Who is your least favorite non-Pegula since the Pegulas took over?

[Thorny]

Also while we are at it, we should filter out “hindsight is 20/20” on this board as a defence for anyone in a management position. They are literally to be judged on results, not “making a reasonable decision when viewed through the prism of the moment”. 

They are paid to make decisions that work. That’s it. 

It’s slightly ironic that the argument was used in a post touting how one knew all along that Krueger was bad. 

Yet we shouldn’t expect the professional General Manager of the NHL team to have equal foresight to that of a fan? You have tremendous hockey knowledge @GASabresIUFAN but I think it’s reasonable to expect similar standards from the person being paid handsomely. 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Thorny

[IKnowPhysics]

2 minutes ago, Thorny said:

Also while we are at it, we should filter out “hindsight is 20/20” on this board as a defence for anyone in a management position. They are literally to be judged on results, not “making a reasonable decision when viewed through the prism of the moment”

 

Should mangement decisions be weighed on outcome? Absolutely yes.

Should the information available at the time of the decision be considered? Also yes.

 

Management is human and shouldn't be expected to be infallible or have a crystal ball.  However, they should also be expected to perceive and correct their mistakes.

 

One can take a "winning is all that matters" approach, and even most GMs might publicly agree with it, but if one doesn't take the time to at least understand why decisions were made, it becomes difficult to parse who is truly to blame and solve the problem, even if the GM "accepts all responsibility."

[GASabresIUFAN]

15 minutes ago, Thorny said:

“They didn’t know how badly he sucked when he was hired”. 

Same logic would apply to LaFontaine re: Murray 

True enough.  My dislike of Tim Murray stems from what he did not that he was hired.   

I don't dislike LaFontaine, TP should have never put him in charge of the team. Like KA he wasn't qualified for the job.  Patty is smart enough to know that and he should brought in more experienced people to help him make the correct GM choice.  Tim Murray was qualified to get a shot at being a GM, but a rookie unqualified President should have never hired a rookie GM.  We needed an experienced GM to start the rebuild and Patty was smart enough to know this.  My guess is he didn't want the experienced underling to usurp his authority, which happened anyway with the rookie GM.

I have never said that Jbot didn't make mistakes, he did, huge ones.  Mistakes that I agreed could get him fired and would have been reasonable to fire him over. My defense of Jbot is that he is the only leader this organization has had since TP took over that had a reasonable plan to rebuild the team and I felt that he deserved a 4th year to realize his plan. Nothing more nothing less.  Patty's plan didn't exist.  TM's plan didn't make any sense.  What plan does KA have?  Buying goals?  

[Thorny]

3 minutes ago, IKnowPhysics said:

 

Should mangement decisions be weighed on outcome? Absolutely yes.

Should the information available at the time of the decision be considered? Also yes.

 

Management is human and shouldn't be expected to be infallible or have a crystal ball.  However, they should also be expected to perceive and correct their mistakes.

 

One can take a "winning is all that matters" approach, and even most GMs might publicly agree with it, but if one doesn't take the time to at least understand why decisions were made, it becomes difficult to parse who is truly to blame and solve the problem, even if the GM "accepts all responsibility."

When there are only 32 coveted jobs to be had, the bar goes up. To the point of needing to be judged based on results - every other GM is just as human - the fact of the matter is you don’t even need to be GOOD to make the playoffs. You only need to be mediocre. Better than the bad GMS. When the results are to the extreme we have seen, yes, only the results should matter. 

It’s a bit of a straw man anyways. It’s like I said when you gave KA a B+ for his job evaluation so far - I do factor in the excuses but they cannot factor in more so than as a deterrent to firing. 

He did a terrible job. Objectively. But due to some factors laid out, I’m not calling for his head. 

[GASabresIUFAN]

32 minutes ago, Thorny said:

Also while we are at it, we should filter out “hindsight is 20/20” on this board as a defence for anyone in a management position. They are literally to be judged on results, not “making a reasonable decision when viewed through the prism of the moment”. 

