Randall Flagg

Forum status: Thornified

Eichs Risto for Zegras, Rakell (whatever makes this work, pieces can be added) Re-sign Samson "I want to be a Sabre centre for life" Reinhart and Linus "Vezina" Ullmark Sign Danault & Coleman Sign a GOOD backup Sign Savard Trade Olofsson, maybe a Dman for solid defenseman (idk who, pretend NYI wants more goals and gives up Mayfield or something) Skinner - Reinhart - Rakell Zegras - Danault - Cozens -> They all play center/shift to center/move around when injuries happen etc. Asplund - Mitts - Coleman Girgensons - Ruotsalainen - Okposo/Thompson Dahlin - Joki Bryson - Savard Mayfield - Borgen Ullmark Mrazek or something Probably 10 mil over the cap and forgetting important names but who careeeees

Shut up and dribble catch! In all seriousness, the number of adults in society whose decisions on receiving the poke aren't swayed by WR3 and WR4 of the Buffalo Bills is large enough that I wouldn't worry about it affecting society-scale immunological trends It's JOSHY we have to worry about >:)

Haven't really read the thread, but I thought Kevyn was pretty convincing on the medical stuff. Sounds like Eichs is being a bit unreasonable, if Kevyn wasn't lying about doctor consensus and the rehab window that is still in place.

I agree, I normally assign 0 value to press conferences and anything said within them. But I honestly think the Sabres' image r.e. medical stuff can be rehabilitated if properly handled, and I think if he butchers this our stock around the league for players and coaching/FO hires can be tangibly affected

IMO this is the most important interview/press conference we've had in a long time

Thanks! Still floating

To me, this carries the same ugly tone as so many of your posts on so many Sabres-related topics. Little birdies talk to me too every now and then, some here, and have never said anything remotely close to this. A lot of ugliness to this situation all around. Ducks intrigue me more than most.

She said yes!

Crypto is definitely still in its infancy haha. It could crash and burn, but if they iron out the kinks it would be foolish for all sorts of industries to not adopt it in all sorts of ways, and if you picked the right ones before this potential singularity, your grandkids are retired

Come on.

It is incredibly easy to imagine us starting out slow next year, and looking back with disgust and disbelief at the idea that we needed to keep Granato for going 7-11-3 (plus whatever our record in the last 7 games is) in Spring 2021, how could we ever have thought this was okay? Don may be the right guy, but it's a riskier hire than at least some of the available names.

Reinhart and Reesto have been noticeably bad to me tonight, though Risto had some good passes on that power play

Think I'm done with Risto.

Grateful for you pointing this out. Drives me up a wall

My friend, if negligible R^2 is all the justification you need to believe something, I could change the way you see a lot of things in this world with just an array of R^2 values

The 5 on 3 issue goes back to since Pominville/Vanek left, I'd bet. Its a problem with Jack out there too, it was a problem when ROR was here. They gotta rebuild that from the ground up

I would go 7-3-1 and talk to Seattle about getting them to take Miller. If they really didn't want to or wanted too much in return, I explore the Risto trade market and see what's there before the expansion draft. If I have reason to believe that the return for Risto isnt significantly different before the ED compared to after, I make the trade and protect Will. If it's clear I that nobody wants Risto before, but I could do Risto-for-something-really-good after the ED, the decisions start to get trickier - essentially trading Borgen for whatever those returns could be, or not doing so. It's an impossible decision to make from my current position, which is ignorant to virtually all of the questions posed in this thought process. But would probably be pretty easy if I knew all of the info.

What is in the best interest of the franchise is immediately putting out a team that is a safe bet to make the playoffs next year, without obviously mortgaging our entire future. Narrow-mindedly closing off entire mechanisms for helping us do this with instances of past failures and individual examples of possible trades isn't much of an argument. Just sitting on our hands to be safe strikes me as an incredibly low-probability maneuver, far riskier than "using opportunities that are always present in offseason roster-building time like all normal teams do every year" is despite your reservations. None of the lineups you guys put together that are basically tonight's lineup plus Jack look like a hockey team that will be able to sniff a playoff spot. They look like the fast-lane to Eichel's trade next June.

