Randall Flagg

A couple days ago I said that I didn't think the Bills would be able to force other teams to get out of their two-high shells until roster moves came in the offseason. I'm not totally sure how much of it was the Bills, and how much was Belichick just playing the defenses he likes to play in the situations he likes to play them, but those early dump-offs to Motor for 5-10 yards at a time felt absolutely huge in opening things up for the offense. Josh ate those plays up like we haven't seen before. This sort of patience is one of many ways we've watched him grow in front of our own eyes. He hit a couple of them in the Jags game, but got impatient and went away from it, playing right into their hands. It didn't happen this time, he decisively chose these checkdowns until NE changed, and he changed with them, dropping dimes at all levels of the field when the coverage called for exploiting that level. The offensive line was excellent against a daunting opponent, which also helped. I can remember sitting in these threads with you guys in the preseason of 2019, seeing a touch pass on one of his 2 or 3 drives against Carolina, and collectively remarking "hmm, we haven't seen that touch from him before." Pointing out that, while his game as a whole is pretty mediocre, his aptitude in random situations like the red zone, the 4th quarter, and 3rd-and-long was attention-grabbing. Experiencing the national-game-excellence for the first time against Dallas on Thanksgiving, which was the biggest Bills win of my life (and boy is that hilarious to imagine after getting to enjoy the last 16 months of Bills football). Watching Josh bloom the way he has is something I'm fairly convinced I'll never see again in sports. Allen was an artist today. His QB performance in the biggest AFC east game since, probably, a Bills-Dolphins thriller in the early 90s, was a ballet that would match the best possible output of most men who have ever attempted to play the position professionally - moving seamlessly between ruthless efficiency, by-the-book within the play structure provided for him and dizzying, chaotic brilliance - but only as the situation called for it, never unnecessarily. Not every throw was perfect, but so many were jaw-dropping. There are probably a hundred different things you could look at that would tell you that this NE defense is the best in the league. The Bills never punted and every single drive (that didn't purposefully run the clock down in Qs 2 and 4) ended at, at worst, the NE 12 yard line. It was sometimes frustrating to watch the NE run game have its way as it did on 3 of 8 NE drives, but the reality is that our defense, when functioning to expectations, is quite complementary to our offense, when it is doing its job. Teams like NE can only run for so long when Josh is doing his thing. Eventually they are going to need to pass, going to need to be quicker and shifter and smarter than our secondary and linebackers. The teams that can gash us in the run game are not built this way, and so the Bills wind up with a top pass defense, year after year. In the cap world, and looking at the QBs of each division-leading team as of today, despite the success of the Indy/TEN/NE run games against us, I'm not convinced we are doing this the wrong way. And I'll gladly take a playoff game against any one of those teams. Bring it on.

Also I'm too lazy to go back a page and see who said this, but I do not care what "pass blocking grades" our line gets. A few of our linemen are decent pass blockers, but that doesn't matter when guys next to them are turnstiles both on the field and on the depth chart. Allen has been Houdini back there all season, and their inconsistency has implanted a merited, and impossible to quantify, jitter to his play back in the pocket, and this manifests in him being spooked when he does'nt need to be, which has affected his play. His magic in avoiding pressure also gives them a better look in the stats than they deserve. "Wow, the line gave allen 4.5 seconds to throw!" no, he had to bail the pocket before he could move to read 2 for the fifth play in a row

