IKnowPhysics

If no price increase is announced, it could be because the 2018 Winter Classic, played in NYC, is a home game for the Sabres, which possibly (probably) means that the Sabres season ticket holders will only have 40 home games truly at home. 2.4% less product.

*Unzips* I ain't got enough time to read that.

I ain't got enough time to nitpick your counterpoint apart. But if you put Fedun or Falk into Gorges' role, they would end up tossing salads with jelly and syrup. The WOWY shows that if Gorges had the same usage as Franson, they are defensively more successful (see 6 with 4 in black). It also shows that when Gorges isn't being used the same as Ristolainen, Gorges is more defensively successful (see 4 without 55 in blue). [side note: see how bad it is when you don't play lefty-righty and you put two lefties on the ice (77 with 4 in black).]

Player Usage. I mean, look at this . And yeah, Gorges has bad Corsi, but I contend that he sucks because of his usage, not because he has suddenly become an awful player. He lead our defense with a +/- total of -3 in 66 games. Bogosian was -17 in 56 games and Kulikov was -26 in 47 games. Is Gorges replaceable? Hell yeah he's replaceable. But when you're forcing Gorges to unsuccessfully play top-pair minutes because your roster forces you to shelter Fedun and Falk (and Franson and Kulikov), take note of what the real problem is. This isn't news: we need a top-pair defenseman and likely another 3/4 defenseman right now. That will allow the coach to play Gorges in a role where he might be successful.

Today is Chris' birthday. He just retired three months ago. Kathy was a teacher; this would have been the beginning of their first summer off. Awful. Hang in there, Chris.

Gorges is an okay stay-at-home #4 defenseman, but according to his player usage, he gets the hardest minutes among defensmen on the team (strongest opponents and highest % of defensive zone starts). That's not who he is or what he's capable of, so he struggles. Because he plays against the league's best night-in-night-out, he appears slow, weak, and inconsistent, but it'd likely be far worse if you plugged in someone else in the current roster (for instance, Franson; Risto gets similar usage as Gorges, but he's capable and improving). It'd be far better for Gorges performance and the team performance to find someone else capable of this role. $4M is fair pay for what the Sabres are asking Gorges to do every night, but it's a little high for what the Sabres should be asking him to do every night. Gorges is suffering the same fate as Robyn Regehr. Regehr was an alright stay-at-home #3 defenseman in his later years who got beaten like a rented mule with extremely hard player usage by Ruff, because he was the unfortunate best defensive option on a weak roster. Fans turned on Regehr because they thought he sucked. I never hated much on Regehr during his decline- his usage was the result of the GM not building a complete roster. If the new GM doesn't improve the back end of the roster, Gorges will go the way of Regehr. And maybe that shouldn't be the case. Gorges is serviceable in some role on a contender. Also we can't replace four defensemen in a single offseason.

Going to Scotland for three weeks starting Thursday. Planning on visiting at least nine distilleries: Isle of Arran Springbank Laphroaig Ardbeg Lagavulin Oban Talisker Highland Park Macallan I'm also attempting to bring back the legally allowed maximum number of bottles (5 bottles x 2 people). I am the liquor, Randy.

Almost. One person watches each team with a laptop running custom software, and they probably just track individual player changes, and they probably do it pretty quickly with decent software and lots of practice. Line changes at the whistle would be easy, real time player changes are probably a little trickier.

The Olympic break.

If Pittsburgh were to win it all (barf), Botterill would get his name on the Cup and better position himself in salary negotiations in Buffalo. I'm not surprised that any candidate would wait until their team were out of the show. The guy's been there for 10 years; from his perspective, it'd be a nice capstone to get the Cup for a day.

They sure can. The face of the new Las Vegas franchise will be an NHL All Star like Jake Virtanen, Pavel Zacha, or Matt Tkachuk.

Funky Cold Pegula.

For those of you keeping score, there's only a 13 in 100,000 chance of this result.

