Robviously

My big problem with Bennett is that I keep seeing him projected as a LW and we need centers. That's not really the end of the world, but it'd be just about perfect if we were getting Draisaitl at center too.

This can never happen, if only because it would be too wonderful. That's just science.

Minnesota (Hudson Fasching) is on ESPN U at 7:30pm ET tonight against St. Cloud State.

No. First thing's first, make sure we finish dead last. After that, the Isles can finish anywhere from 2nd to 5th. And I wouldn't mind them letting us have their pick this year, which seems a lot more likely if they're 4th or 5th overall.

Remember like 2 months ago when someone started a thread about the tank being "complete"? THIS is what completing a tank looks like. And it's f***ing ugly.

The Amerks were actually really good for a few weeks there before we stole all their best players due to injuries in Buffalo.

Brutal.

This was inevitable (obviously) and something that had been on Buffalo's collective mind for over a decade. And yet when my phone buzzed with this last hour, one of my first thoughts was "I'm not ready." Or maybe Buffalo isn't ready. Can you really say "too soon" when a 95 year old man passes away? RIP Ralph. Thanks for making Buffalo an NFL city.

You're disgusting.

Which sounds about right when you're 30th in the league. Sabres fans should take everything they see -- good and bad -- for the rest of the season with a grain of salt.

Nice rebuttal. Because that's definitely what I was saying.... :doh:

It's not just Hodgson's line mates; it's the entire team. How do you put up numbers when your team never has the puck? Not only does our defense not make the first pass going the other way, they can't even get the puck out of their own zone. No one is going to put up numbers on the team we have this year. It's important to judge players only based on a single game that fits your narrative, especially when that game was played against the worst team in the league when they were using their AHL goalie. Seems legit.

Nah, it all seemed pretty legit to me. If you're going to have a safe zone, obviously you wouldn't want guards or lookouts or walls or defenses of any kind. Just signs telling people where to go. I'm confident the characters will spend the rest of their lives there, getting married, having kids, and eating barbecue. They're ending the series on an upbeat note. (I'm actually excited to see how they're going to make Terminus turn out to be a complete hell on earth.) BTW, Terminus is the series' third "safe zone": The Farm, The Prison, and now Terminus. And these places all seem fairly close together. We got our first look at the prison in the episode where the farm burned down, and the characters found the signs for Terminus right after the prison was destroyed. This makes me wonder how many mini safe zones there must be in this universe just sprinkled throughout rural America. Hundreds? Thousands?

That part doesn't bother me. Pretty much every schlubby dude or nerdy guy on TV has a ridiculously attractive girl on his arm. And, like you said, you'd expect some random hook-ups in the apocalypse anyway. It's more about how insanely shallow their relationship is, and how the two actors have no chemistry at all together. If each of them didn't regularly declare "I LOVE my wife!" or "I LOVE my husband!", you wouldn't get that from them. It's like the writers have no idea how to portray two adults in love so they just keep having the two characters declare their love for each other in expository dialogue. Do the writers have no actual relationships to draw from? Have these people ever been in love? Because they sorta use "LOVE" as a magic rationale to get the characters to do ANYTHING. Think of all the terrible decisions each of them made this season "because Love." They both separately decided to enter a pitch black tunnel in the middle of a zombie apocalypse because it might help them find the other one. Completely inexplicable in Maggie's case and basically inexplicable in Glenn's case (yes, he knew she went down that tunnel but now it's clearly completely full of zombies so she's probably not still in there waiting for him). Earlier in the episode, Glenn decided to sprint away from his group for no reason. When Sasha found Maggie a few episodes ago, she was sleeping by herself in the street in an abandoned town, waiting to be attacked I guess. WTF? At this point you could summarize both characters as follows: "Glenn/Maggie is married to Maggie/Glenn and makes terrible decisions because of this." On a better show, this level of co-dependence would just get them killed instead of reuniting them.

And still more believable than Glenn and Maggie.

It's so simple. Why didn't we think of this before?

One week after probably their best episode ever, TWD went right back to total crap tonight. 1. Is Eugene basically Rain Man in the comics too or is that a TV show thing? It just comes off cheesy and I don't understand the other characters actually following him. 2. The arrival at Terminus could have had a ton of tension except they picked an incredibly dopey song to play over the whole sequence. 3. Is there anything about Glen that isn't ridiculous by now? His crazy sprint to start the show made me roll my eyes. His decision to enter a tunnel full of zombies made no sense. And he now regularly somehow survives situations he really shouldn't.

Not the faintest idea? What does common sense tell you? Elite players skip the AHL entirely. Notable Sabres players developed through the AHL that played really well in their first years include Vanek, Roy, Stafford, Ennis, Gerbe, Adam, Kassian, McNabb, Foligno, MacArthur, Butler, and Adam. So playing well in the AHL in your first year there doesn't guarantee anything in the NHL but a lot of our draftees that made it to the NHL did well in the AHL very quickly. The one example I could find of a guy taking a while is Pominville, who only had 34 points in 73 games in his first AHL season. He definitely became a good NHL player. In any event, I think being concerned about a rough first AHL season is reasonable. As far as his Finland numbers over the last three years, it was tough to feel strongly about those since I never got to see him play in those games and, more importantly, I've never seen a single SM-liiga game in my life. I honestly wouldn't know what to ask for from a guy developing in Finland's top league.

Nope. The difference is that Girgensons started in the AHL as an 18 year old and was clearly their best player by the end of last season. (And that's with suffering a pretty awful concussion from a cheap shot in the middle of last season.) Armia started in the AHL this year as a 20 year old after logging two extra years developing in the top Finnish league. And I don't think he's been talked about as their best player ever.

I'll be tempted to trade Myers if a blockbuster deal comes along but I'm definitely hesitant because he's the one guy in the organization right now that can completely change this team. We're a totally different team when he's on his game and I mostly liked him this year. If he ever gets back to being the force of nature he was in his first year, we're suddenly most of the way back to the playoffs.

Armia is looking more and more like a long shot to me. How many guys struggle in their first season in the AHL and later turn out to be good NHL players? Grigorenko is different. He struggled in the NHL as an 18 and 19 year old, but so would almost anyone. If all we had to go on were his QMJHL numbers and his great performance in the WJC this year, we'd all be pretty excited about him. Give him a full season in the AHL next year and see what he can do. The Sabres did a terrible job with him by treating him like a marketing gimmick instead of a prospect to develop; I'm hoping they can still right that ship. As for all the initial hype we all bought into about him being our future no.1 center, let's just pretend that never happened.

Wow, busted glass. Now this game will drag on even longer. :(

I love that the Sabres' commercial for "tickets on sale" includes a clip of the legendary Butt Goal against Phoenix.

Which opportunities?

Wow, that actually looks really great.