I will say that, given the contract Josh has earned and the baseline he has established, I'm disappointed that one or two of [Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville, New England, Tampa Bay] did not end in a game winning drive for the Bills. You want your franchise QB to pull some of those games out. And we were right there in almost every single one of those games. We are 0-5 in one score games, but were 5-1 in them last year. So I don't think Josh isn't clutch or something, and I think this can correct on its own just by getting bounces (or a flag when Diggs is mugged). The Chargers had the same thing happen between last year and this year. Comparing Josh's play last year to this year is also tricky. Teams routinely dared Josh to beat him all year long last year, we only saw the two-high safety shell sparingly compared to this season. He gladly obliged. He doesn't get treated anywhere near the same this year. The Jacksonville game was the epitome of this. they had 7 guys in coverage all day long while their 4 down linemen obliterated our OL every single play. There is a very easy way to beat this defensive strategy, especially in the red zone where space shrinks and they continue to drop LBs deep - run the ball up the gut, force them to bring guys into the box. But the film shows that every time we have tried to do this, from Pittsburgh and Tennessee games through NE/TB, the run-blocking and RBs can't get past the line on situations where the bare minimum should be 7+ yard gashes given defensive alignments. This has increased the confidence of these teams to continue to leave the box sparsely populated and the Bills have yet to be able to take advantage of it. There is basically nothing Josh and Daboll can do to get defensive looks like they did last year (and thus, a less-painful looking passing game) until they can scare defenses up the middle. And I think they've done everything they can to wring this out of the current roster. I think this is a personnel issue, bad guards and mediocre running backs. Until this happens, likely through a good offseason of roster moves, we will continue to be passing the ball on Hard mode. This has actually made me appreciate Josh even more than I did last year. He is a unicorn.

It would be interesting to see them coach some tricks into it, as long as they aren't relying on passes between hinostroza, asplund, zemgus etc.

This might be a good idea in general. But look at the skaters who play below the circles on our power point roster. Compared to Dahlin/Tage/KO/VO up top. I'd rather those guys use the puck than the guys down low and i don't want any of then down low

An extended Girgensons - Jankowski - Hayden shift is followed by one that heavily features Brett Murray, who then got off the ice to make room for Eakin-Hinostroza-Asplund Not a lot of hands in that group

That is a helluva save by Malcolm Subban

Rodrigues has 4 more points than the leading Sabre scorer somehow

Each of the last two years, Kevyn Adams has found a bottom six forward for cheap (Sheahan and Hinostroza) that is clearly better than any bottom six forward brought in by Tim or Jason in their combined 6 years.

Cozens has to figure out how to make those short passes connect on the rush, because they haven't been and when they don't all the sabres forwards are skating full speed in the wrong direction.

So refreshing to see the speed. Reminds me of a better version of Toronto's "tank" year - they played fast and engaging and had a nice structure to add talent to the following year. Very good game! One wonders how many of those 7-4 and 5-4 losses could have been wins with goaltending like this. Hinostroza, Tage, Dahlin really stuck out to me

The only angle that was close to level with the goal post, which was behind milano, made it look like a good goal. The others didn't, but were at angles that were impossible to discern with eyeballs. I never have thought that kind of goal is impressive, didn't like it when Svechnikov did a variation, and neither of those guys had any pressure. I see 8 year olds do that all of the time in pickup games with the same amount of time& space

There were 4 minutes left, we don't play again til Friday, and Girgensons-Murray-Hinostroza was the line combination on the ice. Strange

Love the push but these guys can't afford to try and roof every shot, this is ridiculous

I'm not ready to fire Kevyn. My gut instinct with him has always been positive, which was such a relief after Jason lost me the first time I heard him talk. But I would like Kevyn to tell me how he can be sure that losing like this won't affect this core of prospects like it did the last one, with a thoughtful, concrete, convincing explanation And he needs to blow me away in the goaltending department sooner than later given what he accepted as the backup situation for an unproven, injury-prone goalie last year, and whatever you call what he stitched together this year, because I have been horrified by his decision-making in this regard Also, I love a lot of what I see and hear from Granato, and don't think that I have anything bad to say about him. But Ralph's hot start in his first (full) season as Sabres coach lasted twice as long as Don's did, and we know how that turned out. We are in an unstable situation, but our hope feels more grounded in reality than it has in the past. We can basically go in any direction from here

3 of the last 16 means it's time for the annual pointing out of the fact that the Sabres love to let unbearable stretches of hockey fester untreated, they think it's fun, it's a game to them, they love taking the joy out of their players' lives drop by drop

There is absolutely no question that Tanev, who is quite fast, is faster than Dahlin, who is not, and who has downright slow acceleration

