matter2003

Crazy to think people on the ship who are not infected are now basically being forced to stay in an environment against their will where there is a high chance of them ultimately getting infected. I would be livid if I was one of those people. The government is in effect potentially giving these people a death sentence for no reason.

Very scary, especially since they said it was a cardiac event. Might be a situation he can either take medication for and/or have a surgical procedure to fix but might also be an issue that doctor's may not clear him to play anymore.

This is just simply not true. If you have the same people who have done nothing but lost, they develop bad attitudes, bad habits and lack of caring because they think no matter what they do the result will be the same and it saps their will and energy. When things go wrong, they expect to lose. When they are up 2 goals and the other team scores, they expect the other other team to tie it. On and on... that's culture...the mindset of the team...the competitive nature of the team...the mental toughness of the team. All of that is severely hurt when a team loses for a long time and players just shut down and stop caring because it hurts less. It's almost like a protective mechanism for their psyche. So saying there is no such thing as bad culture is just plain wrong. If players are brought into a winning environment they either get with the program or they get gone. There is no such pressure for players joining a losing environment because the players already there aren't holding themselves or anyone else accountable. Peer pressure is a mother and if its not there the team is in trouble. If a player knows he can just take shifts off and nobody is going to say anything because nobody cares, that matters. Just like if you know you can do things at work and your boss doesn't care you take advantage of it, but if he came by your desk 5 times a day looking to make sure you were doing these things, you would be on top of it. It's the same thing. Yes, good players help, but good players alone cannot fix a bad culture---how is that working for the Oilers who have the top 2 players in terms of points in the NHL? it takes a lot more than that, it takes getting the wrong people off the team before bringing the right people on the team so the players who don't care or don't want to change won't poison anyone else on the team. Look at what the Bills did...they got rid of a lot of good players initially to make sure the players that were there fit with what they wanted to do. And it worked!

I mean look at the hirings of Chris Drury and Steve Yzerman...were they experienced front office hockey people or were they just good players who people thought would likely be qualified to transition into it?

Wawrow never accuses. His info ALWAYS comes from good sources or multiple good sources so if he is saying something its probably as close to the real truth as we are going to get. He is probably the best connected reporter to the "real story" we have in this area both Bills and Sabres.

I thought LTIR doesn't count towards the cap tho?

Sometimes these moves are in name only to lessen the salary cap ramifications and the player actually never leaves the team, which I would assume is the case with Pilut? I like Pilut and think he will be a good NHL defenseman once he is here full time and they clear this log jam

Good win but of course they had to turn a cruise control game into a nail biter in the last 3 minutes.

Are you trying to claim he had someone offensively worse than or equivalent to Sobotka playing with him? I don't buy it.

I don't understand how people are blaming Skinner for not scoring goals while he is stuck playing with Sobotka, Middlestadt and Johansson. Skinner has never been a player who is going to create a lot for himself, he is a player who is deadly when someone sets him up to shoot the puck. Who is setting him up? I mean yeh we can say he has sucked but his 5 on 5 production is still near the top of the team as all 11 goals have come there. I find it hard to place all the blame on him when he is playing with people who do not compliment his skills whatsoever. Worst of all his skillset has been very well known for a long time. He is a sniper. Its not like he was creating a ton of chances for himself last year or throughout his career and is creating nothing this year. What have they done to help him succeed? Really nothing.

Avalanche are just a bad matchup for the Sabres...they have gotten smacked 6-1 twice in a row at home by them

A 2% mortality rate is a pretty weak virus for there to be this big of a panic. Its inline with the flu and far lower than SARS and MERS. This is irresponsible mainstream media creating a panic over something that doesn't even make any sense to create a panic over. Must be a slow time for media and they need new stories...they can get months worth of content from this. Just take sambucol 3 times a day and you'll be good. Prevents viruses from replicating due to blocking the point of entry at the cell receptor site.

There is definitely some of that, but Jack has said he spent a lot of time working on his shot and becoming better when he does shoot the puck, so I am assuming some of that is hard work paying off, but there is no way its more than double his career shooting percentage improvement. I'd say he likely falls back to the 15% range, which would still be a huge improvement over his career average.

