don't think that will be quite yet, but they're going to let him try. And finally, a bunch of kids we know nothing about. So how does this come together in the context of my pages of ranting? Well, it's clear that this team is going to live and die by Jack. it's clear that Sheary made a living with a high end center, and doesn't need the puck, and can position himself in a place to finish. I am fine with them giving Jack and Jeff the cursory look just in case utter magic happens, but I'm predicting that the players by nature will not mesh. So Sheary-Jack is how I start out the building process. The next most obvious thing is to build a line to try and limit the events of the other team's best players. The two players I mention that do this best are obviously Berglund and Girgensons. Both of these guys are used to hybrid center-LW roles and can form the backbone for the line that we should slant defensively and try to chase after Crosby/Marchand/Kucherov/Matthews(dammit Tavares)/Barkov etc. as best as Phil can. This is because these players are the ones that are going to do the most damage, the offensive ceiling of Zemgus and Berglund is low enough, especially fluid team-play-driven offense, that you're not hurting your team in that sense if you bury these guys, and they'll do a decent job of limiting the events of the most dangerous guys on the other team. Now, who are the MOST volatile offensive players that need the most protection? I WANT this to be Jack because his offensive ceiling is so high and his defensive floor so low, and you could really do some insane leveraging with this that can radically change this team's path of success with that as the sole variable, but the reality is that teams are going to try their best to get their own good players of all kind against him. It appears to me, then, that Skinner should be the guy we send out to chase after the 4th lines of the division. 75% ozone starts, and production independent of talent around him. We can do a few things here, so first I'll move onto the trio of E-Rod, Mitts, and Okposo. First thing I'd do is see if what we saw from these guys is real, and if it is, roll with it as an offensive line. Then you give Vlad to 28&Berglund(have these guys said their #s yet?), Reinhart to Skinner, a kid-fit or high-event-Wilson to each of the offensive lines, and bury Berglund's line like no tomorrow. If it doesn't work, you have a few more options. This might include giving Sam to Jack and Conor, where I think he'll be fine and help out, and building an offensive shelter line with Rodrigues, Skinner, and Mittelstadt, and having a trash line of Wilson - Sobotka - Okposo. It's the "trash line" but it is objectively better than trash-lines of the last three years, by several orders of magnitude. That is the good thing about Botterill's depth additions. The details may vary based on injuries, chemistry, and players surprising pleasantly (E-Rod being the player we'd always hoped we'd find for Jack) or unpleasantly (Sobotka, Kyle being beyond repair). But I would stick hard to -Jack&Sheary -Berglund&Zemgus -Sheltered Skinner -Casey having rigid placements which are dependent on what he shows -Reinhart as the piece to put on a line that's a small piece away from being a Sabre staple -Limiting Sobotka to 4th line role -Avoiding Larsson and Pominville in any capacity when the team is healthy With fluid pieces being Rodrigues, Wilson, and whichever kids show well in whichever roles, but keeping their usage in line with what we know they do well And I would avoid like the plague: -Using Wilson on a defensive line -Using Jack as an all-situations 1C. Slant him offensively like Chicago would Kane, like Seguin was 4-5 years ago (Seguin is the perfect example of a C to be handled with care, who will eventually learn the defense you'd like him to naturally, so get the offense out that you can now if you want to win). -Being suckered by Berglund's goal scoring and putting him with Jack, Sam, Casey. You don’t want Berglund in your top six for two reasons. The first is that you want your top six scoring goals, especially when it’s been the thing youre the worst in the league at over the last five years. He is a drag on all events, goals included, for reasons outlined in the video. The other reason is that your depth was the worst in the league last year, and he’s a legitimate depth piece. Use him where he is meant to be an improvement. If you use him as a top six piece, he will not only be disappointing relative to other top six pieces in the league, but your depth won’t be improved. He is an upgrade to our 3C/LW and we should use him there even if we have a hole up top we might need to put ERod in. This decision point is the one that cripples the Sabres, because they just HAVE to put a Berglund/Pominville/Kyle there, that a great coach won't fall for. Evan is the offensive event player you want in that role if you're forced into that decision. You can tweak its usage to minimize the goals against and that will be better for your team than thinking Berglund fits and will "help" the defense. - Thinking Sobotka is going to be a defensive or offensive help to any line you want being the defensive or offensive focal point. He is a clear upgrade to the trash line wing, Nolan, Des, Griffith, Pommers, you name it. Put him in this role and thank god for the upgrade. - Using Zemgus on an offensive line These lists are subject to change when we see what the unknowns can bring. Note: The ROR role is gone and doesn't need to be here, and never needed to be there. We have a lot of the "handle with care" players. These are exactly the players that can thrive in the perfect conditions and bring us a NewJersey type year this season, but can make your team finish dead last if they're looked at as any old "4D" or "2C" or what tradition tells you. I'm less good at analyzing defense, so I'll keep this part brief. We have way too many "handle with care" defensemen. Bogosian, Nelson, Risto, McCabe, basically everyone is. Everything basically hinges on what Dahlin can bring right away, but no matter what, you have to focus on HIM. Doing what is best for his development before assuming he'll fix everything right now. Because that's what'll be best for the team both now and in the future. Do not play him with Risto 27 minutes a night because he's DAHLIN. Start him on the third pair. If he struggles, reduce his minutes. If he excels, slowly graduate his responsibilities. Let him grow into whatever role he settles into organically. Stop feeding Risto 27 minutes per night. Make him an offensive-specialist. We'll be fine without the "minute eater" giving us 30 minutes, half the game, of verifiable trash. We can easily get verifiable trash to take 10 of those minutes and make Risto better for it, resulting in a net upgrade. 21-22 minutes, most of them ES or PP, slanted towards the offensive zone, with whatever defenseman has offensive potential but is also dubious defensively. Find a fit for Dahlin, also unload a tiny bit of Scandella's responsibilities. Dahlin needs to be sheltered, but he can handle a few challenges to make Scandella's life 45 seconds easier each nice. Just like with ROR, we don't need Risto playing Suter minutes. What defenseman gave the Avalanche 30 minutes of verified trash each night, that we MUST find someone to do for us? The answer is, they did what we all want to happen with Risto to Barrie, and became much better for it. The rest of the D is a giant question mark, we just need to see what Guhle, McCabe, Pilut, etc. can bring before we get more answers. Goalies: Be better than Lehner-Johnson, preferably by a lot. Kthx. This wasn't supposed to be this long, but the words kept spilling out. I'm almost positive I've violated some sort of community guidelines with the length of this post. Feel free to ignore it, report me, ban me, I understand. Let's go buff a lo. I'm pretty excited for the season now that the bulk of the offseason moves have been made. Yes, I gave this post to my adviser to see if it could be my thesis.