Previous *****-ups at attempting to make your team better do not preclude the usefulness of that entire avenue of roster building haha Or maybe it does work that way. In that case, I'll raise LA elevating a wild card team with a promising home-grown young core to a cup winner through the use of trades to negate your point and bring us back to neutral. But really, our best hockey with awesome youth development still has us getting shelled most nights and going 6-3-2 (a fine record, but worrisome for the best "hot streak" on the season). You can keep the Mitts line together and still make key adds to shore up weaknesses, build immunity to injury impacts, and make sure you have a team capable of winning games in October-December AND January-May

It came to me in a dream. But really, there isn't some peer-reviewed study and film breakdown in existence that I can show off to say this is definitely happening. I've seen a couple Rochester games, read the threads and talk about him, and watched him play those few games in the NHL. I saw positioning, processing speed, calmness that Tage and Mitts would have killed for in their first couple years, orders of magnitude higher. Watching what a competent staff has done with those two, I'm just not interested in taking a player with an ideal stylistic game, an ideal "concept," and sending him off to watch another team unlock it when the hardest part (processing speed) is already taken care of naturally. Just like several factors found a way to take a 7th rounder with a good shot and turn him into what Olofsson is today, there is no reason a sufficiently motivated Borgen, surrounded by a competent staff, can't develop into our favorite defensemen from the 05-07 era Sabres Also, I'm not one of the guys lining up to give Risto away for free, but he is a member of a distinctly different "space" than what we are talking about. A known quantity with an expiration date in Buffalo. So the base option available to us of protecting Risto because he's been in the lineup for years and Will is just getting a chance to give it a shot, doesn't make any sense to me when we will likely be able to dump a player none of us like at a small cost

"faith" and "what they've seen him do [to this point]" dance around as incomplete descriptors of the exact regime we need to be operating in to get out of this mess, and maybe even become great one day

Did you know that you can acquire players that aren't ufas during the offseason? And why do bad GM decisions of the past preclude a team from being able to make smart UFA choices now? I'm sure the Islanders regret Eberle and their past few goalie acquisitions, I'm sure the hawks regretted Hossa, the Rangers Panarin, the Bruins Chara, the Pens Gonchar, the Stars Radulov, the Caps Niskanen, the Stars Pavelski etc. etc.

Sometimes you need to make the move that isn't obvious to the casual observer at the time of the move. Combining this with the fact that it shouldn't be too hard to get Seattle to not take Will Borgen, since he isn't exactly seen as a prime asset, there is simply no good reason to hand the guy away because Risto has played more hockey games to date even if he is going to leave next year We should always be on the lookout for the guy that can make us laugh at what we thought years prior - "man, to think I was willing to let THIS GUY get away to keep THAT GUY." Working with the deck only as it is stacked today is the perfect way to never ever hit a home run No guarantee that Will is that guy, there never is. But this is the philosophy that allows Tampa to churn out a surprise new 20+goal forward every single year that nobody has ever heard of. And the "cons" list of finding a way to avoid losing Borgen (what, losing a 3rd rounder and Colin Miller?) is vanishingly small.

At this point, it's become humorous that 98% of all lineups for next year posted on this forum contain zero offseason moves that bring in players from outside the organization. And only 1 or 2 bring in players that aren't being viewed as bottom 6 filler types. That doesn't even happen with good teams! We are in last place, and even the good hockey we are playing now comes with a lot of qualifiers and would only be seen as an "average" or "typical" stretch of hockey results by a decent team I love the development of the youth, but ensuring a good NHL team that can make the playoffs in 2021-22 should not be viewed as possible without an influx of some amount of hockey players from outside the organization