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GDT Montreal at Buffalo Sabres 7pm ET 10-25-2018


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11 minutes ago, LTS said:

Just because they get paid a ton of money to play the game it certainly does not mean they can just ignore the impacts certain players may have.

A case can be made that professional athletes are less capable of the general public of tolerating abrasive personalities.  Growing up, many of them were the best player on their teams and their coaches did whatever they could to keep the waters smooth so that the best player could be at their best.  At some level of competition they become just another member of the team, one who never learned how to deal with annoying people without the intervention of a coach.  Now consider that each team in every major sports league have several people that fit that description... I can see there being drama.

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16 minutes ago, LTS said:

@Randall Flagg- I appreciate all the research and work you put into things. 

Hear hear.

The night I got my points, I was mortified that you might leave and stay away for an extended period.  One of the great things about Sabrespace is that there is a mix of stats-ignorant slugs like myself, and stat-masters like you, and that you actually take the time to explain all the stats.  I made fun of the length of your posts, but I realize that stats can be complicated to explain.

If I ever abuse you again, just slap me.

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6 minutes ago, IKnowPhysics said:

Doohickie Unchained

AQb8owO.gif

I remember years ago he was called out for being a 'trowel' on the Canes message board.  So, everybody hates him ... ?

4 minutes ago, Doohickie said:

Hear hear.

The night I got my points, I was mortified that you might leave and stay away for an extended period.  One of the great things about Sabrespace is that there is a mix of stats-ignorant slugs like myself, and stat-masters like you, and that you actually take the time to explain all the stats.  I made fun of the length of your posts, but I realize that stats can be complicated to explain.

If I ever abuse you again, just slap me.

I take it that this was not in reply to LTS, but a love message directed to Randall, eh?

Edited by N S
fat fingers ...
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I think it is a mistake to blame Ryan O’Reilly for all the Sabres woes simply because they seem to have gotten better without him.

I think it is also a mistake to ignore the fact that Jason Botterill was so bound and determined to trade O’Reilly that he ultimately chose to accept the best package available, even if it didn’t seem to either net fair value, or properly address the team’s on-ice needs. Is Botterill foolish? Panicky? Or was he privy to information or observations that we were not?

Teams are complex systems that frequently exceed or fail to equal the sum of their parts because those parts do or don’t mesh for less-than-obvious reasons.

Our players obviously had some difficulty being honest with themselves and each other and management just as obviously took measured, yet dramatic steps to address that. Too little has been talked of the things that players allegedly got off their chests in the summer and the vulnerabilities that were apparently laid bare (I suspect Jack Eichel had more than a few nights of troubled self-reflection.) And I also suspect certain things had to change before the players got to the point where they were able to do that, and the purge was an integral part of that process.

It doesn’t mean it was O’Reilly’s fault the Sabres were bad; he’s obviously a gifted player and he was one of a dozen who were moved out.  It’s not about the individual pieces, it’s about the mix.

There is unmistakeable evidence that chemistry problems were an issue. And early returns (and don’t kid yourself, it’s early and this team still has a long way to go) are that the changes - taken as a whole - may have addressed that.

Edited by dudacek
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Something I wonder, to add to LTS's point, is if ROR was too brutally honest and potentially nitpicky. When you are a bad team, having trouble winning, the last thing you need is someone continuously bickering about everything you do. For all we know ROR's suggestions and critiques may of put more than a few players into a state of over-analysis of their play and thus making them play really slow.   

His comment about losing his love for the game made me curious if that is how he usually talks and that his scripted post-game comments were exactly that, scripted. While a great player, he may have constantly been looking to make everyone else more like him, and some players will never be able to play that way regardless of how hard they try. 

So I believe his presence in the locker room likely soured over the years. If you are having a rough time, would you really want to be told about it every morning when you go to practice? So while we don't want the players to live in a bubble, we also don't want to subject them to torture. Think of this scenario, we lose 4 or 5 straight then get a lucky win. In theory if ROR continued to harp they were lucky and lost their last 4/5, other players might become either angry, lose their hope, or at minimum lose the good feelings from a win. In the end a win is a win, regardless if it was lucky or not. What you want to do is ride that wave while improving along the way; critique is good but not if it literally sucks the life out of everything.

I think that might be part of the problem Flagg ends up with on the board; analytics are a great tool and very eye opening. However, being reminded about how bad we are over and over again can get on people's nerves. So what if ROR was Flagg on steroids? Nothing against you Flagg, you may not always be the most optimistic poster but you seem like a good guy and I do love reading your informative posts; but unlike a forum where I can choose to ignore negative things if I'm not up to dealing with reality in full; imagine being in a locker room where you can't?