They are paid to make decisions that work. That’s it. 

It’s slightly ironic that the argument was used in a post touting how one knew all along that Krueger was bad. 

Yet we shouldn’t expect the professional General Manager of the NHL team to have equal foresight to that of a fan? You have tremendous hockey knowledge @GASabresIUFAN but I think it’s reasonable to expect similar standards from the person being paid handsomely. 

My opinion is my opinion.  Sadly, I just happened to get it right.  That said I went and re-read some of the articles about the hire and some of the posts on the hire thread and the vast majority of posters here, media types, and hockey pros thought is was a courageous and good hire at the time.   

Ultimately, what's done is done.  Time to move forward.  Sadly I don't think KA and RK are the guys to move forward with.  

I sort of have a crap threshold with administrators and coaches.  TIm Murray tipped the scale when he acquired Lehner and broke the camel when he trade McNabb and 2 2nds for magic beans.  Jbot was getting there as well.  Had he remained GM and didn't replace ROR this past off-season I would have been done with him also.  I gave KA a solid B I believe for his off-season work, but he has already tipped the scales for me by saying he has the authority to fire RK and still not doing it.  That's completely unacceptable.  RK lost me when I realized how inept his system was at generating offense despite the proven talent on the team.  

Edited March 15, 2021 by GASabresIUFAN

[Thorny]

10 minutes ago, GASabresIUFAN said:

True enough.  My dislike of Tim Murray stems from what he did not that he was hired.   

I don't dislike LaFontaine, TP should have never put him in charge of the team. Like KA he wasn't qualified for the job.  Patty is smart enough to know that and he should brought in more experienced people to help him make the correct GM choice.  Tim Murray was qualified to get a shot at being a GM, but a rookie unqualified President should have never hired a rookie GM.  We needed an experienced GM to start the rebuild and Patty was smart enough to know this.  My guess is he didn't want the experienced underling to usurp his authority, which happened anyway with the rookie GM.

I have never said that Jbot didn't make mistakes, he did, huge ones.  Mistakes that I agreed could get him fired and would have been reasonable to fire him over. My defense of Jbot is that he is the only leader this organization has had since TP took over that had a reasonable plan to rebuild the team and I felt that he deserved a 4th year to realize his plan. Nothing more nothing less.  Patty's plan didn't exist.  TM's plan didn't make any sense.  What plan does KA have?  Buying goals?  

I’m not sure I can see the substantive difference you are drawing between Murray’s and Botterill’s plans. You argue only Botterill’s was “reasonable” but that’s subjective. I think both had merits but were incorrectly applied in their own ways. Who one dislikes more is to each their own but I wouldn’t say Botterill had some sort of inherent logical consistency to his plan that Murray’s lacked. I could see what he was trying to do too 

3 minutes ago, GASabresIUFAN said:

My opinion is my opinion.  Sadly, I just happened to get it right.  That said I went and re-read some of the articles about the hire and some of the posts on the hire thread and the vast majority of posters here, media types, and hockey pros thought is was a courageous and good hire at the time.   

Ultimately, what's done is done.  Time to move forward.  Sadly I don't think KA and RK are the guys to move forward with.  

Not me. The hiring sucked. He wasn’t even in the field at the time. 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Thorny

[GASabresIUFAN]

4 minutes ago, Thorny said:

 

Not me. The hiring sucked. He wasn’t even in the field at the time. 

We were in the vast minority with that opinion.

[Thorny]

6 minutes ago, GASabresIUFAN said:

We were in the vast minority with that opinion.

I’d wager there was a lot more of that out there than you’d think - I mean most average people can see this was a man who hadn’t been in the NHL for years. Not only is that risky, there was a reason for that. Of course it was all sunshine and rainbow quotes when he was hired but when is the last time a hire WASN’T accompanied by that language? 

They always always feed you the propo first 

We see what we want to see, too, and filter out the bad stuff. I do it with every hire. Of course my/one’s recollection is altered because we more likely commit the positive to memory 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Thorny

[lost in dc]

How the fu$$ did lafontaine get on this? Every single one of these morons on the list except Patty.

