Marvin

I remember this. Splitting the farm team was weird. Playing behind the Iron Curtain was dumb. And acting as if he had been ignorant of the national leagues was goofballed.

Brawndo has a thing in the "League Hits Pause" thread on page 3. maximum of 6 players on the taxi squad with all sorts of caveats.

The Sabres are bad, but "flaming $#!+#0|3" seems a bit extreme.

I SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO envy you. I have always wanted to call a game. Until I discovered the joys of mathematics, I was hoping to be a hockey announcer.

In modern lingo, maybe we need to say, "I hope that does not put too early a timestamp on me."

That Helen Thomas reference is just spectacularly awesome, @PASabreFan.

But I thought we were supposed to root for TP selling the team, so surely that hope is immaterial. Or am I missing something?

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?