That's just what I'm thinking.

 

I agree though with you Flagg, we didn't get enough for ROR on a player to player stand point.  

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I was always an admirer of ROR. I hated to see him traded but I have to believe it wasn't because of on ice play that caused his trade. Don't know what issues were but it seems whatever they were they felt it had to be done before another season started. Based on talent alone we didn't get back anything talent wise to match him.

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7 hours ago, Randall Flagg said:

I'm going to try this again without being obnoxious. 

There is absolutely a human element to hockey teams. These guys have to be together in close quarters for large stretches of time. I don't discount any of this, and never did. 

On the ice
Last season, the Sabres depth scoring was the worst in the league. If you want to see the exact numbers, I made a thread about it about six months ago, complete with charts. Behind the top six scoring forwards for every team in the league, we had the least amount of production. Our top six production was not great, but it was middling, and it wasn't bottom-5, and would have been in the mid-tier had Eichel stayed healthy. Furthermore, last season most underlying metrics and scoring rates for our top six forwards were the best they had ever been in those players' Sabres careers. But again, we started the year winning 3 of our first ten instead of six, because every time ROR or Jack wasn't on the ice, at least two of the bottom ~10 players in the entire league were, out of a sample size of probably 700. Right now, Erod-Mitts-Okposo and the checking line was switched out with a conglomerate of Matt Moulson, Seth Griffith, and flipping out Berglund on that line for Jordan Nolan. Pominville was with Eichel, but his legs were gone compared to now, and the other side was Zemgus or Kane, and not Skinner. Furthermore, the goaltending duo, despite being in front of a team that was in the top half of the league in allowing shots and high danger shots, was the second-worst tandem in the league, behind that of the team that added said starter as an upgrade to allowing the second most goals since the full-season lockout. 

Of course, I believe that this all adds up to what we saw last year. It more than explains everything, fully. Any sort of fallout in interviews (ROR), on-ice demeanor (Jack's slumped shoulders, Okie's Vanek-face recreation, Risto's frustrated just-clear-it-out attitude, etc) are typical of any team that's going through what this team did. It's, fallout. It isn't driving. What drives on-ice success is the product you put on the ice, along with some bounces, some timely hot streaks. 

Interviews, Problems off the ice
It has been very clear that this team had maybe 3, maybe more, people in the locker room going through some heavy personal sh*t last year. It's clear that number one in this category is Robin Lehner. Robin almost died. He was taking pills and a twelve pack to bed every night so he could sleep. Furthermore, as it relates to on-the-ice, it's an objective hockey fact that the only single player that can solely determine the outcome of a game with any real consistency on a standings-affecting-level is the goalie. Because of this hell that Robin had to endure, the team's performance suffered. And there absolutely had to be strain on these guys' shoulders in the locker room. They're worried about their friend. It sucks, and we're all glad Robin is getting better. This has all been documented and we have a pretty good understanding of it. Separately, if Robin had been in a better place, and had put out a season more in line with his previous one, the league-leading one goal losses might have been fewer, and the season wouldn't have been as bad. 

Similarly, apparently ROR has some demons, and Okposo was fighting his own as well. It's real, it's human. 

Of these three players, I recall two major interview tropes. Robin had a tendency of deflecting blame to the team in front of him (and he was, quite frankly, often correct). Ryan, since he got here and assumed a leadership role, would shoulder the blame himself for everything that went on the ice, and it's clear that it ate at him. It sucked to listen to, and posters here and elswhere would get very annoyed. "Why don't you do something to change it, Ryan, instead of saying the same things over and over again?" I don't think this is fair, but whatever. I never said anything when it was going on, because I don't care about what guys have to say when it's the mid-season grind and the team is so bad that they have to talk after loss after loss, and ultimately reduce to the same tropes to get the interview over with. 

I guess here's where I'm going - which of these players needed to be cast out of the locker room, considering all of their issues and how it affected their play on the ice? 

With all of what was going on in Ryan's head, something that literally hasn't gotten out to anybody unless dark feels like he can share (he has no obligation to), well, there's nothing well-defined here at all, aside from the "woe is me vortex" that Vogl shamelessly tweets about with a tone that is disgusting for somebody who pretends to be all sympathetic to mental issues.

If we can't get these details, then I think some of the speculation that goes on here is ridiculous, which is why I'm using the phrasing that has ruffled feathers, and I'll try to stop. 

