Archie Lee

Ok. Thursday morning. Sun came up (or, I assume it will). Beat Pittsburgh Friday and we have 20points in 20 games. Improve a bit and get 22-23 points in games 21-40. Get Thompson and Quinn back, sort out the goaltending and get 24-25 points in games 41-60. Make a meaningful deadline trade (dare to dream) and get 26-27 points in games 61-80. Go into the final 2 games with 93-95 points and grab a wildcard. The negative is we are not where we want to be. The positive is that we just had a decent road trip after a bad two games against Pit/Bos. In the light of day there are positives to build on.

I feel a little bit like this tonight. It was close to being a near perfect road game. But, they just couldn't get the one last play they needed to seal the win, whether that be a 4th goal, a big defensive play or a save. So much of that does seem to relate to experience. I'm not making excuses. It seems the best we can hope for is that they hang in there until New Year's, don't fall too far behind, get Thompson and Quinn back, maybe sort out who the #1 goalie is by then, and then get on a role in the 2nd half. 😬

The average over the past 8 full seasons is 3.75, which is 23%. Those still seem like long odds, but keep in mind that every year there are a number of teams that are pretty much considered locks to make the playoffs before the season starts. The Sabres, if they are going to be in the race, are going to be in competition with Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, NYI, Ottawa and Detroit for a WC spot. Regardless, we will need to get on a run at some point.

There were 3 teams that did it last year: Florida, Minnesota and Edmonton. I have not looked it up beyond last year, but just saw a post elsewhere that there have been 30 teams that did it in the last 8 full NHL seasons.

It was an unintentional omission on my part, but I don’t see how the word “fully” changes the context. Are you saying he can partially develop in Junior but not “fully”? My view is that he can fully develop going back to junior for another year (I’m not predicting he will or won’t, I’m only stating that he can). The evidence for this is a long list of NHL stars who played their 19 yr old season in Junior. There is not a single player you can point to who went back to junior for their 19 year old season who then failed to develop, “fully” or otherwise, specifically because they went back to junior.

You did say that “he can only develop playing stronger competition which he won’t in the WHL”. This is just wrong. If your opinion is that the best place for his development at this time is the AHL then that is fair, though subjective. There is zero evidence that a player like Savoie will have his development stunted by another year of Junior hockey.

I respect your view. It would be more supportable if you provided a list of players who failed to fully develop specifically because they returned to junior for their 19 year old season. Savoie can, and most likely will, spend significant time in Rochester after this season.

Did I miss something on this? Was this mentioned in an article or commentary somewhere?

Not every game will be like that. Remember, Savoie had such a slow start last year that he did not get an invite to Team Canada’s World Jr tryout in Dec. Also, in the WHL final last year his team lost 4-1 and he had only 2 assists in the 5 games. He will play at the World Juniors this year. He will get another year going through the grind of a long season with lots of travel. He will get a chance to learn how to sustain production through a long playoff run. He will get another year of being a team’s top player and leader, getting top PP and PK time. There is so much that he can learn playing Jr hockey. Bedard wasn’t too good for the WHL last year. Savoie is not too good for Jr. hockey.

We will get a glimpse of this team's psyche on Sunday. The Blackhawks are not a good team. They play today in Nashville. The Sabres should be well-rested. MoneyPuck's simulator has the Sabres winning last night's game nearly 70% of the time. They did play a good road game against a good team. They had a couple defensive lapses, one terrible goal against (a once a season kind of goal), and they were at times too fancy on offence. In a lot of ways, last night was an encouraging game. In the context of a good team having a good season, last night would be the sort of game where you conclude you just need to clean up a couple things and keep doing what you are doing. Unfortunately, we are not currently a good team having a good season. In the context of a disappointing start for a team with high expectations, overlaid on a record-long playoff drought, last night just seems like another sign that they are never going to get it right. The Sabres should take positives from last night. They should fix a few problem areas, go into Chicago and win going away, and then build on these two games.

I wouldn’t go this far. It’s hard for me to understand though how the penalty for what Benson did should be both a 2 min penalty and getting punched in the head 2-3 times. Either police these with the refs calling a penalty or with frontier justice. But if Benson gets a penalty for a love tap on their goalie then there had to be a penalty to someone on the Jets for the group retribution.

It’s a valid concern. If it were easy to coach up a D-structure the way coaches such as Montgomery and Cassidy do, then every coach would do it. When Bylsma was our coach, they tried to play a sound defensive game. They always seemed to look passive though. Yet, there is nothing passive about playing good defence.

There is nothing about structurally sound defensive hockey that equates to playing without pace or intensity. Perhaps these are growing pains as we learn we can do both.

Ha, ha.

There is a narrative that Olofsson scores 3rd period goals in 5-1 games. I have no evidence to support this isn't true, but I've yet to see a post from anyone that includes supporting evidence either. Olofsson can be streaky player. He had 9 points in the first 8 games of 21-22, before getting injured. Last year there was a 12 game stretch in January where he scored 10 goals and added an assist. The record shows that there were many close games in those stretches. We are offensively challenged at the present. Olofsson looks like he might be getting into gear. We might be wise to lean in to him rather than away from him, over the next couple of weeks.

The good news is that UPL and Comrie have been objectively good so far this year. I'm not down on Levi at all, but lost in the less than exciting start for him and the team is that our other goalies have been good. Hopefully Comrie is healthy soon and he and UPL continue to play well.

