Porous Five Hole

We have a new Mr. Softy

For me, the team is making strides defensively and Kane doesn’t do anything to help that.

I didn’t realize you posted this and started a thread on it. I think it deserves its own callout.

We all knew this team needed to tighten up defensively. When your stud leads the way, that’s a huge help. Setting the example!

When McDavid signs his extension, it’ll be for the cost that would equal both Tage & Cozens. Buffalo is one of the few teams who could pull this off.

I’ll play fantasy hockey for a minute. How about Mitts, Kulich, Savoie, and a first for Drai? The Oilers would might be better off spreading 13M around the roster and four first round pieces helps to kickstart a mini rebuild.

TOOL in ROC

Maybe so, but improving the PK was the primary objective. So far, so good.

Ya just can’t have two turnovers and expect to win. The Bills offense has averaged 20 pts a week for five weeks now. That isn’t good enough with a patchwork defense battling through key injuries. Anyone can rightfully flame the soft cover/zone scheme the Bills D runs, but the offense needs to pick up the slack where so many key pieces are missing. I guess that’s too much to ask right now.

and there were some very vocal posters who wanted this guy on the team.

Jessie is in the finals of the season ending WTA. It’s the tennis version of the playoffs. Only the top ranked eight players get invited. Then round robin down to four to set up a semifinals. Pegula throttled Coco in the semis. Over 2MM to the winner 🤑 https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/11/05/sport/coco-gauff-jessica-pegula-wta-finals-spt-intl/index.html

My fandom needs this team to get it to the garage

Bad news for the flying Lindy’s

Terry is cheap lol 😜

We can agree to disagree. This team isn’t good enough at defense. Power is still developing and isn’t playing well in his own zone. Muel was playing hurt and now he’s officially hurt. Joki has been fine I guess for a 4/5. Clifton played 25 min last night! Anybody want to sign up for that again? Dahlin and 12-15 minutes of EJ cannot do it by themselves. Also, if you don’t think we have a problem in the crease, I just don’t know what to tell you.

Please hear me out. This isn’t on the head coach so much as it is on the roster construction specific to goaltending & defense. People don’t like to hear it, because yeah, there weren’t a lot of great options out there this summer, but Buffalo did nothing significant to address it. That does not fall on Granato. Rolling with Levi as G1 was also not his decision to make. I’d rather see KA go out there and try to make some adjustments now before we call for Donny’s head.

The forward group is kind of a mess right now. Rousek and Biro are in Buffalo. Captain Michael Mersch is out probably long-term with an upper body injury suffered on Wednesday, Brendan Warren is out into December with a broken jaw, Linus Weissbach may be ready sometime this month, and Aleksandr Kisakov and Brett Murray are considered shorter-term injuries.

I’m not passionate about this debate, but 1) I believe you can’t flame the GM for a lack of moves if you cannot express a jealousy over a logical move the guy didn’t make. And 2) the rebuild started when Eichel was traded, and that was 1.5 seasons ago. Can’t we agree that it was a seminal moment and the vacuum should start there? What move did you see that the Sabres brass missed and should have made? It is important to articulate this because otherwise we can just be mad at our GM for not trading for Connor McDavid every year. That’s not logical.

You can’t just assume the opposite either.

That’s what I was thinking. Show up flying tomorrow and get a win. That’s a winning week.

Adding Tage to PK1 would explain the reduction in 5 on 5 ice time. I don’t recall him doing much of that last year. I have to imagine meatballs sat Tage down and said, “you’re getting paid 7M no matter what, so I don’t care about your goal total.” I’m glad Tage bought in to varying his usage.

Some of the team is going to regress from last year’s career high personal stats and Cozey is a likely one for this to happen. 38 points the season before to 68 points last season—with no pressure to produce. A lot is different and he’s still super young. I would love to have Cozey’s baseline to be 31G, 37A, 68 pts, but that’s probably closer to his ceiling than his floor with his toolset (at this point in his career). He has plenty of time and room to grow that ceiling tho!

That would have been the ticket! At least my low brow attempt at humor was weirdly tied to the Sabres.

Well, how do you?

Hey, we finally goalie’d somebody!