Furthermore, NHL teams carry 23 skaters. I would like to see evidence that
a.) There isn't somebody dealing with things as bad as ROR or worse on 95% of hockey teams, because just in my dealings with humans and reading rudimentary mental health statistics, that seems overwhelmingly likely among a population as driven as these humans are
b.) These players consistently are a barrier to on-ice success in ways that on-ice talent and lack-of-talent can't explain, and
c.) how it ties into the following:

The team getting a better attitude sans ROR
Say we make every single move this offseason, except for the ROR trade. But we still add Berglund, because there are quotes going back a full year which indicate Armstrong was actively calling people trying to unload the contract and that nobody could bite. Even if we didn't, we're down one roster player (Berglund and Sobotka, one of them upgraded to an elite member of the two-way-forward category). What about this year's success wouldn't have been replicated? In ten games, this team has created five goals 5v5 that had nothing to do with Jack or Jeff, a guy who was already here, and a guy who would have been added anyway. Of those goals, I can picture one that has integral involvement of a player that wasn't here last year, Sheary's yesterday, and Sheary himself was brought in before ROR was shipped out. Most importantly, our goaltending performance (the upgrade we made in the one position that can consistently affect standings, and a direct addressing of a mental issue that we DO know tangible things about, issues that can be directly tied to last season's results) has been rock solid compared to anything we've seen in years. 

And yes, the humans are having more fun. Are they having more fun and thus the fun is driving wins? Or are the additions of good personalities also direct upgrades to positions that were tangible reasons we were so bad last year? Because they sure as hell have been playing better than the laundry list of worst-players-in-the-league which got real ice time for us all season. As a result of actually winning some of these close games, of course things are a lot more fun. So why wouldn't this have 
a.) helped O'Reilly, who seemed to have fun and had no rumblings of this stuff during Colorado's fun season in 13-14
b.) still existed if ROR was here because of things that still have yet to be well-defined without giving generic locker room quotes from a key player on bad teams


Why would this effect have been muted? Would these guys have been less infectiously positive, eyeing ROR in the corner of the room solemnly? Why? Would their efforts in the corners be less, their on-ice vision clouded, just knowing that down there on the end of the bench sits the bearded vegan? Show to me that this is the case, and show me it's unique to that player and this locker room. Show me why players who DON'T come out with their problems (ROR hasn't) yet still exist in every locker room in this league, don't have the same thing happen to their teams. What's the mechanism. I want to see it described. This is not me deferring to stats and only metrics. This isn't a "stats versus eye test" thing. It's a challenge to a claim that I find weak, ill-defined, vaguely referenced. 

Furthermore, they believe in themselves, but didn't before because of ROR's sadness and its affect on the locker room. "Last year's team would have lost games they were trailing." Please differentiate the ways they would have lost as they pertain to attitude versus the fact that they were an objectively worse team last year too. And then please address this:
2015-16
In St. Louis, we trailed most of the game to a much better team but forced an OT point, ROR scored the tying goal and was our best player.
At home against LA, ROR assisted on our tying regulation goal in the first and won the game in OT on a stupendous individual effort, falling over as he does it
The next night was one of those classic stinkers against Detroit, until a ridiculous individual effort, throwing dekeyser off his shoulder and driving to the net, tied it with less than 5 to go in the 3rd, leading to a win
A week later, trailing 3-1 in Boston, Ryan kick starts the comeback with 3 3rd period points and the Sabres win
Later in Carolina, a beautiful assist to Kane in the dying minutes of the third to tie the game before the Sabs pull it out on the ensuing momentum swing with grumpy Larry (on a Skinner giveaway)
2016-17
Stealing the show in Jack's first game back, helping us to the desperately needed win to kick-start the push we had to being within 4 points of a playoff spot in February
Connor McDavid comes to the house, gives the Oilers a lead in the final seconds, and ROR creates the game-tying, and then game-winning goal, both happening within 2 minutes of the end of the 3rd and the start of OT
days later, like I mentioned, being down 2-0 to LA and ROR making Kopitar and Doughty his b*tch, kick-starting the comeback that gave us the win
Home against Winnipeg, again right in front of me, tying the game in the first and then creating the game-winning goal in the 3rd after being down 3-1
ANOTHER one of those dreadful Detroit games where we look worse than we should, until ROR ties it late in the third and assists on the OT winner
Immediately followed by another third period tying goal and OT winning goal, both assisted by, you guessed it, this time in Montreal
A goal and an assist in the 3rd period, including on the tying marker late, after being down to SJ 4-1 at home - we won in OT
The game-winning goal to cap off a 3 game win streak against a great Blues team in our last breath of hope
The tying goal for our grittiest win in the season, 2-1 in the shootout at ANA
2017-18
2 points in the 4-1 comeback on the road in Boston, including a ridiculous OT winner
2 points in the 4-1 comeback that fell just short in Vegas, an OTL
An assist on the OT-winner to cap off another 3-1 comeback in NJ
3rd period goal and assist to ice the red-hot lightning in a surprising 5-3 win
4 points including 3 in the third in that awesome comeback in Nashville, to beat them 7-4 on the road
Assisting and creating the game-tying goal in the 3rd on the road in Ottawa to get a win
 

