TrueBlueGED

At least Dareus looks like himself at long last.

Any truth to the rumor Dan Bylsma took over the Bills offense?

Sure, assuming you enjoy disappointment :p

Rex going full Rex here using a second challenge in the first half. Even if he wins, not having a challenge for the second half is a huge mistake.

Yea, Rex is gonna win the challenge, but I still expect them to go for the 1 foot and convert. Edit: Or, he's going to lose it, because NFL officials.

Our RT position is such a disaster, and now with Wood out, we can't even go left with regular success. Bleh. On the bright side, I'm having my first Sierra Nevada Celebration of the year.

Wait, what? I totally missed this...almost as if I'm trying to tune them out during the week :lol:

Yea, but one of those weeks was the bye :p

It's only been two games since his best game as a starter.

He's average, and it could be much worse. But yea, I'm not opting into that extension. Nice :lol:

We look like poop.

I'm thinking at home Thursday against the Rags.

I see. Did you report the poster for offensive content?

Don't be silly...from everything I've heard he hasn't been late to a single meeting! :p

You didn't answer my question. I asked for prominent liberals calling him a hero. Funny you mention Hitler, because, he's likely the worst dictator in human history, and possibly also the most studied of all time...and not all the study focuses on the Holocaust and WWII. Political skill, post-Versailles economic reforms, etc. Studying and acknowledging those aspects isn't done to deflect from what he would eventually go on to do. That's all "the left" is doing with Castro: whole picture. In grad school, for four years I dated a first generation Cuban American whose parents fled Castro. I'm intimately familiar with his oppressive governance. And the Cuban Missile Crisis? Nope, never heard of it. Definitely not. Never came up. But let's assume because I appreciate nuance that I'm clueless :rolleyes: And if we're being intellectually honest, let's be honest: the adversarial relationship between Castro and the US wasn't because he was a brutal dictator, it's because he was a communist so close to the homeland. So let's cut the sanctimony, shall we?

You keep pushing this, but how many liberals are calling him a hero? How many in the mainstream? Jill Stein doesn't count. He was a revolutionary, so not sure why/how that's bothersome. Ultimately I see you framing anything other than calling him a brutal, repressive dictator as praise, which I don't think is the intent. He certainly was those things, and should be condemned as such, but Castro was also a significant political figure for an extended period of time (and I'm probably understating that), so I'm not sure what is so terrible about reviewing his life as a whole like we do for every other dictator throughout history.

Minor quibble: I don't think anyone's arguing the success of the O'Reilly trade. If they are, they should be banned with all deliberate speed.

I don't think talent has a single, solitary, thing to do with why Babcock chose the Leafs. Toronto is an abomination defensively and they're not going to win anything until they clean it up, but in the meantime, man are they fun to watch. They're a bad team, but they're the right kind of bad: entertaining.

On the flip side, some players wouldn't have gotten the same offensive opportunities with a healthy Eichel in the lineup. For instance, how many of Moulson's 6 PP goals and 2 PP assists would he have with Eichel playing? Moulson is currently 3rd on the team in PP ice time, behind only Risto and Reinhart--our top unit guys are getting 60+ minutes, 2nd unit 20-30, and I'm pretty sure Moulson would be down on that 2nd unit (1st unit being Eichel-ROR-Okposo-Reinhart-Risto). I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest he'd be down to 1-2 goals and maybe an assist on the PP. Just cutting his PP time and scoring rates in half (on the latter I don't even think it's a safe assumption he'd score at the same rate on the 2nd unit) puts him at 2 goals and 1 assist. Sure, Jack covers the decline and more, but I don't think his mere presence makes up for 85% of those missing 17 goals when everything is taken into account.

Not that I claim to have a photographic memory of those couple of games, but I thought Reinhart looked pretty out of sorts playing LW.

So? Wasn't Pittsburgh's last coach only on the job for less than two years? Then they fired him and won the Cup. It was Rutherford's first hire there, and he cut bait pretty quickly. I don't think Murray is going to can Bylsma this year, but I don't think it's because it would be admitting a mistake, I think it'll be because the injuries bought Bylsma time.

Corsica actually has a scoring chance metric. Overall percentage we're pretty good at 53.58%, 7th in the league. But that's due almost entirely to our scoring chance prevention, where we're 3rd at 6.53 per game. Problem is we're only generating 7.54 per game, which is 19th. Before you ask, I'm not sure exactly what they count as a scoring chance (which is why I don't regularly cite the data), but a safe bet are things in the whole slot area. We are shooting a little low as a team, at 5.06% (as opposed to our expected, per Corsica, of 5.97%), but even if we were shooting as expected, it'd still only give us another 6 goals on the season. We simply aren't generating enough chances to score more. Which brings me full circle to Bylsma: he's using the roster incorrectly. As I think we can all agree, we're not a team with a bunch of high end finishers (our only guy with a realistic expectation of hitting 30 is Jack), so we have to manufacture offense through volume and control. Bylsma is doing the exact opposite of that with his passive forecheck, weak puck support, and neutral zone trapping. Sure we're limiting chances against at an elite level, but we're generating chances at a below average level and when combined with our roster, has resulted in a total dearth of offense. Backing away from the stats some, looking at our defense, I think it's pretty clear that Risto, McCabe, and Bogosian (lord save my soul) are better at attacking offensively than they are at defending in their own zone. Yet, Bylsma's system has them spending more time playing to their weaknesses than to their strengths. Every game I see a lot of chances to either lead a rush or pinch, but they just choose to sit back instead. If it was only say Gorges doing it, that's one thing, but they all are. That's coaching. Jack coming back will help, as he can generate on his own outside of the system, and he can finish. But him coming back doesn't fix the underlying systemic problems Bylsma is responsible for. People can point to the injuries all they want, but it was the same last year, and it was the same this year when we were healthy minus Jack. It's how Bylsma wants to play. I've often joked about what Bylsma learned in his year off...well I think he decided that clogging everything up and castrating the generation of chances (by both teams) was the way to go. Though his breakouts and dumping and chasing is basically the same as in Pittsburgh, I think he neutered the forecheck he used there in favor of stifling the competiton (someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I have no memory of Pittsburgh playing a 1-2-2 with any regularity...quite the contrary, I remember them giving up a lot of speed rushes through the neutral zone). Bleh.

It's not his fault they don't convert the chances they get, but I do hold him responsible for the team not generating more chances. The foremost problem with Bylsma's approach is it requires capitalizing on a small set of quality chances, and if shooting goes cold (and it does, for every team), the scoring will be non-existent. The best teams create more chances, and that helps offset natural ebbs and flows in finish. The bottom line is for all the fault you can find in Murray and the roster, this team is scoring less than the tank teams despite having a better roster. Matt D'Agofreakingstini was skating a regular shift for those teams. And they were better offensively. That's on the coach, full stop.

When we're healthy, I really don't think the Leafs are better than us. But they're the right kind of bad...they're funly bad! Yes, funly.

Do you deny being crazy and old? :p