BullBuchanan

The difference is Horvat has a body of work. Cozens is having a career year on the #1 scoring offense in the league while previously looking like a bit of a disappointment based his draft stock. I REALLY hope this proves to be a great contract, I'm just super skeptical that all of these kids just suddenly became elite level players overnight and that they'll be able to hold it.

not trolling at all, but ok. I figured a Cozens extension would be something like $3m per for 3-4 years. Until this season he's been an up and down bottom six guy. If I were to chart out all the #2 centers in the league I'm not sure he's in the top 2/3, let alone the $7M club.

He's at 54 right now...

They aren't contradictory at all. You have guys like Malkin, bakstrom, Tavares that cozens is now in the same money realm as (exceeds both malkin and bakstrom). It just seems like an insane gamble to me. He would have to double his production from last year at a minimum and then hold that throughout the deal for it to be worth it. If he maintains for 7 years agreed. He's done it for 40 games out of a career so far. Players regress all the time after big one-off years.

70-80 points!? He's at a career high with 43...What are you basing this on?

I'm really shocked everyone thinks this is a great deal. Why? The first thing I thought was that is was a gross overpayment by over double. I've always seen him as a Girgensons replacement and a 3rd liner. Now he's making Tage Thompson money. Are we really saying he's an elite 2nd line center now? Horvat at 8.5 seems like a much better deal.

What incentive does Levi have to actually come here? After this year he can go to any team in the league. We've been burned so many times on these NCAA kids already, you'd think we'd learn our lesson at some point.

It's two games. Complain in a month if it's still a problem. It would be extremely surprising if his point total didn't regress from last year, but I think he'll be fine.

They scored 2 and 3 goals plus 2 empty netters through 2 games. I think it's working fine.

I think Power looks great for 10 games of experience. He looks like a 5 year journeyman out there most of the time with the occasional offensive breakout. So much poise. I'm not sure what more you want to ask from a rookie on the 2nd pair.

You're acting like the Sabres have already arrived and should be beating teams loaded with proven veteran talent that have been in the cup hunt for years. That's what the next 80 games are for. Hopefully we're where Colorado was 5 years ago by season's end. That's pretty much best case scenario.

A quarter of the way through the season if the #3 team doesn't make the playoffs, that has to be a disappointment. I was thinking it was realistic for the sabres to fall back to earth early in this run. Instead they've just blown by everyone. It's been so long since they've had a game where they looked plain outmatched, that I don't think there's a team in the league they can't keep pace with this season. The traditional powerhouses are all having down years, so it's a great time to have lightning in a bottle.

Black. The darker the roast, the better.

Lucky for you, that data is available. You know what's cool about them? They prove the point that players regress and rise to their mean. Kinda the opposite of what you were hoping for, so sorry about that. https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/g/gretzwa01.html https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/l/lemiema01.html Gretzky's is especially beautiful, because you can see the impacts of age and experience in the data. He has 3 mean periods throughout his career. He starts his prime in only his second year, and then proceeds to carry much of that forward for the next 7 seven years. The one year he shot 14.9% during that span and hen rose right back up to his mean. After that stretch he begins a 6 year period where he enters the backside of his prime seeing all of his numbers shift a bit downward. at 31 he hits his cliff and begins his sharp but steady decline downward for the next 10 years until he retires. by the time these guys hit 26/27, their best years were already behind them. They each had good seasons afterward, but they were on a clear trend down.

Seems we have to go back to the ABCs of this. I don't know your education level, and I don't really care. You don't have to be educated to understand that if you're on the wrong side of probability that it cannot last forever. If you quit or die before a correction can take place it doesn't mean that it wouldn't have happened. If you want to argue on the model being flawed, that's fine. It probably is, because hockey analytics are in their infancy. However to try to say that a player experiencing an extreme statistical outlier is not extremely likely to regress towards his mean, is beyond illogical. You can ask John Scott about his NHL All-star performance or any other one of hundreds of athletes over the last hundred years that had surreal seasons that they never ever came close to replicating again. It's cool - you made up your mind before any evidence presented itself and today opinion is as good or better than facts.

Sorry if being accurate is too "political" for you. In science, constraints and controls matter, so yes, when you calculate predictive outcomes you have to make sure you're taking all appropriate data into account so that you're just not seeing a correlation = causation scenario. Re: predicting the future. Do you understand how math and probability works? I'm guessing not. Predictions are never 100% for a given scenario at a given time. That's not how math works. Probability states that over an extended or even infinite amount of time the algorithm will be true.Predicting the future happens all the time. How do you think doctors know what cancer treatments to provide, or how scientists will predict what path a hurricane will take, how a poker player determines the likelihood of a given play being successful? They use hard data and probability. When you have a 0.0001% chance to win a lottery and you win it twice, does that make the math false? No, of course not, the math never changes. What you just experienced is called variance, commonly called luck. Could you experience positive variance or negative variance over the course of a career or even a life? Sure. The math doesn't care how old you are, it just cares what is true. Your positive variance is likely paid for by someone else's negative variance. You can beat a 95% percent terminal illness, lose an election you were favored by 80%, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme. If you bet against the odds, you are invariably going to lose if you live long enough. Will goalie equipment affect the model? Of course. Will it change the game to a degree that a significant portion of the population will experience a disproportionate rise in their efficiency vs other equally or superior skilled opponents? Unlikely. They're all playing int he same scenario. It's effectively a control. Sure, some may benefit more than others, but it would be reasonable to assume that the majority of the population would be affected more or less equally with potential modifiers based on skill gap. Maybe Crosby benefits slightly more than Skinner, by virtue of already being better. Don't try to preach about things you clearly don't even have the most rudimentary understanding of.

Apparently it's beyond your comprehension. Just ignore it, it'll be easier.

Haven't had this much fun watching hockey in a decade

Could be. Maybe we'll find out this year ?

I would not be in any sort of rush to extend him. A reasonable number ends at about 3.5M/per for me. He started off inconsistent, but has been very good lately. Long term, I think he's a guy you're always trying to replace and I doubt he sees the end of his contract in a Sabres sweater if they ink him for 5 or 6 years.

We lost the tank, unless McDavid is hiding out somewhere in the locker room. Last years last place was one of the worst teams in NHL history trying their very best not to be. Dahlin was the reward for that. The Tank netted us Reinhart and Eichel, neither of which were able to pull the Sabres out of the basement until Skinner and Hutton got here. This team was fixed through FA, not the draft.

Jesus, how much effort did you put into resurrecting this?

When calculated appropriately, that's precisely what they do. What we're currently experiencing is variance, or deviation from the norm. This is also baked into advanced analytics in fields that aren't new to using them. Sports are still in the infant stages of using data to make predictions, so this isn't necessarily true in the hockey context, but it is globally. You can argue the specific merits of a given metric and be completely valid, but to say data cannot predict the future is completely false. You usually can't predict what will happen next Tuesday, but you can accurately predict long-term results provided enough insights.

I remember going to the Aud as a kid, but don't remember the game. Probably around '94. We were sitting a couple rows from the top, and I remember being terrified of that near vertical climb.

I can tell you it definitely won't extend past the season, which also happens to be when his contract is up. No.