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Botterill and any other forward not named Skinner


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7 hours ago, PASabreFan said:

Lazar. I'm not even sure I would include Skinner in your list.

I wouldn't, because of his contract. For the amount of money he got paid, you cannot consider this a good move. 

3 hours ago, LabattBlue said:

The usage of Skinner this season after handing him a monster contract is mind boggling.  Clearly there is a massive disconnect between the GM and the HC.

I think the disconnect might be more with Skinner and the coach. Skinner has not been good this year, plays selfishly, takes dumb penalties, pouts, has a temper he can't seem to control, to me he behaves like a diva and perhaps he's the proverbial "uncoachable."  Hard to know, but I suspect Krueger and him aren't on the same page so to speak. 

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2 hours ago, Randall Flagg said:

Lazar wasn't out there either? And Skinner was the guy that came out when the goalie pulled. It is well known that Skinner is a bad power play player, and before that power play, after Ottawa scored the third goal and we needed a goal, the winger to replace Zemgus on Jack's line was...Jeff Skinner.

I repeat my initial point. Adding Lazar and then questioning that Skinner is on a list of useful NHL additions is pretty sketchy logic. Lazar has been solid for 20 games, Skinner has triple that time period of ELITE NHL goal scoring for us. Outside of those stretches, Skinner has been bad, and Lazar has been a non-NHLer. 

The exercise was to list players that are useful. There was no requirement that everyone listed be equally useful. Of course Curtis Lazar isn't a top-unit power play guy. But he's been more useful to this team this season than Skinner has, and has done so while having 1/10th of Skinner's skill. I don't really care if Skinner is on the second, third or fourth line, scoring 11 goals all season is totally unacceptable. I love this idea that Skinner can't be effective unless he's on Eichel's hip. What if Jack is lost for a season one of these years? Is Jeff also done for the year? Ridiculous.

Also, Skinner's been disappointing since racking up a bunch of goals and points in the first half of 2018-19, securing his big payday. Maybe RaKru is onto what the guy is all about.

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3 hours ago, Randall Flagg said:

To be fair, I think a lot of last season's stagnation had to do with that obscene ankle tweak he had. I know he kept playing, but he was a different player at that point, and the goal-less streak before it was purely unlucky (he was still generating a large amount of chances and hitting goalposts like crazy) while after, he simply wasn't playing the same level of hockey. 

Of course, he doesn't have that excuse for the last 25 games or so of this season, after another hot start. 

I have changed my mind on this 8 times, but if you want Skinner to play like 9 million dollars, he will have to be next to the guy that helped him earn that contract. He won't score at a level worthy of the money if he doesn't play with Jack. I don't care if we keep him away in favor of Olofsson, but I will try to ignore Skinner's cap hit for the resulting decline in production that will bring him

For me, it's not about not earning the $9. Never expected him to.

It's more about not being the 30-35 goal, 55-point player his track record showed he was, a track record that had nothing to do with Eichel.

He's pacing for 20 goals and 40 points, acts like a sideshow too often, and hasn't made the clutch plays.

Edited by dudacek
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5 hours ago, Getpucksdeep said:

Yes MoJo.  He's good.  

On the 4th line.  He is way over his head where he is being used right now.

But I would cite him and Joker as the only 2 adds to the team I like under Botterill, aside from Skinner.

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, dudacek said:

For me, it's not about not earning the $9. Never expected him to.

It's more about not being the 30-35 goal, 55-point player his track record showed he was, a track record that had nothing to do with Eichel.

He's pacing for 20 goals and 40 points, acts like a sideshow too often, and hasn't made the clutch plays.

With just the slightest spark, he can boost that pace significantly.  I don't think that's all that unrealistic.  Whatever happens, I think we've seen his ceiling and his floor in consecutive season.  Whether it's being on Eichel's wing or just finding more appropriate scoring line talent that gets him closer to that ceiling, they absolutely need to address it.  The latter is a no brainer no matter which line he skates on.

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6 minutes ago, shrader said:

With just the slightest spark, he can boost that pace significantly.  I don't think that's all that unrealistic.  Whatever happens, I think we've seen his ceiling and his floor in consecutive season.  Whether it's being on Eichel's wing or just finding more appropriate scoring line talent that gets him closer to that ceiling, they absolutely need to address it.  The latter is a no brainer no matter which line he skates on.

We probably wouldn't even be having this conversation right now if Botterill had bothered to pay the price it cost to bring in anyone better than Sobotka to play on the second line at any point between last February and today. 

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Here is something to think about regarding the forward depth on this team....Girgensons this year....

1 of only 4 players to suit up for all 50 games so far

5th on the entire team in goals.