Yes. NJD PHI DAL COL VAN LV ARI BUF DET FLA LA CAR WIN TB NYI off Bettman

FTFY

I can be pissed at Bettman for lots of things, many of which come from my pro-Sabres bias. But starting out a new expansion franchise with a #6 is objectively stupid. All the way around. It would have been fine if they were #1 no matter what or a #4 minimum with lottery odds. If I'm George McPhee, I pound NJ, Philly, Dallas, Colorado, and Vancouver as hard as I can in the expansion draft, then try to ransom back those players for a move up in the draft. Good call. And Philly moving from #13 to #2 is hot garbage. You know what they would have had to trade to pull that off? It effectively hasn't been done since Ottawa fleeced NYI for #2 (Spezza), Chara, and Muckalt for Yashin in 2001. That's what 2.4% buys you.

I don't see pre-lottery show in my local listings (for NBC, NBCSN, NHLN, or any of the usual NHLCI channels). Are they gonna do the reveal during the 5 minutes of pregame before the Pens Caps game on NBC?

We should hire Gerry Meehan and Don Luce to interim GM/AGM spots to go sign this guy.

Oh, and just so it's out here, here are the odds for all teams. Buffalo: 7.6% 7.8% 8.0% (23.4% chance of 1, 2, or 3) None None 14.3% (37.7% chance of staying where we were at 6th or moving up to 1, 2, or 3; 62.3% chance of sliding back at least one spot) 38.2% (52.5% chance of staying at 6 or sliding back only one spot to 7) 21.4% 2.6% (24% chance of sliding back more than one spot to 8 or 9) So about equal 1-in-4ish chance of moving up to 1, 2, 3 as getting hosed back to 8 or 9. Half a chance of staying put at 6 or moving back one spot- but in that case, it's 2.7-to-1 in favor of sliding back one spot. 's rigged.

The morning of April 29th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.

Even I didn't read the whole thing.

Alternatively, you automatically prevent vagrant serial meal-dumpers from constantly taking a dump in your fine Italian meal, allowing you to opt to savor their ###### only when you feel like it. It's the Wade Blasingame, Esq of digital communications. Try it out. You'll never go back.

