Thorny

If he shocked personally if Catton wasn’t the pick, screams sabres from all I’ve read and heard advocated

Mason Raymond ish

My favourite player. It’ll be funny when he gets traded and we can do the whole Eichel thing again with me staunchly defending Dahlin I apologize in advance One of the most prevailing myths in the league that will probably never go away is the idea a star player can carry a team. If you suck, your star player will be disliked, that’s sort of just the way

Ftfy “Teams will hold his toes to the fire on our assets because we are desperate” is a myth. Resoundingly so. A team after our assets isn’t just competing with Adams at the negotiating table they are doing battle with their actual competition - the other teams after our assets. There’s no good lowballing if all you end up with is your rival acquiring said piece If we trade good assets, there will be buyers and the price will reflect If we try to trade the pieces we don’t want for things we do, we’ll mysteriously find we’ve been “lowballed” out of “desperation”

What ever happened with this? Did they ever end up getting this series played?

And no wonder Adams is feeling the pressure: if he’s expected to be around the team more, I wonder if Terry is essentially fulfilling the role Adams did, for him, towards the end of the Botterill tenure.

So after all this time, my expectations timeline was bang on. I’m glad to find myself in line with ownership’s decision making process ..wait

Plus most of this is really just in theory anyways. Someone in the top 9 WILL be hurt. Multiple. If Greenway is “pencilled in” on line 4 that really means we have a capable player filling in within the top 9 WHEN the first injury takes place aka game 1. Just keep adding good players. We aren’t close to ready.

I like him too - that’s why when I say I envision him reasonably on the 4th line it’s because I’m necessarily envisioning him as part of a revamped bottom 6 that deserves plenty of minutes: it’s an area I’d look to make up ground on against other teams if at all possible. Turning from a weakness to a strength would be nice for a change. If Greenway is L3RW, then I simply mean I’d want a player as good as him when we go looking for the other 2 bottom 6 wingers we need (and the 2 bottom 6 Cs)

I’d say they have a chance simply for the reasons you already outlined: it’s a formula they’ve followed to success thus far. It could theoretically continue On the other hand, the nhl famously often has a team go on a magical run to the finals as more or an underdog before everything catches up to them: so I could see the Oilers falling apart too. It’s not easily predictable IMO

Quinn has pretty consistently lined up on the right, which is sort of interesting because looking into it, while Benson played a lot on the left he also did play on his off hand a lot too on the right. So depends on the player I guess.

Just as a rough exercise, detailed is the ranking of each hypothetical top 6 forward by way of points by position league wide, with a breakdown of lineup fit based on output: LW Peterka 29th (low-level first line) C Thompson 52nd (mid-to-lower tier second liner) RW Tuch 17th (mid-tier first liner) Line average: 33 (top range second-line production) LW Skinner 33rd (great second line production) C Cozens 62nd (2nd/3rd line tweener) RW Benson 48th (mid-tier second liner) Line average: 48 (mid-tier second line) I know we hope for upswings and returns to “form”, but if similar to last year we could be in a situation where we are running more less 2 2nd lines if we see the sort of outputs we saw repeat. (Yes I know I took all data all situations it’s just a rough estimate) But it seems to line up: we may very well not have a great or even average top 6, i’d supplement in the bottom 6 if at all possible How do their top 6s look compared to ours

Ya I mean there’s nothing wrong with aiming for Greenaway to be “too good” for the 4th line if that’s the goal we can achieve, when our 1 and 2 c tallied 51 points each last year on average between the 2 of them. There’s assuredly ground we’ll need to make up elsewhere. If the top 6 is set, it’s not set amongst the best in the league. Gaining advantage down the forward ranks is a place to make it up

Greenway on his offhand in the top 9 doesn’t inspire much confidence

Pipeline continues

18 draft picks over the next 2 drafts. We should see a fair few moved We have to move 4 just to get to an average slate, never mind the surplus of prospects

Kinda hoping Krebs is involved in a trade during the process of filling those 4 forward spots

Peterka - Cozens - Tuch Benson - Thompson - Quinn Skinner - 3C - 3RW Greenway - 4C - 4RW …honestly I think we need 4 new bottom 6 players, and we’d be good with that t6. It’s 4 guys but considering our prospects and pick asset pool that should be fishing with dynamite, more less. I think Skinner is fine on L3 if there’s a shooter with him allowing him to clean up rebounds, Greenway nice in a 4th line roll. Byram - Dahlin Samuelsson - Power Clifton - Jokiharju D is fine as is. We’ve spend a ton of capital there. It’ll either be the strength of the team or we will suck. If we have to spend even more on D to make that happen we are probably screwed anyways. I like the group and it’s upside tbh UPL Levi GT should finally be ready to contribute positive results for a full season () - - - That should be a fun offseason for a GM, no? At least as far as one on the hot seat? 4 good bottom 6 forwards. Hardly an unreasonable ask.

No it’s awesome I’m pretty biased but I dunno it’s awesome lol one day Kevyn will come calling for it (as president of hockey ops) and I’ll happily turn it over. For the price of a small discussion on this website, of course

It’s really the starter thing, ya. And Adams thought that would be last year. And because of UPL filling the roll, we probably would have made it last year even with the goaltending situation playing out the way it did had the issues Liger mentioned been addressed. Me saying we are still on his timeline isn’t really true with the emergence of UPL. He just happened to emerge exactly when Levi was planned to (a few months delayed, admittedly). (I’m sort of torn on whether KA expected to/thought we’d make the playoffs last year.) My thing about the timeline still potentially coinciding with Levi was more of a factual aside: it may very well end up that we don’t make the playoffs until Levi has a solidified NHL roll, which could be as soon as this season

The context of the conversation isn’t the cause of why we missed (though the early season goaltending was assuredly a huge factor), it’s what our timeline to success theoretically looks like to the GM. Levi not being the cause of missing doesn’t change the fact the issues that DID cause us to miss may have been symptoms of the roster being configured in such the way it was because of the expectations Adams had for competitiveness. I don’t think Adams expected us to be good until Levi was. Now, we can argue that could have been last year had the rest of the team been better, but only because UPL emerged, which to KA (and many others), was unexpected. Adams just thought it would be Levi. I understand Levi’s numbers eventually got the the point where they averaged out to reasonable backup, but the runway it took to get there and the slow start it contributed to we could never recover from isn’t dismissible when you are supposed to be measuring by results

If Levi’s the backup, we’ll need 30 quality starts from him to make the playoffs. So, essentially we are on the Levi timeline. Playoffs require him to be a capable, mainstay pro Levi wasn’t ready for that last year, and we didn’t make the playoffs. Seems to line up

Not much to it. I have it. For his birthday we got my Dad one of those Cameo things you could/used to be able to get from celebs/famous figures. Video message of RJ announcing the Sabres have won the Stanley Cup Dunno if others have similar but I can confirm there’s at least one version of the audio

Yessir

I told you all Canada hockey stinks