Dahlin is about to get dealt ?

Precipice of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel again for the 9th straight year hahahaha

Maybe, but players do make that jump and play well. Depends on how he progresses, but I think he at least will start the year in Buffalo unless he has an absolute disastrous camp next year.

Could be a quick fix if Cozens quickly becomes a viable #2 center next year. That would fix a lot of ills on this team. By all accounts this kid is the real deal and should become a stud. Also do not need to worry about him being pushed around like Middlestadt...at 6' 3" he has enough of a frame to add 10-15 lbs of muscle pushing him to near 200 lbs and he is already considered pretty strong at 183 lbs. Kind of sad because Middlestadt outweighs him at 198 lbs but he is a soft 198 lbs...he is not in the type of shape from a weight room perspective that will help him in games.

I have often wondered if there would be different results if teams allowed their players to rest more on off days rather than get up early, get to the rink and practice. Are all these practices beneficial or are they detrimental to players? Wonder if some team takes a look at this and makes some changes. Would be interesting to see what the results would be.

Pirates were good for a short run recently and made the playoffs 3 years in a row...they turned it around but recently went back to their losing ways again. Those low revenue teams in baseball just have a huge uphill battle where they have to constantly draft well and replace players leaving on rookie deals that have become too good and outpriced their budget. Basically they have to draft good players, hope they become good major leaguers and then hope they can draft their replacements when they leave in 4 or 5 years and that those players then become good major leaguers...its just too hard for these teams to remain competitive year in and year out when playing against the big boys and it turns into an endless cycle of churning players and watching them leave. Yeah they can do it for a few years here or there and catch lightning in a bottle for a year and maybe even win a World Series, but long term, they are going to have a lot more losing seasons than winning seasons while the high revenue teams simply poach all their good players once they hit FA or trade for them when they are in the final year of their deals so they get something for them instead of nothing.

I have no idea why they would keep playing Hutton knowing he isn't any good. Play Johansson and at least see what you have in him.

Turgeon put up 106 points for the Sabres in his 3rd season and then "dipped" to only 79 points the next year before being traded to Toronto earlier the following season. He scored 122 goals and had 323 points in 322 games for the Sabres, so yes that is Eichel like production. However, it should be noted he played in a much more offensive era where 100 point players were a dime a dozen. That being said, he finished with 515 goals and 1327 points in 1294 games so he was a damn good player for a long time, averaging over a point a game, with a high of 132 points in a season for the Islanders including 58 goals that year.

Norris type defenders have simply become the defenseman who scores the most points now. They should just call it the best offensive defenseman award now, not best defenseman.

I think you mean Frolik

Uhh, I don't think so. Lehner has posted far better raw numbers than Ullmark has. Even his first 2 years here, he had save percentages of .924 and .920 and GAA's of 2.47 and 2.68 on REALLY bad tank teams which are both better than Ullmark's numbers this year. The last 2 seasons he also posted .930 and .922 save percentages, which are both far better than Ullmark. The only place Ullmark is an upgrade to Lehner is in shootouts, where for whatever reason Lehner is the worst goalie in NHL History

With Ullmark likely being out for a while, I wanted to reflect on who he reminds you of as a potential goalie of the future. Personally, I don't think he is going to be a number 1 goalie in the NHL, I think he will be a quality backup that can give you 25-30 games a year and play well enough to give your team a chance to win if the starter goes down for any length of time. Looking at similarity scores for Ullmark on the Hockey Reference site, his top similarity scores are 2 ex-Sabre goalies: Marty Biron and Darren Puppa. As soon as I saw Biron, that is who I thought of with him. Biron came on as a young player and played really well for about 15 games in his first year when Miller was hurt and the Sabres were going on their runs...Ullmark came up early and played really well also, even though the Sabres were tanking and he didn't get a lot of W's, he was a respectable 8-10-2 in his first season. That being said, with both players, that might have been the high-water mark for their careers. They both kind of drifted and never really established themselves as legit #1 goalies in the NHL, but quality backups. I think that is what Ullmark is ultimately destined for. He lets in too many bad goals at bad times to be a number 1. What are your thoughts on who Ullmark reminds you of and if he can becomes a #1?