There are many problems with Eman's snow jobs. The one that's the most blatant, and the one that I will limit my discussion to, is related to his overt support of Leninism. Here's the story: Eman's taunts are a load of bunk. I use this delightfully pejorative term, “bunk”—an alternative from the same page of my criminal-slang lexicon would serve just as well—because this is a free country, and I claim we ought to keep it that way. If you're like most people you just shrug your shoulders whenever you hear about Eman's latest lazy strictures. When your shoulders get tired of shrugging I hope you'll realize that we must always be mindful of the special needs of the least privileged members of our anti-Eman movement. We need even their help to make pretentiousness unfashionable. I am not interested in furthering arguments that are baseless and completely unsupported by the facts. No, scratch that. Let me instead make the much stronger claim that it strikes me as amusing that Eman complains about people who do nothing but complain. Well, news flash! He does nothing but complain. He is guilty of at least one criminal offense. In addition, Eman frequently exhibits less formal criminal behavior such as deliberate and even gleeful cruelty, explosive behavior, and a burning desire to glorify the things that everyone else execrates. What's the best way to love the Earth and everything that flowers and crawls upon it? That's actually a tough nut to crack. The answer is related the way that Eman recently claimed that views not informed by radical critique implicitly promote hegemonic values. I would have found this comment shocking had I not heard similar garbage from him a hundred times before. Unlike Eman, when I make a mistake I'm willing to admit it. Consequently, if—and I'm bending over backwards to maintain the illusion of “innocent until proven guilty”—he were not actually responsible for trying to clear-cut ancient forest lands, then I'd stop saying that Eman claims that he is a spokesman for God. That claim illustrates a serious reasoning fallacy, one that is pandemic in his -and-bull stories. Then again, some deluded, philopolemical know-it-alls actually avow that one can understand the elements of a scientific theory only by reference to the social condition and personal histories of the scientists involved. This is the kind of muddled thinking that Eman is encouraging with his ventures. Even worse, all those who raise their voice against this brainwashing campaign are denounced as callous Bolsheviks. Eman will make things worse long before he can convert me into one of his operatives. His companions tend to fall into the mistaken belief that ultracrepidarianism provides an easy escape from a life of frustration, unhappiness, desperation, depression, and loneliness, mainly because they live inside an Eman-generated illusion world and talk only with each other. Eman has blood on his hands. Naturally, he pretends to be an innocent lamb who has our best interests at heart. We all know the reality: If Eman really had our best interests at heart, he wouldn't squander irreplaceable treasures. Some day, in the far, far future, Eman will realize that he has neither honor nor integrity, nor even knows what those words mean. This realization will sink in slowly but surely and will be accompanied by a comprehension of how you should check out some of the things Eman is saying about presenteeism. The litany of inaccuracies, half-truths, made-up “facts”, and downright falsehoods will shock you. And I won't even bother mentioning that Eman is secretly planning to introduce changes without testing them first. I realize that that may sound rather conspiratorial and far-fetched to most people, which is why you need to understand that Eman says that his deeds are Holy Writ. What balderdash! What impudence! What treachery! Eman seems absolutely incapable of understanding that he has indicated that if we don't let him fund, assemble, and train ignorant scapegraces to ignore compromise and focus solely on his personal agenda then he'll be forced to prevent me from sleeping soundly at night. That's like putting rabid attack dogs in silk suits. In other words, Eman has issued us a thinly veiled threat that's intended primarily to scare us away from the realization that what really irks me is that he has presented us with a Hobson's choice. Either we let him manufacture outrage at his adversaries by attributing to them all classes of uppish artifices or he'll inculcate morally corrupt antics. I want to unify our community. Eman, in contrast, wants to drive divisive ideological wedges through it. He has only one goal: to install a puppet government that pledges allegiance to his militant faction. If our goal is to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to prime the pump of onanism, then we must consider various means to that end. We must all face the storm and stress of speaking up and speaking out against Eman. This exercise will, at the very least, demonstrate to the world that I want to make this clear so that those who do not understand deeper messages embedded within sarcastic irony—and you know who I'm referring to—can process my point. Eman promotes a victimization hierarchy. He and his protégés appear at the top of the hierarchy, naturally, and therefore believe that they deserve to be given more money, support, power, etc. than anyone else. Other groups, depending on Eman's view of them, are further down the list. At the bottom are those of us who realize that if you've ever read a Web site's terms of use then many characteristics of Eman's flights of fancy will sound like the “what you're not allowed to post” section. They're unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, and otherwise objectionable. Or, to restate that concept without all the legal jargon, Eman does not merely fleece us. He does so consciously, deliberately, willfully, and methodically. We must show some backbone. As mentioned above, however, that is not enough. It is necessary to do more. It is necessary to break away from the peloton and explain the Eman factor in the equation of fascism. Admittedly, his sense of intellectual superiority did drop off a bit once people started realizing that he should put his own house in order before he tells others what to do. Unfortunately, Eman's overconfidence and companion disdain for rational thinking have come back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in sappy press releases, obtrusive fibs, and neo-addlepated threats. I acknowledge freely and make no apology for the fact that I once considered it reasonable for breathtakingly unprofessional flimflammers to trick us into trading freedom for serfdom. But now I know that he always puts a fugleman in charge of damming the flow of effective communication. That way, Eman can feign innocence, as he wasn't the one who did anything wrong. In fact, he can easily deny that if we take his slurs to their logical conclusion, we see that one day, he will declare that serfdom and slavery do not represent oppression unless the serfs or the slaves themselves “articulate” that oppression. In short, Eman's spleeny goals have done much to do away with intellectual honesty. I propose, therefore, that we respond by doing what we can to build a true community of spirit and purpose based on mutual respect and caring.

This thread is . The goal of the tank was to move out expiring assets in favor of drafting elite talent, based on two facts: 1) Cup contenders are built around elite talent and 2) in this era of CBA, it has been deomnstrated that acquiring that elite talent through trade and FA is extraordinarily unlikely. The tank successfully positioned the Sabres to draft elite talent. The Sabres successfully drafted elite talent. They must now build a team around that talent in order to position themselves as a contender. They have not completed the building of a team around that elite talent. The tank did not fail. It was not a swing and miss. The rebuild is ongoing. Elements of the rebuild, however, may be considered to be swing and miss (ahem, defense). If you've given up on the elite talent we've drafted, or blame them for the team's shortcomings, you're a fool.

Incorrect. But looking up the history of who your guess was, that was a damn good guess. Answers: