Marvin

Overall, this is the model for the league. Everyone saw Buffalo get decimated after 2006-7 and said, "yeah, let's not do that." The only flaw in this strategy is that you sign guys to big contracts when they haven't earnt them yet and have, basically, dead money for years. The one change I would made to those years is that the Sabres should not be penny wise and pound foolish like they were back then.

I am rooting for the Sabres to vastly improve quickly with the youth so that the team makes money and the Pegulas decide to keep them.

Welcome to the board.

Anyone else seeing more dominoes falling?

Where did that come from?

I would prefer to see a much larger set of games with the team rising in the standings because of decent goaltending before proclaiming it a bright spot.

IMHO, most younger people tend to think that if they can't tell they have a disease because it is so debilitating, then no one will catch it for them. To my mind, all players in these sports are "younger people"; the idea that they might kill someone older than they are because of their lack of immunity just does not occur to them. So unless someone they know get hospitalised for a long time, it looks invisible to them. Heck, it may take a death of a major hockey player with McDavid-like stature to die before any of the players take it seriously. And someone in another sport may not be enough -- it has to be someone close enough to them where they say, "$#!+, that could be me." The longer this goes on, the more I think the US and Canada will be the countries where the rest of us will have to cave into those who won't get a shot come hell or high water. Remember that Crosby was patient zero for a mumps outbreak a few years ago -- and it changed nothing. How does that happen in the age of MMR vaccinations? And why would we expect the players to react any differently with COVID-19?

That sucks. That makes it less likely that they will stay in Buffalo.

Same here. I have still not recovered after almost 2 years. I was about 80% back when I got the shot as a booster -- after which I spent a week bedridden and a month recovering back to 70% or so. After a few months, I am back to 80-85%. I do warn people -- long COVID is horrendous. You really, really, really don't want it.

The NHL may never get me off my hobby-horse. Had they grouped teams to play in blocks when crossing the border and traveling around the country, they could have minimised the testing on border crossings and playing in groups. For instance, if the Buffalo, Tampa Bay and Florida went into Canada for a 3 game road trip for each (even better, 3 x 2 game sets for a 6 game road trip), you could test all three teams at the start of the trip and once at the end of the trip. Then the 3 Canadian teams could come to the US to play 3 teams in a 3 or 6 game blocks. That means tests every 1-2 weeks around each block rather than single games across the border. This is the league's punishment for failing to think ahead.

The Chinese Olympic team needs all the help it can get. They are the 2011-22 Sabres of the KHL without the deliberate tanking and high-end talent.

Not surprising. Some surely hoped it would not come down to this.

Some rumours I have heard are really ugly. Let me give you some facts which are not in dispute. These are accounts I have from people living there. The start-up I was with at the time had investment from a Chinese firm based in WuHan province. In June 2019, they sent people over here to work with us on the adjustment needed for the hotter and colder Chinese climates. They told us that the flu season was extra long and more severe over there. I would bet money that was the start of the pandemic. That is 6 months before anyone outside really became aware of it. We sent people there at the end of December for equipment testing. When our people were coming back over the Pacific in January, the Chinese locked down WuHan province weeks before western news agencies found out. There were armed personnel surrounding all the buildings with orders to keep people inside the buildings indefinitely. The Chinese blocks are like downtown Buffalo with dual use: the lower levels have shops while the higher floors have residences. Because they still delivered food and such to the residents and businesses, they could keep going with their lives without leaving the building. Literally, you could live your life without leaving your apartment building. And so they did for 2 months.

It's not happening in this country. There are states with NHL teams where this would be illegal to boot.

Smart move. Honestly, even if I exclude the games being in China, the tournament was a disaster waiting to happen.

Two points: 1. The comparisons with 1919-21 are interesting. They seated every other seat at sporting events for those years. We are taking COVID a lot less seriously than they took influenza back then. Some of this makes sense because the death rates from COVID now are less than the death rates from influenza then. 2. IMHO, some of this is political. If they take COVID too seriously, that will turn off the most vocal fans who are opposed to any restrictions at all and could land them on the national news as being against freedom.

Are they looking for the "fast forward" button to speed up getting COVID out of the league?

Let us think about this. There are 3 weeks cleared in February. The normal maximum number of games played is 1 game every 2 days. So there could be up to 10 games made up during that time for each team. Since playoff times are not made yet, they could tack on a week or two at the end of the year, which puts about 7 more there if need be. So they could still make the schedule without too much work if the Olympics were ditched and the season were extended a week or two. This is why it was so stupid to not make this season conference only just to cut down on scheduling trouble if there were cancellations like this. There would have been less travel, so players would be less tired, and therefore more likely to fight off a very mild exposure. Scheduling would be less complex in case of outbreaks. The less cross-continent travel would limit transmission rates. Even better -- they could have scheduled in blocks by grouping teams in groups of 3-5 which would play each other in groups so that an outbreak in one group would not spread to the rest of the conference. You don't think the other leagues might let their players go or that some NHLers might take their chances?

I don't see many "holes" in the schedules where these games can be made up without removing Olympic participation.

Just asking: is Lazar doing more at even strength than Hall? Defence, scoring, whatever.

They may have. I just don't recall.

Just enjoy yourself. I am sure all of us have said and done things which might have offended The Hockey Gods. We can't worry about minor transgressions or otherwise we'd go insane.

I wonder if that was a fall-back plan. This was part of the reason I thought that the current regular season should have been conference-only. It would have cut down on exposure and slow down spread of COVID across the league. It also would have cut down on travel in the compressed schedule as well, which would mean less physically tired players who would be more apt to fight off an infection.

I really only hate fanbases. The teams come and go. For instance, I hate the Flyers from my youth. But the Sabres doing things like eliminating them in such lopsided fashion in 2001 and 2006 plus ending the losing streak last year against them has assuaged my feelings. The Stars annoy me for 1999 and Carolina for 2006. I don't hate as much as envy the Bruins for often being the team which the Sabres were. Hate teams? Not so much. On the other hand, cecause I had to fight for just being treated like a person and not even being treated as an equal so often over the years, fanbases with entitlement issues make me hate their teams. Are there any more self-important fanbases who ooze entitlement like the Strangers and the Laffs?