[That Aud Smell]

I went with GM TM for reasons stated upthread -- basically, that he had the most tools at his disposal, and failed the hardest as a result.

That said, GM TM did acquire O'Reilly. That was good work.

But, in the end, his failing grade is the most egregious, IMO. 

On 3/14/2021 at 8:49 AM, PASabreFan said:

Cliff Benson.

Oof. Never forget. And my money's on us hearing about him again, at some point. No smoke without fire, eh?

 

On 3/14/2021 at 11:39 AM, Eleven said:

Ted Theodore Logan Black.  He was a jerk.  

On 3/14/2021 at 5:02 PM, IKnowPhysics said:

I never got the impression that Ted was a jerk.  Why was this?  

This had been my sense as well. But my experience was based on interacting with him when he was "on" at team events. OTOH ...

On 3/14/2021 at 6:10 PM, Eleven said:

We belonged to the same club for a while.  (So did Whaley, and Quinn, and a few others.)  Black was a jerk.

I have no basis to dispute this sort of thing.

[That Aud Smell]

One more thought: Trading O'Reilly and getting essentially nothing in return should place JBOT atop this list, but my belief is that the Pegulas forced that move.

[Randall Flagg]

26 minutes ago, That Aud Smell said:

One more thought: Trading O'Reilly and getting essentially nothing in return should place JBOT atop this list, but my belief is that the Pegulas forced that move.

What about an offseason that involved hiring Housley, and bringing in the following players: Pouliot, Nolan, Josefson, Beaulieu, Tennyson, Griffith, to fill out the roster, creating the conditions so terrible that they led to ROR breaking? 

Or two consecutive seasons of watching a team fall from first in the league to out of the playoffs by 20 points over the span of months and months, without lifting a finger to do anything about it?

Allowing his coaches to use Vlad Sobotka as 2C? Bringing up Mitts a year too soon, cutting his ELC a year short, assuming he or Berglund would be fine centers? 

What about flipping Scandella for a 4th, watching another team flip him for a 2nd, and then trading that 4th for Michael Frolik, who was so bad that even Ralph wound up needing to healthy scratch him as often as possible (noting that while Scandella was likely to leave, he and Jokiharju were easily our best pairing last year, and Joki has plummeted since)

What about giving Reinhart contracts that essentially walk him to leaving as a UFA if we don't trade him this summer?

What about trading the first pick of the 6th round, for a 6th rounder the FOLLOWING year from TORONTO, a team certainly not picking first in any round anytime soon, while just after that Detroit traded their 6th for a HIGHER value pick? 

And while I don't mean to DEFEND GMTM, who I was fine with firing, He took a roster of

Foligno - Ennis - Stafford
Stewart - Girgensons - Gionta
Moulson - Hodgson - Flynn
Deslauriers - Larsson - Mitchell

Weber - Myers
Benoit - Meszaros
Zadorov - Risto

with Reinhart waiting in juniors, 3 first round picks, and a few second rounders (the first rounders were all mid/late besides the Eichel one, and people act like it's trivial to turn this stash into meaningful hockey players when it's definitely not) and immediately created the best team we've had since 2011-12 with it, a team whose point total Jason Botterill's Sabres couldn't once match in 3 seasons.

I don't know about you, but that roster and a few extra first and second round picks is not something that any old GM can make into a powerhouse (which is why the tank was a ***** idea)

He did use that pile of assets for a Selke and Conn Smythe capable center (when everyone was shitting on the guy, I was saying he was usage tweaks from being a 75 point Selke winning center, and I have the receipts), a 30 goal winger, and a goalie that wound up winning a Vezina (yeah, he gets deducted marks for not being present enough to be the one to help Lehner out of what he was going through). Most people were alright-to-thrilled with all of the moves as they happened. To me there is a CHASM between the competence of these two guys as GMs. It's not even close, even though I don't want EITHER of them as my GM

Edited March 16, 2021 by Randall Flagg

[Thorny]

3 hours ago, Randall Flagg said:

What about an offseason that involved hiring Housley, and bringing in the following players: Pouliot, Nolan, Josefson, Beaulieu, Tennyson, Griffith, to fill out the roster, creating the conditions so terrible that they led to ROR breaking? 