We are going to find out what Granato and this group of players are made of. I realize that something that happened almost exactly 30 years ago has questionable relevance. But, the current scenario reminds me of November 1993. The Sabres were coming off of a year where they were a high-scoring and exciting team. In 92-93 they finished 2 games above .500. As exciting as that team was and as much as we fans generally adore many of the players from that era, they finished 15th out of 24 teams; they likely miss the playoffs in a modern day 32 team league and MayDay never happens. Lafontaine and Fuhr are injured early in the 93-94 season. Mogilny, also due to injury, is not quite the same as the prior year. In late November 1993, two things happen. 1.) Overnight the Sabres change their style of play to a more conservative defensive game. 2.). Hasek I’m near certain we don’t have a Hasek. But Granato has said for two years that defence is easier to coach than offence. Here we are. Our best offensive player is injured (maybe our two best if Tuch is also out long-term). The goalie we were relying on is maybe not quite ready. We are headed out on the road. Time to see if we can adjust how we play and if a player or two will step up and play at an all star level.

I just don't recall it happening in-season. I understand that if you have an assistant coach or AHL coach under contract and they get an opportunity in the off-season to interview for a job that represents a promotion, that it is bad form to block them from that opportunity. I've just never seen a guy leave a position with one organization for such an opportunity in the middle of the season. Usually when an NHL head coach is on the hot seat and people are talking about who might replace him if he is fired, the discussion swirls around the veteran guys who currently aren't working (Gallant, Boudreau, etc.), or the assistants on the NHL team, or the head coach of the NHL team's minor league affiliate. I have no issue with it; it kind of opens up the options for mid-season head coaching changes.

Yes, if things that are not going well continue to not go well then it could be a rough year.

Fair enough. My post is in the context of: if we haven't waived Olofsson to this point then we probably aren't going to and, therefore, we are better to try and find a way to get him scoring than to put him in positions where we are working against his strengths. I would not call Olofsson a floater. He is a one-dimensional player who, at best, is a neutral on-ice presence when he is not producing offensively. He didn't score 17 goals at 5v5 last year by floating.

Am I missing something? Is it normal for an NHL team to hire the head coach of another team's AHL affiliate mid-season?

First, it is still way too early in the year to panic about anything. The Sabres are a strong week or two away from being 3rd in the conference. Hanging around true .500 (not NHL .500) for 40-60 games keeps you in the race. Until we have a truly bad stretch of 3 losses or more in a row, there just isn't anything to panic about. I realize we all wanted a surge like what New Jersey had last year. It might still happen, but it is more likely that we are going to be haning around a WC spot for most of the year and that it will come down to the last few games. We can fret about the bottom 6 production, but the reality is that our bottom 6 has produced goals at only slightly below the average for Eastern Conference teams. Most teams get the vast majority of their goals from their top 6. We are no different. The one thing we don't have at the moment is a player who is having a great offensive season. Look at the top teams in the East right now and most have one or two players who are having strong offensive years (Pastrnak, Panarin, Larkin, Reinhart, Hughes, Bratt, Kucherov, Point). Our top scorer is Skinner who has 13 points in 15 games. Those are good Skinner numbers, but it means we are not getting what we expect to be getting from Thompson and others. Again though, it is early. We are on pace to allow 40+ fewer goals than a year ago. That is a positive. I stand by earlier comments; spreading out offensive production can result in diluting it. Greenway has been one of our best players this season. Playing him consistently with either Thompson or Mittelstadt, however, might be serving to limit the offensive production of two of our top scorers while depriving the bottom 6 of a player who can thrive in that role. We need to get Cozens and Olofsson going. Olofsson worked well with Thompson in the past (That 70's line, along with Asplund) but does not seem to work with Skinner. How about: Skinner/Mitts/Tuch Cozens/Thompson/Olofsson Greenway/Krebs/Peterka Girgs/Jost/Okposo What we have seemed to be doing all year is take the 3-4 guys who are struggling the most and put them together on the 3rd line and hope that they can find something. They don't and then the 3rd period comes along and we are rolling 3 lines including an exhausted Girgs and Okposo. The recipe hasn't worked. Time to give Cozens and Olofsson and Krebs an extended stretch with players who compliment their skills.

Krebs had a 90% xgf, 80% Fenwick, 70% Corsi in his 6 minutes last night (per Money Puck). On the season he is 4th on the team at D-zone shift start % while being one of only 7 players on the team with a corsi of 50% or better. Not saying he can’t be better, but he isn’t going to generate much offensively playing where he is in the lineup and for the minutes he plays. He is not hurting us defensively.

This is also why it is fine for Benson and Savoie to just go back to junior. The idea that they have nothing to prove or learn there is just not accurate. Both ran out of gas a bit in the WHL final last year. They can both get physically stronger and more mature and play for Canada at the World Juniors and have another deep playoff run with what appears to be a good team (hopefully their coach issues are resolved). There is lots of development that can occur with another year of junior hockey. The other factor, I think, is that you diminish a player's value when you have them playing a level too high. Nobody is down on Benson or Savoie, but if they are tearing up the WHL right now the hockey world in general has a different view than what they have when they see a 19 year old in the NHL playing less than 4 minutes or an 18 year old injured perhaps because they are not ready for the physical rigor of NHL play. If the Sabres are going to trade one or two of their high-end assets at some point (and I'm not sure they will) then the best way for them to retain their value is to be dominant players at lower levels as opposed to struggling players in the NHL. To bring this back to Mitts, if he had gone back to college one more year and then spent a year in Rochester before coming to the NHL, a lot of the negative vibes around his development never occur.

It's true. The Oilers don't have the VGK depth. When I watched that game I remember thinking that the Oilers were a lock to be a playoff team and here they are playing an afternoon game in Columbus, a non-conference rival, and they are pushing McDavid and Draisaitl in the final half of the 3rd period like the game was do or die. It seemed like a great opportunity to give some other players a chance to step-up. I don't mean that they shouldn't have had McDavid or Draisaitl on the ice at the end of the game, but it was odd to me that leading up to that moment they chose to almost entirely lean on their big two and deny the team a more collective stake in the outcome.