With all the usual stipulations on what you can and can't see in preseason games, Allen's footwork has absolutely improved. Allen's pocket presence was outstanding compared to what I was expecting. It was there more than I've seen from a bills throwing QB in a while. The way he stepped up into a few collapsing pockets had me grinning ear to ear. In Wyoming, there were no pockets to collapse - I watched every throwing play he had last season thanks to the miracle of youtube (that's the binge that changed my mind from absolutely detesting the pick to being fine with seeing where it goes) and when he was scrambling it was because before the ball had even hit his fingers, the DTs were both behind their guys ready to sack him. You cannot emphasize enough how bad his line was. Of course, our 3rd stringers were quite bad for him too, I hope he gets some game time with the 1s. Then I hope he is shut down for the entire season, so he can learn, learn, learn and practice, practice, practice. He has tools. He's fixing his footwork, there is already improvement, and with it will come more stable accuracy. His accuracy problems, even in college, had nothing to do with innate accuracy and everything to do with sloppy feet and hips. (His throwing motion is excellent, which is nice cough cough Darnold) He won't be Aaron Rodgers, but he's going to be able to complete enough of his throws to be a starter in this league. Treat the asset like the gold that it is, develop him right.

I wasn't sure where to stick this, but did anyone see that we had the second-most-dump-ins in the league this year, behind only the 3rd-last-place Coyotes? And even better, we had the best rate of dump-in-recovery of every single team in the entire NHL! Fat lot of good it did us ? Of course, since Phil talks about "possession hockey" it's clear that nowadays we're doing this because our players suck, and not because it's a mandate from above. I just thought that was pretty surprising/interesting. I'm sure ROR and Kane helped drive that success, so it might not be repeated, though hopefully we have enough guys who can do things with the puck that it doesn't matter.

I wasn't really sure where to put this, so I'll just put it here. Each side is always such a monster, innit? I spend weeks seeing headlines all over social media and legitimate news sources talking about the "Unite the Right" gathering of neo-nazis, and how white supremacy is just bubbling under the surface of our nation ready to explode, and how it drove literally half the country into voting in the guy they don't like. And then the rally happens, with all the media imaginable gathering earnestly, and there are literally twenty losers sitting there in the street. What a hysterical, pathetic sight from multiple angles. I'm sure we'll still be treated to 1,000 articles about the dark cloud, the evil elephant in the room. Which news corp was it that drove out to east bum- nowhere to find and interview a random neo-nazi in his house in rural PA? That was so illustrative of the whole thing. And the same exact thing happens in the other direction, too. And yes, I know the immediate history of "Unite the Right." But people have lost faith in pillars of the western world. The open platform provided by freedom of speech lets moron neo-nazis make fools of themselves. They don't show up because they don't want to be embarrassed in person and be shown to the world as losers. Their ideas lose in the public court of debate and scrutiny, as they should. And in places where being like these people is forbidden by law, well, quite frankly, there are far more sinister politicians in those countries, especially as you move east through Europe, but even in the UK, than the single worst one in the U.S. in this regard, I'm confident in that. There is no serious public hold that this garbage ideology has at almost any level here. (Now that Bannon is gone teehee) Unfortunately we are never going to fully be rid of these ideas, people will always be the same, but what we have in place is the best way to quash dangerous race nationalism and ensure that it gets no serious political foothold. There are far more valuable discussions to be had, and far more relative contextual lenses to look through, than talking about how we're 1931/32/33 Germany, pitting literal communists against literal fascists on a precarious national-policy-and-identity tipping point.

Yeah...these results are pretty stunning. I'd like to see the Sabres show they can come close to getting the nearly 20 points they need to get back to the mediocrity they were before this season, let alone the nearly 20 they need on top of that to be flirting with a playoff spot, before the team I just watched in the playoffs (in a league where it's MUCH harder to make the playoffs) a few months ago falls below them in next-season-projections for which we have an equal lack of proof/validation for each team....