Hoss

I get the hate for his antics but James Neal has always been on and contributed to winning teams. We could use a player or two nobody likes (outside of our fan base).

if I’m ranking: 1. Dahlin 2. Mittelstadt 3. Guhle 4. Asplund 5. Thompson 6. Nylander 7. Davidsson 8. Borgen 9. Samuelsson 10. UPL 11. Pilut 12. Pu 13. Baptiste 14. Smith 15. Bailey 16. Bryson 17. Johansson Okay that’s enough names.

If you head over to the Meet Tage Thompson thread you’ll meet a few people that can’t wait to see his d...

Sobotka? Maybe. Berglund? No way. 44% isn’t exactly the opposite of 40%

And Gary Bettman is currently writing a hall of Fame acceptance speech.

Where is Mittelstadt going here? To the wing? I’ve got zero interest in forcing him to the wing for the sake of mythically protecting him. He’s a Center. Keep him there and focus solely on that.

I’d be surprised if Reinhart got $5 million (but there are other RFAs that’ll get small deals to get us to around $7/8M available. Regardless: I don’t think we can afford to pursue Karlsson with or without Ryan coming back. Nor do I think he’d be interested.

Who other than Eklund has said this?

On the first part: Kane wasn’t a prime asset. We all thought he should be due to age and ability but the league did not. It was reported by Botterill and the top insiders (real insiders, not fake twitter ones) that San Jose’s offer was never topped at any point in the process. He wasn’t valued around the league. Tage Thompson is by no means a “garbage prospect.” He’s highly regarded. He may not turn into anything significant and he’s definitely flawed, but that’s how prospects work. Eichel, McDavid, Dahlin and Matthews are the only prospects of the last five/six years that didn’t have some level of serious flaws. Dahlin was a given. Mittelstadt was not, he fell and there were some grumbles among Sabres fans when he was picked. He’s also not a finished product so we’ll see. Anybody on here that attempts to make serious evaluations of any picks outside of the very top names is fooling themselves and everybody else. Even when I went out of my way to try to catch prospects it was impossible to see more than like five of their games.

He was respected around the entire league and got one of the 31 top decision-making positions in the world’s greatest league. We’ll see if he earned it but a single season and one and a half offseasons isn’t close to enough time to make any meaningful observations on his talent evaluation. Scandella was a good get. Kane deal sucked (got lucky with that turning into a first) but it appears the league had no interest in Kane, so I’d rather get what he got than absolutely nothing. This deal is less than 24 hours old so it’s going to be much longer before we can make final judgements on it.

i don’t understand how people have gotten to this point already. There simply isn’t enough of a history here to evaluate this yet.

I stopped reading after the part about Hall for Larsson. That’s revisionist history. Everybody hated that. The only “positive” comments I remember were people saying that Larsson isn’t complete trash.

You’re going to have to take solace in the fact that our GM felt this was a good deal as do very many well-connected people in the NHL. I saw an almost universal appreciation for the deal by Sabres writers and national guys up front then came here and saw nothing but hate for the deal. I’m on the fence on it. I think the value is what it was supposed to be.

He spent over 50% of his time with Sobotka, Jaskin, Berglund, Magnus Paajarvi, Oskar Sundqvist and Ivan Barbashev (21% with the first two).

“Proper development” is very different for every player. The only time I’ve ever heard somebody talk about “proper development” on this site is in the context of either forcing a player through one to three years in the AHL or playing sheltered minutes. There are other ways. It’s also fun when a prospect gets to the big club but ends up on the third or fourth line and everybody screams about how they’re being wasted because they’re not getting enough minutes with top talent. I think Thompson will start in Buffalo in the top six or third line at worst, and I look forward to it.

When we talk about lines I constantly think of Tortorella saying the lines in the NHL is legitimately just throwing darts and seeing what sticks.

I don’t think Bokk surpassed him within two weeks of being drafted. The Blues also offered us that first rounder in earlier talks, according to Rutherford. I also think fans being concerned that the team views him as NHL ready just like the Blues did is strange. Two NHL staffs view him as NHL ready. Fans get so caught up in thinking they know better than those getting paid hefty salaries to know these things after decades of work.

Two seasons ago he was on a 24-33-57 pace before the injury. I think that injury lingering all offseason really hurt his conditioning last year. I think he's removed enough from it after a mediocre but not putrid season to get back to where he was at two years ago.

Eichel, Reinhart, Okposo (I'm confident he's still a top six player) and Mittelstadt are all top-six talents. Sheary has spent a couple years in the top six on two cup teams and two years ago produced like a definitive top-six winger. Ideally we add another real top-six guy but it's not THIS bad.

There's definitely an excess. Looking at contracts I don't really see any of their pending UFAs/RFAs being back except Ullmark and MAYBE McCabe (I still think he's a good NHL defender and a piece they should look at flipping). Pominville and Moulson are UFAs that are all but guaranteed to be out. I don't see Beaulieu coming back in any way after this season if he even makes the team. Larsson and Girgensons are also gone, I would assume. I'm not sure what they do immediately but a lot of the clog of NHL bodies that aren't impact guys will be mostly cleared up once that happens.

Brian Duff just posted this depth chart on the Sabres website. It’s a mess but this is what the team-paid “journalist” thinks... Buffalo Forwards: Conor Sheary - Jack Eichel - Sam Reinhart Victor Olofsson / C.J. Smith / Evan Rodrigues / FA/Trade? - Casey Mittelstadt - Kyle Okposo Vladimir Sobotka - Patrik Berglund - Tage Thompson / Justin Bailey / Nick Baptiste Scott Wilson / Zemgus Girgensons - Rasmus Asplund / Johan Larsson / Sean Malone / Andrew Oglevie - Jason Pominville Defense: Rasmus Dahlin - Rasmus Ristolainen Marco Scandella - Zach Bogosian Brendan Guhle - Jake McCabe Matt Hunwick - Casey Nelson Nathan Beaulieu Goalies: Carter Hutton Linus Ullmark Rochester Forwards: C.J. Smith - Rasmus Asplund - Justin Bailey Danny O'Regan - Sean Malone - Nick Baptiste Alex Nylander - Kyle Criscuolo - Cliff Pu Kevin Porter - Andrew Oglevie - Eric Cornel Pascal Aquin / Vaclav Karabacek Defense: Lawrence Pilut - Zach Redmond Brandon Hickey - Will Borgen Matt Tennyson - Taylor Fedun Nathan Paetsch - Andrew McWilliam Devante Stephens - Arvin Atwal Brycen Martin - Tobie Paquette-Bisson Goalies: Scott Wedgewood Adam Wilcox Jonas Johansson

For the record, they also got Jamie McGinn in that trade who they flipped for a third round pick. That third rounder became a failed attempt at Jimmy Vesey. The selection at that slot by Nashville was Rem Pitlick who hasn’t panned out to this point.

Berglund is going to be a nice piece for this team in each of those four seasons.

Nevermind - thought they were talking about Antipin and not Sobotka.

Who is now a mainstay on a good defense in Winnipeg.