Only 4 forwards on this team are 'plus' players (qualifying players how have played at least half the games). He is one of them.

He is 4th in Even strength goals. ahead of players like...Olofsson, Vesey, Sheary, Johanson, Okposo, and every D-man. Basically, he is behind ONLY Eichel, Sam, and Skinner

 

The way he has played the past few years..the fact he is pretty much an NHL 4th liner...and what he is getting paid....he should be ranking a lot lower in those categories.

 

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11 hours ago, mjd1001 said:

Here is something to think about regarding the forward depth on this team....Girgensons this year....

1 of only 4 players to suit up for all 50 games so far

5th on the entire team in goals.

Only 4 forwards on this team are 'plus' players (qualifying players how have played at least half the games). He is one of them.

He is 4th in Even strength goals. ahead of players like...Olofsson, Vesey, Sheary, Johanson, Okposo, and every D-man. Basically, he is behind ONLY Eichel, Sam, and Skinner

 

The way he has played the past few years..the fact he is pretty much an NHL 4th liner...and what he is getting paid....he should be ranking a lot lower in those categories.

 

Girgensons is having the second best season of his career.

He has as many goal as guys this board has pined for like Ryan O'Reilly, Boone Jenner, Robert Thomas, Ryan Dzingel, and Kevin Fiala.

He would sit just outside the top 50 in the league in goals for LWs, even though nhl.com still lists him as a centre.

And this is being trotted out as an example of a bad thing?

I guess I'm not surprised

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42 minutes ago, dudacek said:

Girgensons is having the second best season of his career.

He has as many goal as guys this board has pined for like Ryan O'Reilly, Boone Jenner, Robert Thomas, Ryan Dzingel, and Kevin Fiala.

He would sit just outside the top 50 in the league in goals for LWs, even though nhl.com still lists him as a centre.

And this is being trotted out as an example of a bad thing?

I guess I'm not surprised

On it's own it's a good thing.  The problem is that so few others on the team are doing the same.  Even at his best, Girgensons should probably be topping out at around 8th on the team in goals, not 5th.

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21 hours ago, PASabreFan said:

The exercise was to list players that are useful. There was no requirement that everyone listed be equally useful. Of course Curtis Lazar isn't a top-unit power play guy. But he's been more useful to this team this season than Skinner has, and has done so while having 1/10th of Skinner's skill. I don't really care if Skinner is on the second, third or fourth line, scoring 11 goals all season is totally unacceptable. I love this idea that Skinner can't be effective unless he's on Eichel's hip. What if Jack is lost for a season one of these years? Is Jeff also done for the year? Ridiculous.

Also, Skinner's been disappointing since racking up a bunch of goals and points in the first half of 2018-19, securing his big payday. Maybe RaKru is onto what the guy is all about.

Right, and you said you were skeptical about putting Skinner on the list of useful NHLers, while adding Lazar without any such qualifications. That's nonsense, as Lazar has a shorter track record of decent Sabres (and NHL) play than Skinner does elite goal scoring play...for the Sabres, much less over the course of five years, in which he is a top 5-10 scorer in the entire NHL. Otherwise, Lazar has largely been awful unless he's in the AHL. It's one thing to appreciate the honest effort a player like Lazar brings, while doing what his coach asks, it's another to, in the same sentence, distribute "usefulness" the way you did

I don't think you're wrong to be upset with how Skinner has played of late. he isn't helpful off the puck, and he's taking way too many selfish penalties. When his scoring slumps, he becomes an elephant in the room because of these tendancies, and his contract. But what I elaborated in the previous paragraph is what I took issue with. 

And I don't think it's honest to paint his previous season that way. His first 57 games last year he had 36 goals. Three games later, he had an injury that had many of us thinking he was done for the year, and his game immediately took a very visible hit. He then went a really bad stretch of production for 18 games. His skating looked better by the end of it, and early on, he was still cranking pucks off the goal post and generating shots and chances at the rates he did all season long. In fact, his shots per game increased by about 6% in that down period. That isn't evidence of much, but I don't think you're providing a lot of evidence for the storyline you're trying to craft either - guy who's just cashing checks now that he secured them. I think you're presenting limited, selective information about large stretches of time to make it seem like something it's not. 

Nobody is saying they're happy that a 9 mil guy is going to wind up scoring only 20 goals while not playing with the guy who got him to 40, but everyone understood that this is kinda how it works with Jeff, a guy who was just as likely to score in the 20s as the 30s in Carolina, but fans understood who Jeff is, and how he won't score 30 or 40 reliably if held away from our only good playmaker all season long, and so we were happy to bite the contract bullet rather than let Jeff get away given the state of the team Jason has meticulously put together aside from him. We were never going to be able to trust Jeff for 9 mil production away from the top line, it's not who he is, and it's our GMs fault that our roster is in such disarray that we couldn't afford to let Jeff slip away and he and his agent knew that, while pointing out that only like 2 players have more even strength goals than he does over the last handful of seasons. 