This is directly addressed at the "ROR's attitude being gone lets the team believe they can win" sentiment. You must explain to me why this amount of the same type of thing happened, battling back from behind with ROR, why he drove all of these happenings, and why we should have expected more from a team with the talent level these teams had, how much more we should have expected, but just didn't get, and tie the reason we didn't get that amount to ROR being a downer. And how many we thus should expect this year, and why the two comeback wins they have so far (whopping two eh) couldn't have happened and were driven, not by things that happen on the ice when we can roll lines without getting caved now, but by the better attitude that couldn't have existed with ROR's presence in the locker room, even after clearing out Lehner. 

F*ck stats. That's not what I'm doing here. I'm trying to see why that can be a real mechanism for the things we see on the ice, and I won't believe it if the talk remains as vague as it's been at its most fleshed-out points. It doesn't actually make sense if you put reading glasses on. 

 

Having read it doesn't change what I asked. Why can't it be a little of both? 

And for someone who thinks this whole thing is a joke, you sure are taking it a little too seriously.

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4 hours ago, WildCard said:

Btw watch Eichel before Dahlin's pass. He tells Dahlin where to go

I think it's also possible that Dahlin had made the decision to pass to KO before Eichel made the suggestion- he just did it while looking the other way to draw the defender. Either way, so nice to see the two of them on the same page!

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6 hours ago, IKnowPhysics said:

Haaaaa. Welcome to the club finally.  You're not the first and you won't be the last.  I have two strikes and a brief ban from a couple years back because nfreeman didn't like that neither the word dick nor compound words with dick as the root word were being caught by the profanity filter.

 

ProTip tho: if Flagg is really stepping on your nuts, put him on ignore.  No shame in that.  Then when you opt into reading his posts, it's nobody's fault but your own.  You'll realize that and respond negatively muuuccch less.

Disclosure: Flagg is not on my ignore list.

Exactly.

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9 hours ago, LGR4GM said:

Something was up with the dressing room and his quiet leadership wasn't fixing it.

I agree with you on the return. I don't think Tage is currently the prospect we should have targeted. 

We will always miss his scoring but I think it gives other players the opportunity to take up that scoring. I don't believe in his leadership. 

I doubt Tage is the prospect we targeted. We can keep saying they should’ve asked for Thomas/Kyrou or others but St. Louis likely refused.

This doesn’t mean Botts made the right move or a good trade, but it’s useless to say we should’ve targeted someone else. We probably did.

The package they got and the timing tells me O’Reilly was definitely getting moved one way or the other. I don’t know what that says about him. I don’t think we’ll ever have the information we need to judge O’Reilly’s impact here.

We’ll know enough to judge what we have and that’s all I’m focusing on from here on out.

Edited by Hoss
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19 hours ago, WildCard said:

Btw watch Eichel before Dahlin's pass. He tells Dahlin where to go

We are very lucky that we're going to be able to see these two collaborate for a long time.

17 hours ago, sweetlou said:

Has anyone mentioned the fact that Scandella failed to clear the puck on Domi's first goal, and that he was was lazy getting back on the would be icing on Armia's goal??

The game recap that I read yesterday morning (don't remember where) was pretty hard on Scandella for both of these screwups.

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On 10/26/2018 at 3:43 PM, Doohickie said:

Yeah, I thought that would be obvious.  Everyone knows I can't stand LTS.  It's almost time to put him on ignore.

You know, I keep trying to put LTS on ignore too and the damn software won't let me do it.  I sent a message to SDS but he just laughed at me.  I'm not sure why.  This place is toxic.

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This topic is OLD. A NEW topic should be started unless there is a VERY SPECIFIC REASON to revive this one.

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