Marvin

True, but Irbe frustrated the hell out of XGMTM by making previously mediocre goaltenders look like Dominik Hasek when they got here. I still find his work to be in a class by itself.

The bolded is what scares me. He may be solved -- in fact, that is a decent indication that he has been solved. Like Eichel's neck, I would rather some other franchise figure it out. Now, if we can bring back Arturs Irbe as goaltending coach, then we can talk.

IMHO, Gibson should only be included as a cap equaliser. Goaltenders can be like Bill Ranford and just fall apart or like Jim Carey and get solved. And although they can bounce back, they are just as likely to stay broken or stay solved. You need to have either a top prospect or some clearly high-end mid-line-up guys being the main parts of an Eichel trade. If they insist on some conditionals on top of that or want Gibson as a throw-in for hedging their bets on an Eichel injury, then that is different.

I just hope none of the quarters is a slug.

Please put on flame retardant. We would hate for you to go, especially that way.

Does speaking with the younger ones when they were handing out programs count? They spoke at length about wanting the family to be a Cup-winning dynasty.

Playing with the cats and helping our newest daughter adapt to a house with cats. Her previous family are moving into the military and can't bring her, so we adopted her so that they would know she was always being taken care of by another family that love her.

"Help run the team" and "sell the franchise" are miles away from each other. They are not selling the team. And remember: his daughters are the ones who really, really want the team. Now "Give an ownership stake to someone who knows something and can make the team look less like the Keystone Cops and more like the Bruins and Lightning" is much more likely. Maybe a small-ish stake, like Larry Quinn got from B. Thomas Golisano. But until we get something more concrete from the Pegulas' end, it is speculation and fan-fiction. And as a former writer of a lot of fan fiction, I can tell you that it is not flattering.

I think Thorny's and PromoTheRobot's posts have each other's answers. I would bet significant money that Don Granato has a lot of information from friends of his about players in this draft.

One person who was spectacularly good at this before he was kicked off of two boards for his truculence was @jame. He just nailed things like who will develop, how far, timelines, etc.

I can still hear the announcement of the goal in my head: 9:18 of the first overtime period. I remember Robert broke the shutout in game 6. And, of course, I remember Rico's goal with 12 seconds left. Aside: I am lucky enough to have a friend's audio tape of the third period of game 6 of the 1973 series against Montreal. In 1989, I was a the Clarion Writers' Workshop in Lansing Michigan (hey, my activity fee went to that, so why not?) where we were to write a brief short story around an exercise from Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction about an incident from our childhood which was meaningful to us and to examine why. So I picked the fans and the players for "Thank you, Sabres." I wrote a fictional story about who was the first person to yell that, how it caught on, and how the players reacted, and the post-game interviews. "First Buffalo goal scored by number 14, Rene Robert. Unassisted. Robert, unassisted. Time 11:41." "Second Buffalo goal score by number 7, Rick Martin. Assists to number 8, Jim Lorentz, and number 11, Gil Perreault. Martin, from Lorentz and Perreault. Time 19:48."

Your build up just reminded me of this...

It has pitted virtually the entire hockey world against the Sabres. If he is that Machiavellian and wants out that badly, it might have been his plan to engender pressure to force a panic trade where we got bupkes in return.

Being pedantic: 1. Hutton is not under contract after the end of the league year and there is no evidence that he is being brought back. 2. There is no evidence that they will just let Ullmark walk; indeed, I recall Adams saying keeping Ullmark was one of the top things on his list. Opinion: I was never going to be 100% comfortable with any of the the potential coaching hires. Then again, I felt funny about Lindy Ruff, Marv Levy, and Sean McDermott, so what do I know?

Holy Crap! Get well soon, Rene!

Let me quote Jeff Klein and Karl-Eric Reif from The Death of Hockey on how good Hasek was: "(Hasek makes) the often hilariously inept Buffalo Sabres masquerade as a contender because he bails them out of their numerous mistakes every night." They were right. Oh, they worked hard and were a borderline playoff team when they got above-average goaltending. But they were not contenders in any sense without Hasek. And I loved that team.

You snatched the words right off my keyboard. I thought immediately, "there's something already wrong with his neck."

Please don't do things like this. Every time I see this sarcastically rhetorical question or some variation of it, I am reminded of a similar question asked of Cornelius Bennett. I always want to answer the way he did.

@carpandean is our resident plot maker.

You forgot the verbosity of Dickens.

That's awesome. Thanks for the update.

Thanks a lot, Paul.

Yeah, I guess I was being over-exuberant. I need something to grab onto.

I am largely with you -- Just as I think the roster finally will give Jack and Sam the support they need to lead the team out of the wilderness, WHOOSH out the window they go.

4 of our main suitors are in the top 9. Even in this draft, 3 picks in the top 9 is a helluvalot better than 3 picks scattered throughout the first round (Columbus). If this board were running the draft, I would be very confident that we would come away with 3 very good players. With GMKA, I can't think of why it would be that much different. Beniers, Guenther, and Eklund anyone?