Curt

I have a hard time knowing for sure if it’s a failure of Adams or if a lot of it is coaching. Eichel, Hall, Olofsson, Staal, Skinner, Eakin, Okposo, Dahlin, Jokiharju, Montour (did I miss anyone?) all seem to be playing about as poorly as they ever have. Is that a coincidence? It’s not just the players Adams brought in.

I know! That dog can tweet!

That is ***** outrageous.

It would be different. Matt Ellis, the Wayne Gretzky of NHL coaches?

I kind of agree. In principle at least. I don’t know those particular guys felt about it. If Eichel, gets traded, they better not give it to anyone right away.

Not always. Jordan Staal, Bo Horvat, Jared Spurgeon, Anders Lee and a few teams don’t have one named. Also, Peca basically was the star player of that team! He scored as much as anyone.

I agree that this is an interesting comparison. I honestly believe that hockey is a sport where having star players matters less than just about any other. If a star doesn’t have the pieces of a good team around them, they just aren’t able to do it alone. Even the truly elite of the game can’t carry a team without the right pieces around them (McDavid/Draisitel). A well managed and assembled team can be more than the sum of their parts. If you have a very solid team, there are ways to add a very good player or two to the top of your lineup to push you over the hump, as we have seen teams like Vegas, Carolina and St. Louis do the past couple years.

This is kind of ironic seeing how McDavid doesn’t really play defense.

I think starting from a seasons beginning with a good coach, this is a 85+ point team with a legitimate shot at making the playoffs. But right now, I think even putting a good coach in place, they will struggle for a while until things get turned around.

Well, the tweet says can’t jump more than 10 spots, not that a team below 10th can’t move up. So a team at 11 could move up to 1-3, 12 could move up to 2-3, 13 could move up to 3. I guess they are doing away with the lottery for 3rd though. Oh yeah, totally forgot about the Rangers. So Rangers and Philly have done it. But when I said that their drafts wouldn’t have been affected, I really just meant that they wouldn’t have been prevented from drafting high at any point. Just to illustrate that these changes aren’t “anti Sabres”. Poor wording on my part though.

These rule changes would not have affected Buffalo’s drafts. In the past 7 years, they have moved up in the draft order zero times and won the lottery once. These draft lottery changes seem like they add quite a bit of complexity for a pretty minor alteration. Has any team ever even moved up in the lottery 3 times in 5 years? How many times has a team moved up more than 10 spots? All I can think of is philly doing it in 2017. Seems like the main change is that the worst team can only fall to #3.

The problem here is not really that the lines or style of play is not what SS wants. It’s that the results have been absolutely terrible. There is never going to be a full set of lines and D pairs that the majority of fans agree with, but when the team is worst in the league, it’s pretty easy to think that some fans could have managed to do better. We couldn’t do much worse.

Yeah, it is. As bad, or even worse I think, than the Sabres’ tank teams.

Only RD who might be worth taking in lottery is Brandt Clarke though, right? And he is an offense first D. Personally, I would go with any position. This draft is strong in LD, so it won’t bother me if they take another LD. I wouldn’t even rule out the goalie.

I just can’t figure out how or why these hounds are owning donkeys.

Is this some old folksy saying that I’m not familiar with?

I feel like he tends to favor Russian league players as well.

Unless......

Agree. I have a hard time believing that’s even a possibility. Isn’t it likely that Carolina keeps him?

Firstly, thanks for the reply. As for employing you, I certainly am not going to start doing that! If you don’t know or are not at liberty to say, I totally understand. You can just tell me that, no snark required. Honestly, you could have reported something on this that I never saw. I don’t follow your work.

I get what you are saying, but the reason they had the first one was not their idea, but because they were being hounded by the media to do so.

Is he still here?

That would be great. A steal for Buffalo I think.

Perhaps you think it’s unnecessary, or a bad idea, however that doesn’t mean it’s off the table for ownership. Have you heard anything regarding ownership bringing in a high level executive to help them run the team?

While you guys are not wrong. Calling him a soccer coach is just a lazy, tired insult that’s gotten very old for me to read as well. I mean, there are so many basic, legitimate criticisms of Krueger to present, that no one should need to be making silly statements like that.