Also, for 15 or 20 games this season, with Mojo and Sobotka, Skinner was good. He didn't stop playing after game 40 of last year. 



 

 

4 hours ago, dudacek said:

Girgensons is having the second best season of his career.

He has as many goal as guys this board has pined for like Ryan O'Reilly, Boone Jenner, Robert Thomas, Ryan Dzingel, and Kevin Fiala.

He would sit just outside the top 50 in the league in goals for LWs, even though nhl.com still lists him as a centre.

And this is being trotted out as an example of a bad thing?

I guess I'm not surprised

Can't wait for the eighth offseason in a row of "we need to dump Larry and Zemgus because they suck and every team in the world has better 4th liners" ignoring the fact that the first 5 guys we acquire who are better than those two will immediately fill out the 2nd and 3rd lines before even beginning to displace those two 

Edited by Randall Flagg
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7 hours ago, dudacek said:

Girgensons is having the second best season of his career.

He has as many goal as guys this board has pined for like Ryan O'Reilly, Boone Jenner, Robert Thomas, Ryan Dzingel, and Kevin Fiala.

He would sit just outside the top 50 in the league in goals for LWs, even though nhl.com still lists him as a centre.

And this is being trotted out as an example of a bad thing?

I guess I'm not surprised

If that is what you are getting out of the post, then you are missing the point. Heck, I even referenced the whole point of the post was about the performance of the depth of the forwards in the first line. The point of the whole post points out that it is not a bad thing he is having his '2nd best season', but rather there are a lot of other forwards making a lot more money and having much higher offensive expectations that are doing worse.

So yes, this is 'being trotted out as an example of a bad thing' because the point is about most other forward on this team, using Zemgus only for comparison sake.

You do not want a guy to be 5th on your team in goals...4th in even strength goals, and one of the few 'plus' forwards on your team when he is a career 10 goal, 23 point per 82 game guy.

Edited by mjd1001
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2 hours ago, Randall Flagg said:

Right, and you said you were skeptical about putting Skinner on the list of useful NHLers, while adding Lazar without any such qualifications. That's nonsense, as Lazar has a shorter track record of decent Sabres (and NHL) play than Skinner does elite goal scoring play...for the Sabres, much less over the course of five years, in which he is a top 5-10 scorer in the entire NHL. Otherwise, Lazar has largely been awful unless he's in the AHL. It's one thing to appreciate the honest effort a player like Lazar brings, while doing what his coach asks, it's another to, in the same sentence, distribute "usefulness" the way you did

Lazar is doing what's expected of him. Skinner is not. If Jeff isn't scoring, he's of very little use to this team. I'm taking a smaller picture approach. Has Skinner been a useful NHL player? Yes.

2 hours ago, Randall Flagg said:

And I don't think it's honest to paint his previous season that way. His first 57 games last year he had 36 goals. Three games later, he had an injury that had many of us thinking he was done for the year, and his game immediately took a very visible hit. He then went a really bad stretch of production for 18 games. His skating looked better by the end of it, and early on, he was still cranking pucks off the goal post and generating shots and chances at the rates he did all season long. In fact, his shots per game increased by about 6% in that down period. That isn't evidence of much, but I don't think you're providing a lot of evidence for the storyline you're trying to craft either - guy who's just cashing checks now that he secured them. I think you're presenting limited, selective information about large stretches of time to make it seem like something it's not.

Don't you believe in "contract years"? Why is Sam on pace to have a career year for goals?

It's a good thing I'm not an NHL GM. I'd never sign players who just went crazy in their contract years. Says a lot about their character.

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1 hour ago, PASabreFan said:

Lazar is doing what's expected of him. Skinner is not. If Jeff isn't scoring, he's of very little use to this team. I'm taking a smaller picture approach. Has Skinner been a useful NHL player? Yes.

Don't you believe in "contract years"? Why is Sam on pace to have a career year for goals?

It's a good thing I'm not an NHL GM. I'd never sign players who just went crazy in their contract years. Says a lot about their character.

Because he has improved every single year since he entered the league?

Edited by SwampD
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I'd love to know if Botterill even sought out the Skinner trade, or if Carolina called and said "hey, Skinner wants to play with Eichel."

I'm not convinced he made some big savvy move with that trade.

 

EDIT: And no, he's brought nothing in but garbage.