Or two consecutive seasons of watching a team fall from first in the league to out of the playoffs by 20 points over the span of months and months, without lifting a finger to do anything about it?

Allowing his coaches to use Vlad Sobotka as 2C? Bringing up Mitts a year too soon, cutting his ELC a year short, assuming he or Berglund would be fine centers? 

What about flipping Scandella for a 4th, watching another team flip him for a 2nd, and then trading that 4th for Michael Frolik, who was so bad that even Ralph wound up needing to healthy scratch him as often as possible (noting that while Scandella was likely to leave, he and Jokiharju were easily our best pairing last year, and Joki has plummeted since)

What about giving Reinhart contracts that essentially walk him to leaving as a UFA if we don't trade him this summer?

What about trading the first pick of the 6th round, for a 6th rounder the FOLLOWING year from TORONTO, a team certainly not picking first in any round anytime soon, while just after that Detroit traded their 6th for a HIGHER value pick? 

And while I don't mean to DEFEND GMTM, who I was fine with firing, He took a roster of

Foligno - Ennis - Stafford
Stewart - Girgensons - Gionta
Moulson - Hodgson - Flynn
Deslauriers - Larsson - Mitchell

Weber - Myers
Benoit - Meszaros
Zadorov - Risto

with Reinhart waiting in juniors, 3 first round picks, and a few second rounders (the first rounders were all mid/late besides the Eichel one, and people act like it's trivial to turn this stash into meaningful hockey players when it's definitely not) and immediately created the best team we've had since 2011-12 with it, a team whose point total Jason Botterill's Sabres couldn't once match in 3 seasons.

I don't know about you, but that roster and a few extra first and second round picks is not something that any old GM can make into a powerhouse (which is why the tank was a ***** idea)

He did use that pile of assets for a Selke and Conn Smythe capable center (when everyone was shitting on the guy, I was saying he was usage tweaks from being a 75 point Selke winning center, and I have the receipts), a 30 goal winger, and a goalie that wound up winning a Vezina (yeah, he gets deducted marks for not being present enough to be the one to help Lehner out of what he was going through). Most people were alright-to-thrilled with all of the moves as they happened. To me there is a CHASM between the competence of these two guys as GMs. It's not even close, even though I don't want EITHER of them as my GM

This was bizarre. 

[Curt]

On 3/15/2021 at 11:16 AM, Thorny said:

Also while we are at it, we should filter out “hindsight is 20/20” on this board as a defence for anyone in a management position. They are literally to be judged on results, not “making a reasonable decision when viewed through the prism of the moment”. 

They are paid to make decisions that work. That’s it. 

It’s slightly ironic that the argument was used in a post touting how one knew all along that Krueger was bad. 

Yet we shouldn’t expect the professional General Manager of the NHL team to have equal foresight to that of a fan? You have tremendous hockey knowledge @GASabresIUFAN but I think it’s reasonable to expect similar standards from the person being paid handsomely. 

When someone makes a bunch of decisions that look good, most of them work out in the end, but a couple don’t, they can reasonably say, “well hindsight’s 20/20.”

When someone makes a bunch of decisions, half look bad, half look good, and in the end almost all of them don’t work out, the hindsight is 20/20 argument doesn’t hold much water.

[dudacek]

I just want to point out that the mess we are watching right now is largely of Jason Botterill's making.

Botterill had a five-year development-based plan to rebuild the Sabres from the Amerks up that theoretically should be bearing fruit now.

Adams' big moves of the off-season were basically an attempt to patch the most glaring holes on Jason's team (centre, offensive depth) with Staal, Hall and Eakin. All three moves have been failures, but the bones of this team are still Jason Botterill's

Don't believe me?

