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.

Actually Adams is going to give Tuch a huge extension so that he can leave his successor another terrible long-term contract to work withafter he gets fired after this coming season when the team fails to make the playoffs for the 15th straight year.

Maybe the lesson is don’t put talented skill players with crap 4th line players and expect them to produce.

I don’t know if the contract will work out, but it’s stupid to give out big$ contracts to guys with 53 games on experience and only 26 pts in those 53 games. When did Adams take over as Chicago’s GM?

Tuch has an uphill battle to make the team while Thompson has a reasonable chance. 4 forwards have already been selected - Eichel, Matthews and the Tkachuk brothers. I think there are another 4 locks for the roster in Jack Hughes, Conner, Robertson and Boldy. That leaves 5 slots. Guys like Keller, Guentzel, Thompson, Caufield, Debrincat, Cooley, Larkin, Tuch and Knies competing for those slots. I think Guentzel and Thomspon lead for slots 9 & 10.

What you don’t think Kesselring and Timmins will solve all our D problem? What type of fan are u?

The only addition by subtraction I want right now is Adams and the entire coaching staff to get fired.

How is leading the NHL in 1st period goals garbage time? Front running is valid, but garbage time would be leading the league in 3rd period scoring and still have a losing record. The Sabres scored 92, 84 & 86 by period. Those are fairly consistent numbers. They dominated the 1st with a differential of +24 (68 goals allowed). Where they failed is when the game's intensity picked up in the 2nd period, the defense and goaltending collapsed. They allowed an NHL worst 214 goals in the 2nd and 3rd period (107 each period).

This is a fair and accurate post. Hard to win if you can't stop the other team. (ask the Bills in the 4th qtr of the playoffs) Adams has had years to address the goaltending. The last game Ullmark played for the Sabres was 4/13/21. The next season, Adams gave us UPL with Anderson, Tokarski, Dell, Subban and Houser. He followed that up with UPL plus Anderson, Comrie and a late season visit from Levi. Next came UPL with Comrie and Levi followed by last season's S..t show of UPL, Reimer and Levi. Is it any wonder this team can't crawl out of the cellar. This coming season we are getting UPL with Lyons and Levi. Does anyone really expect a different result in year 5 running back the same failed strategy in goal that has failed for 4 straight seasons?

"....but he didn't want to be here"

No idea. It didn’t make sense then and doesn’t make sense now. Giving long term deals after one good season hasn’t exactly worked out for the Sabres; namely Cozens, Samuelsson, UPL to name 3 more. Given Power’s terrible defense, I’m still waiting for his good year.