Edited by OhMyDahlin
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9 hours ago, dudacek said:

Girgensons is having the second best season of his career.

He has as many goal as guys this board has pined for like Ryan O'Reilly, Boone Jenner, Robert Thomas, Ryan Dzingel, and Kevin Fiala.

He would sit just outside the top 50 in the league in goals for LWs, even though nhl.com still lists him as a centre.

And this is being trotted out as an example of a bad thing?

I guess I'm not surprised

Did you really just compare Zemgus Girgensons to Ryan O'Reilly?

With O'Reilly this team is in the playoff hunt...without Girgensons this team still sucks.

On 1/29/2020 at 3:37 PM, PerreaultForever said:

I wouldn't, because of his contract. For the amount of money he got paid, you cannot consider this a good move. 

I think the disconnect might be more with Skinner and the coach. Skinner has not been good this year, plays selfishly, takes dumb penalties, pouts, has a temper he can't seem to control, to me he behaves like a diva and perhaps he's the proverbial "uncoachable."  Hard to know, but I suspect Krueger and him aren't on the same page so to speak. 

So he's everything Carolina fans said he is? Go figure.

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1 hour ago, PASabreFan said:

Lazar is doing what's expected of him. Skinner is not. If Jeff isn't scoring, he's of very little use to this team. I'm taking a smaller picture approach. Has Skinner been a useful NHL player? Yes.

There is something to be said about Skinner's situation here in Buffalo. Whether it be his line mates or his inability to drive a line by itself is not for me to say, he's had less than a full season here yet to prove that and I'm not sure what exactly excelled him in Carolina.

What I do know is this, as Jack Eichel's left wing last season, he scored 40+ goals. And while that is one season, a contract season no less, wroth of evidence, I have 0 doubt he'd have more goals than he does now being married to Eichel again.

This fan base begged, literally begged to get Eichel help. Well, they did, and now, that help has played less than what? 2 games with Eichel this season? 6 games maybe over all when taking in to account shift change overs and what not?

There is something to be said about coaching, about coaching strategy and player usage. While yes, Olofsson was excelling as well there on LW with Eichel, it was the power play that brought Olofsson's numbers up early on. The more proven commodity on Jack's LW is Skinner.

In the final analysis, we need a 2C, and a solid one at that. Assets will have to be turned over to get it. How much will it cost? Well, Tom Webster and I had a brief touch on the subject just the other day, IMHO a Dylan Larkin type player. That, my friend, is going to be pricey. But remember this, Eichel is entering those prime years, AAV and term on contract will be critical to make the push forward, using Dylan Larkin and the current rebuild of the Red Wings as the example yet again, Larkin is 23 at 6.1 mil for another 3 seasons. What would you be willing to spend to get him? What would a rebuilding team like Detroit be looking for, 1st rd picks and prospects with high value? This is merely the example, there are I am sure, others. But regardless, it's the price we are looking at combined with the situation. The Sabres are in get in contention now mode in my opinion, waiting for more picks to develop and trying to achieve that Briere type lightning in a bottle scenario isn't exactly a full press court way to try and get to that contention level, again, IMHO.

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Skinner scored 40 goals last season.  He is not having a good season, but he also has played with a combination of Johansson, Larsson at C, and Sheary, Sobotka on the opposite wing.  That’s not a recipe for offensive fireworks.

He is notably streaky though, so hopefully he gets hot soon here.

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2 hours ago, PASabreFan said:

Lazar is doing what's expected of him. Skinner is not. If Jeff isn't scoring, he's of very little use to this team. I'm taking a smaller picture approach. Has Skinner been a useful NHL player? Yes.

Don't you believe in "contract years"? Why is Sam on pace to have a career year for goals?

It's a good thing I'm not an NHL GM. I'd never sign players who just went crazy in their contract years. Says a lot about their character.

I guess you're just using a sliding scale where I wouldn't find it, er, useful, then, given what the purpose of the thread was. 

Skinner's 37 goal season wasn't in a contract year. He played that season with Victor Rask as his center. Out-producing that season by 3 goals next to Jack Eichel doesn't teach me about Jeff Skinner's character, no. 

The case you make provides zero details about the nature of what is a long, grueling season, in which his team around him started a plunge in line with their previous season's last place finish before he even got there, and next season's bulk, particularly the fact that Skinner's elite goal scoring went a solid ~27 games, or ~2 months, after the free fall began. Skinner 40 goals contract year as a basis, or the entire platform of judgment, for his character is a weak enough case that I wouldn't even address it had it not been made by PASabrefan, a man of considerable influence and intellect. (Not snark, genuine)

Edited by Randall Flagg
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