• This is Jason's goaltending. It was Botterill who came up and stuck with the plan to sign Carter Hutton to carry the load for three years while passing the torch to Linus Ullmark as Jonas Johansson developed in the background.
• This is Jason's defence. It was Botterill who focused attention and resources on an offence-first, lopsided blueline corps, investing significant assets in Montour, Miller, and Jokiharju — two of whom can't stay in the lineup and none of whom has made a difference — while sitting on Risto and squandering Scandella, Bogosian and Pilut.
• This is Jason's development program. It is Jason who counted on Casey Mittelstadt and Tage Thompson to be significant contributors, and whose coaches failed to advance the development of each (as well as that of Rasmus Dahlin), and failed to graduate a single Amerk to full-time NHL status. (Olofsson was a Murray pick who developed largely in Sweden)
• These aren't Jason's forwards, but that's even more damning. He was handed four top-six forwards Eichel, O'Reilly, Kane and Reinhart. He got nothing of significance for Kane and nothing of significance for O'Reilly. He signed 2-goal scorer Jeff Skinner to a $9 million contract. Not one of his 2ndary acquisitions over three years — Sheary, Vesey, Johansson, Berglund, Sobotka, Frolik... —  made an impact on the Sabres, short-term, or long-term. Only Skinner and Curtis Lazar remain.
• And until this week, this was Jason's coaching staff. He hired Krueger, he hired Housley, and he signed off their assistants. Their results speak for themselves.

He is the worst executive in Sabres history.

Edited March 19, 2021 by dudacek

[Thorny]

11 minutes ago, dudacek said:

I just want to point out that the mess we are watching right now is largely of Jason Botterill's making.

Botterill had a five-year development-based plan to rebuild the Sabres from the Amerks up that theoretically should be bearing fruit now.

Adams' big moves of the off-season were basically an attempt to patch the most glaring holes on Jason's team (centre, offensive depth) with Staal, Hall and Eakin. All three moves have been failures, but the bones of this team are still Jason Botterill's

Don't believe me?

• This is Jason's goaltending. It was Botterill who came up and stuck with the plan to sign Carter Hutton to carry the load for three years while passing the torch to Linus Ullmark as Jonas Johansson developed in the background.
• This is Jason's defence. It was Botterill who focused attention and resources on an offence-first, lopsided blueline corps, investing significant assets in Montour, Miller, and Jokiharju — two of whom can't stay in the lineup and none of whom has made a difference — while sitting on Risto and squandering Scandella, Bogosian and Pilut.
• This is Jason's development program. It is Jason who counted on Casey Mittelstadt and Tage Thompson to be significant contributors, and whose coaches failed to advance the development of each (as well as that of Rasmus Dahlin), and failed to graduate a single Amerk to full-time NHL status. (Olofsson was a Murray pick who developed largely in Sweden)
• These aren't Jason's forwards, but that's even more damning. He was handed four top-six forwards Eichel, O'Reilly, Kane and Reinhart. He got nothing of significance for Kane and nothing of significance for O'Reilly. He signed 2-goal scorer Jeff Skinner to a $9 million contract. Not one of his 2ndary acquisitions — Sheary, Vesey, Johansson, Berglund, Sobotka, Frolik... —  made an impact on the Sabres, short-term, or long-term.
• And until this week, this was Jason's coaching staff. He hired Krueger, he hired Housley, and he signed off their assistants. Their results speak for themselves.

He is the worst executive in Sabres history.

Just reading the text of the post before you get into the errors shines such a blinding light on how bad Botterill and his plan/execution were: 

It’s “Botterill’s 5 year plan” and shortly after, “weaknesses (centre)”

LOL

If only he had accounted for the MOST IMPORTANT POSITION IN HOCKEY! 

Gosh darn it how could he have known! Can’t expect a plan to get into the nitty gritty like centres 

Edited March 19, 2021 by Thorny

[#freejame]

If we still had GMTM we would have been in the playoffs three years ago, if not sooner. 

[Thorny]

It’s also Botterill who wanted to “tear it down to the studs” for Dahlin, re Friedman. For what it’s worth