Taro T

Didn't know they yell checkmate, either. 😉

Good point. On the flipside & supporting @dudacek's post, Okposo also is on record in the Athletic extolling Granato's (& Adams) virtues.

Potentially being the key/operative word. With no information on how the unpaid rights fees are distributed across the 3 leagues mentioned (plus wouldn't there possibly be unpaid rights fees to other leagues/sports carried by those RSNs included in that lump sum total) we don't know that the NHL teams will necessarily be taking a big hit this year. Expect that the unpaid rights fees skew heavily either towards baseball (whose season is just about to get underway) if the rights fees tend to be paid in advance or towards the NBA & NHL if they're on a pay as you go basis w/ 1/2 the season over. Next season would likely see the bigger potential hit, but the teams & league can begin right now looking for alternative RSNs. Could be, in a ripoff from Demolition Man, in the future all RSNs are MSG. (As long as they ain't friggin' NESN.) The league and Sabres survived the implosion of Empire & WNSA (and Adelphia).

No, actually he didn't. There were 2 better options and even you have acknowledged explicitly WITHIN THIS POST EVEN that there was 1 better option.

He is good. Well, very good actually. He has "it." That is all (for now). 😉

Yes, Reinhart would've been a better choice, but with the constraints YOU set that was not an option, Rodrigues was the 2nd best C of the remaining players on the roster.

As a matter of fact, yes, Rodrigues should've been the 2C and by the end of the year even Housley had twigged onto that. But a 19 yo rookie 1 season removed from HS hockey should not have been placed in that role. It falls under the category of being set up to fail.

@Curt, where did your post go?

Have never seen the agreement between the NHL & the CHL, but a reading of the CBA says NHL teams have to offer their 18 & 19 year old CHL signers to their CHL team before loaning them elsewhere. And that is due to the CHL - NHL transfer agreement. And the rule is in place to keep from watering down the CHL by moving guys that would be at the top of the CHL into the AHL. CHL squads agreed to not force kids that are good enough for the NHL to stay in the junior ranks, but those guys that are too good for the CHL but not good enough for the NHL are stuck where they are.

And Housley, in his infinite wisdom, never played Mittelstadt at W again. But, he did have the good sense to not only typically play him as his 2C, but even as the 1C when Eichel 1st was absent injured. Yeah, sure, it was Krueger who put Mitts on the road to purgatory.

Nice post. The only tweak it might need is, pretty sure we are already watching Krebs & Jost flip spots from being the 4&3 C's to the 3&4 C's. And the question becomes are we going to see the lines from last night for a while or are Mittelstadt & Peterka going to flip spots w/ Asplund spelling Peterka periodically? Or will Quinn & Olofsson flip flop again?

Well, Granato was the one playing him at center with Olofsson & then either Asplund, Krebs, Hinostroza, or at the very beginning of the year Quinn IIRC. They both wanted him at W but Asplund & Krebs forced him to C w/ 3rd and 4th line talent while the Kids Line developed. So, is it the Granato effect or simply putting him in a role he can excel at? Which, btw, Krueger was the 1st one to play him at W and his play appreciably was better than it had been prior to his stint w/ the Amerks. And considering it was the addition of Jost that allowed him to slide to W, so maybe it's the Kevyn Adams effect? 😉 (And full disclosure, this kid thought he'd be more effective at C than W. D'oh!)

Give them 1983 equipment & the college kids don't come close to competing. Particularly, the goaltending would be very suspect. As stated earlier, there was a reason there were almost 0 butterfly goalies in that era. It wasn't because they were too dumb to use that style, it's because their bodies (particularly their knees and hips) wouldn't survive the abuse they'd suffer going into the butterfly w/ the leg pads of the day. And the Golden Golfers don't have a Devon Levi on their squad.

He HAS to be offered to his CHL team by the Sabres 1st before getting loaned anywhere else. If the Ice aren't going to let him be an Amerk, why would he get to play in Sweden? Matthews got to play on Switzerland because he wasn't under contract to play anywhere else.

My issue w/ being in the football stadium is, especially if there are kids sitting behind you, you have the option of staying in your seat not being able to see the entire field because people are standing in front of you (oftentimes wearing hats significantly increasing the quality of their billboard impersonation) but allowing the kids behind you to see some of the field, or saying #### it and standing, not letting the kids see a darn thing. You also have people walking past pretty much every 5 minutes again disrupting your view. And the times you get to see the play really develop much better than on TV, such as in the home Cheats game when Allen waived Brown to go downfield & he got an easy touchdown, are relativey few and far between. Whereas with hockey, you get many opportunities to see things develop watching in the barn that aren't available watching on TV. Went to a game for the 1st time during the McBeane era, and it was fun, but it literally became a 16 hour event from departure from home to return. A Sabres game is only 6-9 hours, depending on whether we stop somewhere for dinner. Far more doable.

45 minutes of good hockey versus one of the 3 worst teams in the league starting an AHLer in net. San Jose isn't much more of an NHL team, they need to do this to them too. Really would like to see Comrie get that start, but it will be UPL.

And the Anaheim PA crew playing the Smiths How Soon is Now. Now that is somebody tired of the Suck Hard for Bedard.

Guess dropping the exclamation point doesn't really help. 😉

Cozens

Strome being a bit of a prick.

Shouldn't have added the exclamation point. 😉

Zemgus!

Except they really haven't run Comrie with a reasonable D in front of him. And every time since he came back, when they have wanted to sit UPL the game has had some sort of significance for Anderson. Playing the Otters, going for his 700th NHL game, playing the team he shut out a month or so ago. Anderson is 1-4-0 his last 5 decisions & was horrible in 3 of those. He's not the future & needs to be out of the primary rotation. You may very well be right that Comrie is nothing more than a backup. But we haven't seen enough to say that definitively IMHO. And it isn't like either if the other 2 are playing well enough lately to only be giving him 1 game every 2 weeks. That should be Anderson's role. Again, MHO.

If he pitches a shutout this period, would give him the SJ game. Doubt Granato & Bales will agree.

That's the point of running BOTH UPL & Comrie this year so they can figure out if that will be good enough for a year or 2 or if they have to fix it.