TrueBlueGED

Welcome to the bandwagon! If nothing else, I'm glad we have a coach who rapidly recognizes player chemistry when it's smacking him in the face. /comicsans

Sign me up for 1 year at half his current salary.

1) I'm not even convinced Gorges belongs in our top-6 Dmen once everyone is healthy...including himself. The wheels may have officially come off. On that note... 2) A bit of a rant: The negative impact Gorges has had on Risto's stats is simply amazing (in case it's not obvious, I mean this in a bad way), and it completely blinded the analytics community. The statistical models that have been developed do a pretty good job of taking into account quality of competition faced, and there's persuasive evidence that its effects are overstated anyway due to small variance in player QoC faced. However, the statistical models, to the best of my understanding, don't do much to account for quality of defense partner--they factor in quality of teammates, but that's teammates writ large, so the fact Risto was getting #1D ice time and playing with all of our best forwards for huge chunks of minutes essentially served to "pump up" his QoT stat, making it look like he's terrible even while playing with our best players. WOWY analysis is one way to try to get around this problem, but since Risto was stapled to Gorges 90% of the time, there wasn't enough "without Gorges" sample to be worth much of anything (a fact that most in the analytics community simply ignored, or were ignorant to). I've also noticed there's a bit of a negativity bias with respect to how the community views outliers--even those outliers which are in a positive direction, most still tend to assume they're there because of luck and are actually much worse than their measurables. The model is right 90% of the time, and when players deviate significantly from the model, the problem is the players, not the model's inability to catch unique circumstances. That's the general thinking, anyway. And that general thinking misses the boat sometimes. The thing with models that rely on trends and generalities to varying degrees is they do sometimes "miss" on unique circumstances, and generally don't handle significant exceptions to rules very well. In Risto's case, the models simply weren't equipped to deal with just how much of a drag playing with Gorges has been. But because the community has such strong priors about sticking to the models and turning a skeptical eye to the, ahem, eye test, when it contradicts the stats...it was a blind spot of sorts. No matter how many Sabres fans (many of whom are familiar with the stats) would try to say "Look, I know what the numbers are, but you have to listen to me about Gorges"...it was rejected. Well, now that Risto is an over 50% CF player with McCabe and Kulikov compared to barely a 40% CF player with Gorges, people are starting to take notice...but it's going to take awhile for the "new" reality to take hold. Now I'm sure some people are going to take this to say "See! I knew stats sucked! Eye test baby!" but that would be decidedly the wrong thing to take away. The takeaway should be we all have various biases we bring to the table (such as those who still somehow believe Deslauriers brings value because he hits and his teammates love him, as that's what they were taught was important growing up), and we should be a bit more open to taking things outside our world view into account.

My god I love Ristolainen!

These refs can suck it.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME BOYCHUCK!?!?!?!?!

Accidental goals are still goals, thankfully. And here I thought Matt Moulson's corpse falling backwards into a PP goal would make you all sunshine n roses :p

I'm leaning towards the latter. You like him, but are you in like with him?

Nylander will save him. Sir calm down.

In his defense, I think he just got double shifted with Girgensons/Kane prior to the PP. Probably gassed.

Kulikov's escape from the zone there made me smile. His subsequent giveaway in the Ozone, however, did not.

Hopefully nothing bad enough to get Bylsma to move Gorges back up :p

My napkin math says...since he was moved from C to W. Last few games may be more striking, but I don't think he's been particularly good since Jack's return.

Yea, but it's Kane. What did you expect to happen? A cerebral hockey play?

Man, I'm just happy it hit the goalie! Baby steps!

Two amazing things just happened: 1) Gorges completed a pass 2) Kane shot the puck and it didn't go flying around the boards

Sabres PK gives up a goal. Drink.

Yup, first time I ever saw the stuff was today. Goddamn delicious. Possible recency bias kicking in, but I think it's my favorite of the Flying Bison offerings I've had.

BREAKING NEWS: Qwk has lots of problems with a major, mainstream movie. :p

Oh please, everyone knows he's never close enough to the play at even strength to take a hit like that.

You've been drinking, too, I see :lol:

I don't take that as anything other than he saw what Stamkos went through with the media frenzy, and decided to take an approach to avoid it.

Jack Astor's has Festivus themed food and drink options. Gingerbread chicken? Gingerbread chicken!!! I'm also enjoying a Flying Bison scotch ale, which I've never seen before. Quite tasty. Finished Christmas shopping, now I'm either gonna brave the blizzardish conditions...or down a few more of these and go watch Star Wars.

Is it safe to assume we're temporarily back to spoiler-free for awhile with the new movie? Or should I stop impulsively clicking this thread?

Or, ya know, get you paralyzed if you don't have much skill to hone :p