I get that the rules are more friendly than they were for the Lightning or Capitals in eras past, but if he was assuming that they are bad because they're an expansion team, he seems to be right. Their win percentage is in the low .300s and their roster is bad The rules allow for a "middle roster player," but hidden in that is a bunch of young talent on ELCs that are important to teams but off limits in expansion protection, which led to a lot of their picks and available player pools being pretty damn bad, hence the barrage of bad hockey players on that list

Idk, this slate of picks does not look like 31 middle roster players. I see ~10 I'd consider as that or better, and more that would have trouble making tonight's Sabres lineup

Tokarski isn't the reason they lost tonight, but 99.9% of the time it is valid to expect one more save when your goals against is 5 or more. This is a recurring pattern for the Sabres and it's not all because of defense. Goaltending was quite obviously a massive question mark heading into the season. This is the second time in a row Kevyn has kneecapped his team with the goaltending situation, and the fragility and lack of depth that is causing this team to lose games it could probably win is entirely his fault. I get that "he didn't expect Ullmark to leave" and whatever else tom says about the summer, but for two consecutive years the goaltending situation is untenable. You have to do better than he has here. We are nearing a dangerous inflection point where the kids are going to start getting demoralized knowing that they need 5 to have a chance any given night. And yes, Tokarski has been just fine as a whole this year. But the 40 year old predictably got banged up quickly and Tokarski is not a starter, and his backup shouldn't be in the league. This is just a ridiculous, unacceptable situation Dahlin is bad at hockey. In a sane world (not just one with better Sabres management, but one in which players were better-developed across the league and expectations for 1OAs aren't what they are, which has also hurt guys like Hischier and the Rags picks) this year could be his rookie year and his strength and confidence and overall game would probably look a lot different. I know that sounds crazy, but this guy is not an NHL defender as is, so it obviously isn't that crazy. I don't buy that guys will always hit their ceiling if you give them enough time, and I think it didn't have to go this way for Dahlin. At least he allowed us to tear it down to the studs 4 years ago or something. The good news is that Tage was bad at hockey too, until he wasn't anymore. I don't do anything with Dahlin except shelter him, coach him up, and let time go by.

Tage deserves a much better apology from me than I'm currently capable of composing. The crow is delicious. Kudos to him for working his ass off and never complaining despite having fifteen valid things to complain about potentially derailing or crushing him,including unfair and dismissive treatment from people like me. And same to Kevyn for believing in him and showing him the faith that helped him grow

I was thinking that there was a silver lining here - that this ending was a perfect microcosm of the third period approach and therefore a good stepping stone/something to learn from. Sitting back and trying to survive to OT all period is not the way to play, and the same is true of the final 20 seconds. Very few if any players can eat that much time on the boards, and it bit them both in that one play and at the macro level of the entire period. A nice lesson to learn for the future. But I think Weave and SwampD are right, I don't think there was any coaching directive to back off. Lopsided counting stats from 1 period don't by themselves diagnose poor coaching, even if it happens more than once, if you can't describe what those "adjustments" are and provide proof for them, because the Sabres-Rangers third period tonight look like most Sabres-Rangers games since ~2016. Their style of play has always opened us up and gashed us for whatever reason, just like the Colts were the worst case scenario for matchups against the Bills earlier today. The Sabres weren't in a requested shell to get to OT, they couldn't handle it when the Rags turned it on, and understood that/doled out their energy usage accordingly, in a standard fashion for a team that is struggling against a good opponent. Sabres need to get Henri and Mitts and Anderson back, and these nights will happen a little less frequently, and then a good spring & summer will hopefully further reduce the frequency on top of that

Fun team. I hope more people start going

That play where he pulled Tage's pass up to his stick with his skate and basically one-timed it was crazy. Dude really needs to start putting in the simple shots though!

Didn't even realize that, jeez Has anyone ever asked Adams or another GM or a coach why they do this? It is foreboding, if they get timetables so wrong are they diagnosing and treating incorrectly too?