TrueBlueGED

If he's as good as some expect, nobody is trading out of that spot.

According to Chase Stuart, it was 170 cents on the dollar in our favor. That said, I really hope we get Kizer now. Probably have to move ahead of Cleveland. Use the extra 3 to swap with Oakland?

If we take Kizer at 27, I'm doing naked cartwheels.

Please yes Bills!

I'd be completely okay with that. Tampa is a sharp, progressive front office. Can they really get much worse?

You also think Bogosian is criminally underrated. So, y'know.... :p

Well, I had my bunker constructed before this year even played out. His career says he's at best a low end 2nd pairing guy when healthy. His offense can be okay, but everything else is 3rd pair caliber. And he spends half of every year, literally, injured or recovering from injury. This season, of course, he played at an AHL level. I have hope he'll be better than that. But the team will always be better served spending his $5 million elsewhere.

I agree with your generality, I just think Nylander is going to be a lot better than a good winger, and I'm not even close to sold that McAvoy is a top pair puck moving.

Your continued lack of enthusiasm for Nylander is like a dagger through my heart :(

Respectfully, if you don't think logic has a place in analytics, then you don't have a strong understanding of what analytics is.

Of course. But that front office operated without any experience for almost an entire offseason before hiring Lou. The brain trust was Dubas, Shanahan, and Hunter, none of whom had NHL front office experience the time. They managed to offload bad contracts, run a draft, and get Babcock. Presumably, Dubas was a huge part of that.

He may very well be unwilling. But his hesitance shouldn't prevent any of us from thinking it's the right move. Edit: And honestly, I don't think the Peter Principle is any more likely to apply to Dubas than to Fenton. For instance, why has Fenton been passed over so many times?

Who knows, but I really don't expect that to happen. Maybe he's ready? The one thing that struck me listening to him was that he seems to be an absolute sponge for information and learning. I don't think he's the type that needs a decade waiting in the wings before he's ready for his own gig.

If you want Dubas, you make him GM. There is no middle ground here. This is akin to thinking Stamkos is going to come here to play the wing as a complement to Eichel. If you're worried about the experience, there's probably nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. But Dubas is older and has more experience than Theo Epstein did when he was named GM of the Sox at 28. If you really think his mind is on that level, you roll with it.

At some point you're going to run out of room to backpedal to.

Will today be the day the Bills try to join the 21st century of professional football? Probably not. They'll take an "impact" player who contributes a third of a win cumulatively over the course of the season.

What in the world does this even mean? How much higher? I'm assuming this is the article you're referring to. The article says "The R-squared value indicates that a team’s faceoff percentage explains about twenty percent of the team’s Corsi percentage." That is incredibly different from what you posted. Incomprehensibly different. Also, correlation/causation arguments abound with faceoffs, as do a whole host of other contextual factors which may be influencing the basic statistical relationship here. A couple of other views on faceoffs and their overall importance: http://bluesteam.hockey/how-important-are-faceoffs/ https://www.si.com/nhl/2017/03/02/illustrated-review-importance-nhl-faceoff TLDR: You'd like to win more than you lose, and you'd rather win an important one than lose it...but building roster decisions around draws is lunacy.

I agree with this. Civil War was fine, it was okay, but....meh.

Close enough to nothing that it's not worth anywhere near all the fuss over them. You'd like to win more than you lose, and you'd rather win a particular draw than lose it....but man, the way they get talked about, you'd swear they were goals or something.

1) A fresher ROR for 20 minutes with 1.5 extra minutes of a subpar replacement is a better option than a worn-down ROR for 21.5 minutes simply to avoid playing the subpar option. A coach who sees otherwise is what I would refer to as a bad coach. 2) There is no meaningful statistical correlation between faceoffs and possession.

If you want a Ducks' Dman, it's going to be Vatanen. I can't envision them moving anyone else.

No, you don't get to move the goalposts. You were bastardizing a basic comparison to try to say anyone else will win a bazillion more faceoffs than Larsson. Now you're trying to say that Beagle's PK FO% was better than O'Reilly's, as if that's a function of some trait or skill, as opposed to random variance of a near-coin flip event over a cut-down sample. As for the points, Beagle's career average is .24 points per game. Larsson's is .27. You really think ~1 faceoff win per game is worth $2 million? And for the record, any reasonable coach is going to ease O'Reilly's minutes, whether his faceoff replacement is 56% or 49%. No, you're not. If my coach doesn't understand that cutting ROR's ice time by a minute+ per game is worth more than losing a faceoff per game, I don't want that person as my coach.

Subban's complete lack of intangibles, obviously.

It's been a fun one...but I really want it to end so I can watch McDavid.

Also regressing to the mean: Pekka Rinne. Meanwhile, Stan Bowman is busy firing people.