GASabresIUFAN

NFL

But easier, much easier to build a team.

The Jets haven’t.

Dahlin is an amazing player. I just wish the organization was as committed to being great as Dahlin is.

I forgot the high taxes, lack of palm trees, an owner not committed to winning, the crumbling stadium, and terrible fan experience.

I mentioned hope in my post.

Sadly, they can, as they have proven the last two seasons. This is the pts trend under Adams leadership - 91, 84, 79. 10 reasons they could continue to regress 1. The Atlantic division is deeper than ever. Det, Mon, and Ott are actually improving while the Sabres have regressed 2. Adams traded away another young developing scorer, who has improved each of his 3 NHL season, for two depth players who may or may not have upside. 3. McLeod is almost certain to regress. He is a career 11.9% shooter who had a career year last year when shooting 20.9%. 4. The goaltending is woefully inadequate. The save % of our 4 goalies last season were as follows - UPL .887, Levi .872, Georgiev .875, and Lyon.896. League average last season was .893 in all situations. 5. Norris unlikely to play enough games to adequately replace Cozens. Norris has never played more than 66 games in a season and has averaged only 47 games a season during his time in the NHL. Remember he was shutdown after only 3 games last season following the trade from Ottawa. 6. The entire failed coaching staff returns including special teams failure Appert and defensive failure Wilford. 7. The team again refuses to spend to the cap and with the cap rising quickly, the Sabres are likely to fall further behind. Remember that teams that don’t spend to the cap rarely make the playoffs. 8. The defense remains defensively suspect. Byram, Power, Samuelsson and Bryson are still inept defensively. Kesselring and Timmins maybe upgrades defensively over Joki or Clifton, but neither has ever been a full time top 4 defenseman. Timmins has averaged less than 16 minutes a night for his career and last season was his first in 6 years as a full time NHLer. Kesselring played under 18 a night last season and while he did fill in the top 4, as soon as Utah got healthy he was relegated to the 3rd pair. He did have a solid all around season, but it’s fair to wonder if he is ready to pair with a player as defensively inept as Power for 22 minutes a night. It’s also fair to question whether the addition of two 3rd pairing D is enough to elevate a group as terrible as the Sabres have been defensively for years. 9. I am a big fan of both Benson and Kulich, but Sabres are betting on their continued improvement, plus rebounds from injury prone guys like Quinn and Norris, plus continued success from Zucker and McLeod, to keep the offense working. Also don’t forget we don’t even know who the 9th top 9 forward will be; will it be the injury prone and scoring challenged Greenway or a bet on another young player with 62 games of NHL experience in Josh Doan. That’s a great deal to ask and comes with a high risk of failure. If the offense regresses, it raises the odds of another regression by the team significantly. 10. Kevyn Adams is still the GM. I understand that the fans here want to have some hope that the 15 years of wandering in the hockey desert as punishment for the “tank” might end this coming season, but honestly we need to temper our expectations for a team put together by GMKA (aka Howdy Doody).

https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/article/sources-nhl-suspends-players-acquitted-in-2018-sexual-assault-trial-until-dec-1/ They weren't proven innocent. They were acquitted of the charges. These are different things. An acquittal means that the prosecutor in the eyes of the judge or jury (depending on the type of case) failed to prove their case against "beyond a reasonable doubt." It's the same criminal standard in the both the US and Canada. This doesn't mean they are "innocent." It just means that there wasn't enough evidence to convict them. Think the OJ case. Does anyone really believe OJ didn't kill Nicole or Ron Goldman? The standard in a civil case is significantly less. I don't think we'll ever actually know the full details of what happened. What we can say is that were acquitted. We can also say that the original investigation in 2019 concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge the players, but was this investigation tainted by Hockey Canada? We can also say that the NHL did their own investigation and found that the players didn't act criminally, but their actions failed to meet the NHL's moral integrity standard. I think this is a nearly impossible situation. Do we forgive and give these men a second chance? I think each NHL team must decide for themselves. They need to carefully look at the role each player played in the event and I think they need to look at who the players are today. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of teams take a chance on a couple of these guys. I don't think McLeod will be one of them.

This is a very interesting signing. This guy has played great in the NHL on occasion but also terrible. What does this say about their faith in Levi, Lyon and UPL? Not sure. Last season UPL played 55, Georgiev 49 and Lyons 30. Should be an interesting camp battle.

I remember the posts about Risto's great off-season workouts. Did it help his game? No! Unless Power spent the off-season working with a positioning coach, I doubt simply getting stronger will make him a better in zone defender.

2 of which only want to play offense. By the way, I don’t want him to be Risto 2.0. I don’t need him running around hitting everyone, all I want is for him to be better defensively and incorporate some physicality into his game. I don’t think that is to much to ask.

That’s correct, not in college and not in the pros. Until he learns to actually use his size to his advantage in the D zone and that includes clearing the front of the net, knocking people off the puck etc, he is a waste. He is being paid top $ to be effective at both ends of the ice and really only does half the job. To justify his compensation for just his O output, he needs to be a 70 pts player and his O skills aren’t good enough for that either.

Don’t ever challenge worse. @dudacek needs to put odds on each of those 10 things happening. For example - The defense had 2 40 pts players and one 70 pt player so the odds of that happening again for pretty good. While the odds of us having good goaltending are much much lower. He wrote they can’t be worse. While that may be true, given how lousy UPL has been as a pro except one season and how exceeding mediocre Lyons has been in his career especially on poor defensive teams like the Sabres, I’d say the odds of substantive improvement are about 10%. The reason it’s not zero is because we have seen moments of good goaltending from all 3, just not enough and not consistently

I honestly don’t care. Paying 8-9 mill for 7-8 years for a 29 year old 35 g 70 pt player soon to decline is stupid. This is KO 2.0 waiting to happen. Whether we sign him or we don’t also doesn’t matter. This is a hopelessly flawed team with terrible management and a poorly constructed roster with a GM who hands out bad contracts like candy. What’s one more bad contract? The Sabres will spend next season over $40 mill on bad contracts to Norris, Greenway, Samuelson, UPL, Power, and Byram plus the contract corpse of Jeff Skinner. Hard to win when you are spending nearly 50% of your internal cap on players who have zero chance of performing to their contract amount. I like Tuch, but he isn’t a $9 mill now and certainly won’t be 2-3 years from now.

I don't know, there is a very thin line right now between love and hate for the Sabres in the very disgruntled fanbase. 14 straight years of missing the playoffs coupled with GMKA's utter incompetence has left a very unhappy and bitter fanbase.