Robviously

Why not just let Tuel play Week 1 if Manuel isn't healthy yet? (Or even if he is, since starting against the Patriots with very limited practice time doesn't seem like a great idea.) There's very little chance Tuel has any future as an NFL starter, but we already know Leinart sucks. I'd tell Tuel that he lucked into a once in a lifetime chance thanks to injuries and see what happens. You never know.

This is excellent news.

I bolded a line at the top about how *I'm* supposedly trying to portray him as Tony Montana. Vince Gilligan (the creator and show runner) has said it's a show about "Mr. Chips becoming Scarface (i.e. Tony Montana)." So that's not me. That's literally what the show is about. He's Tony Montana now. The second bolded part (that you bolded) is exactly the mental gymnastics I already talked about. He justifies his own horrible behavior -- and his rationale is pretty agile -- but that's all he's doing. Tony Montana did the same thing. After telling Michelle Pfiefer that he wanted to have kids (because in his own mind, he's ready for a family somehow) and getting blown off, he gives this speech. That, along with his grumbling about how lawyers and bankers steal more than he ever could, is the same posturing. Tony Montana wasn't complex either. He was a bad guy who did bad things and tried to justify it. Walter White is basically the same guy now. He's a monster who does bad things and will justify it when questioned. He's brilliant and clever about it, but at his core he's just trying to survive and move up ("I'm in the empire business."). Moreover, he seems to have zero guilt over everyone caught in his path of destruction. The plane crash is ancient history to him (when is the last time that came up?). He didn't worry about setting off a bomb in a nursing home. (He didn't know where Gus would confront Tio. It could have been in a common area with others around.) He got over that kid they killed in the desert last year almost immediately -- and then he kept working with the guy who shot him instead of Jesse. No guilt. And he's not conflicted. He's just determined. I'm not sure where you're seeing his guilt or "underlying humanity." That's not to say he's not a great character. You don't have to be complex to be a great character. Tony Montana and Walter White are both great characters. In fact, I'd say the best villains are NOT complex. The Joker wasn't. Anton Chigurth (from No Country for Old Men) wasn't. Hans Gruber wasn't ("You want money? What kind of terrorists are you?" "...who said we were terrorists?").

Adapting and manipulating every situation and person is what Walt does. It's ALL he does. But he's not complex. He's a guy who initially wanted to do something bad for a good reason. Then he did a little more bad. Then a little more. Because there was a lot of "bad" to him all along and he gave into it over the course of about three seasons and has pretty much been a monster since the end of S3. It's a masterful performance by Cranston but the character isn't very complex. He's not struggling with who he is or what he should be doing. He used to do some mental gymnastics to justify everything, but that stopped a couple seasons ago. Breaking Bad is a study in the banality of evil -- how once you knowingly do the wrong thing, it becomes easier and easier to move in that direction. And where that eventually gets you. The book (and movie) A Simple Plan covers this amazingly well too. It's a man sliding into hell and justifying it as he goes.

I actually don't think Walt is all that complex. He's morphed into a monster over the course of the show and his decisions have hurt/killed everyone he's come in contact with. The plot is complex. Walt isn't.

My memories of that 2nd intermission are still so vivid. There are only a handful of moments in my life where I can remember exactly how I felt. That is one of them.

Would Cheektowaga get its own team?

If the Death Star had a sports bar.....and if they were all Sabres fans.......

I wonder how much of this board was born after that band had their one big hit.

+1

The Sabres have too many defensemen. Again. Regier probably won't do anything to address this. Again.

No. Presumptive would be assuming that because he has Spezza's bad qualities, he must also have his good qualities. Stating the possibility that he can have one without the other is the *opposite* of presumptive.

We need one franchise guy to be the one we build everything around. It could be Grigorenko, it might even be Girgensons (based on how strong he came on last year), or it might be someone we still have to draft if we really tank this coming year.

Oh great, another thread with advanced statistics.

You can have all of Jason Spezza's bad qualities without having all (or any) of his good qualities.

I still hope it was the mono. "All of Jason Spezza's bad qualities" is not a compliment.

From June 22nd of last year: http://blogs.thescor...ail-grigorenko/ From June 11th, 2012 http://www.hockeyprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1333 Just in case anyone thought I was conjuring this stuff out of thin air.

As I said above, I don't mind that he wasn't ready for the NHL as an 18 year old. I *do* mind that he had attitude problems since those same problems scared off 11 teams in front of us and are the reason he fell to us in the first place. That's not good at all, especially when we've all been pinning our hopes on this guy as our stud no.1 center of the future. I've explicitly said a few times in this thread that it's NOT "all over for him." So maybe people are upset about what I'm NOT typing? Everyone is just freaked out because we all want him to be the "true no.1 center" we've spent YEARS dreaming about, and I'm pointing out -- correctly -- that the early returns aren't that great. Does he still have the most potential of anyone in our system? Yep. Is it a foregone conclusion that he'll reach that potential? Far from it. The Sabres still need a franchise player. I guess it could be Grigorenko, but I still don't feel comfortable putting that label on anyone we have. This is why I wanted us to trade up so badly yesterday.

I'm only going on what there is to go on. Hamilton and White (separately) said the team wasn't thrilled with his attitude and the team even moved his locker in hopes that that could help. That's actually far more alarming than the fact that he wasn't ready for the NHL as an 18 year old. Nothing that happened in the last 12 months made me think he's going to be a stud no.1 center. He still could be. But this was not an encouraging first season after being drafted.

Who said it was? I said it wasn't good. Does anyone actually dispute that? Or is the game just to point out that it could have been even worse?

How do you know what the problem with his game had to do with? Per Paul Hamilton and Jeremy White, the Sabres weren't thrilled with his attitude last year and moved his locker so that he was next to Ott, hoping the Ott would influence him in a positive way. Also, I'm not sure what the difference is between "head case" and "full fledged head case" but the fact that you're even trying to draw a distinction is a bad sign. He dropped to us in the draft because other teams didn't like his attitude. It turned out his attitude the Sabres didn't love last year either. That's not good.

Grigorenko was drafted with two bullet points: 1. He's an elite talent. 2. He can be a head case. In the last 12 months he only lived up to one of those, and it wasn't the good one. Maybe he'll still be a point per game no.1 center someday, but so far he's way behind Yakupov and Galchenyuk, the guys he was supposedly comparable to last year. (It didn't help that the Sabres did a terrible job with him last year, but asking this team to both identify the right players and develop them into stars seems far fetched at this point.)

If I'm listening to Howard Simon's show, I always end up catching at least the first segment of this thing. And it's always ridiculous and stupid. Kevin Sylvester does fascinate me, though, for how shamelessly he can spin for the team. He really missed his calling. He would be spectacular as a government official or bureaucrat in a totalitarian regime.

Concept of Grigorenko.

First minute of the show. Andrew Peters: "If Seth MacKinnon [sic] had fallen to 8th, there would still be people complaining." Off to a great start. Immediately defensive about the team, making stuff up about what people "would complain" about, and screwing up the facts.