Taro T

There are exactly 64 NHL goalie jobs. (Well maybe 66 to cover for a team or 2 having a "3 headed monster.") He's a starter. Will he be for all 5 years? No data. But being top 25 (and believe someone said he's actually 17th highest paid) only puts him ahead of 7 starters (and if he's 17th, he's only ahead of 15 starters). The cap keeps going up and by the time they have to be making a serious decision on Levi's pay (a couple of years from now as he's ~4 years away from UFA status) UPL quite likely won't even be in the top 32 of goalie's pay. The man's an amplifier and this is his Sally Fields moment - you like me, you really like me. There's a very good chance this deal works out, and even if it doesn't, there will be methods available to get out from under the deal.

Not in Buffalo, it don't. 😉

Wifey still on occassion will sing their UPL song. What a great bunch of characters they seem to be.

The clause in the CBA that says comparable players' contracts are used to help determine what the player's salary will be was in the post you quoted. Whether you choose to believe it or not is your choice.

One other reason to like this contract is that, for whatever reason, it seems that UPL plays significantly better when he truly believes his team is behind him and trusts him. This contract directly tells his that the team believes in him as a #1. (He has stated that in interviews that it's important for him to know the team believes in him. Maybe that was just a function of his youth and he'll grow out of needing that validation. But considering he seems to have an "amplifier" personality; that 1 extra year might've bought a better goalie than we'd've gotten even with a 3 or 4 year deal.) Personally expect that he'll play a lot better with this deal than he would've on a "prove it" 1 year deal with Levi breathing down his neck. Ruff has spoken highly of him. This proves Adams thinks highly of him too. And if they're wrong, well, TO & other teams seem to be able to get out of even worse bad contracts every single year. No reason the Sabres shouldn't be able to do so as well. AND they've still got Levi in the wings. Kind of feels like they are setting up their own little Ullmark Swayman situation here. Here's to hoping they did. (We're due for getting to actually have nice things again.)

If they DON'T use salaries, how exactly do you EVER get to saying how much a particular skill is worth? Would seriously like to know how else you get to a contract value. How would THAT arbitration go? They team and player's agent both use COMPARABLE players and compare their particular skills in an effort to determine how much the player is worth. You don't look at other player salaries on your own team (or on other teams for that matter) when the player isn't a comparable to him. Aka, you can't say well, Dahlin's the best D-man on the team and UPL is the best goalie on the team so he should get $11MM too. You also don't get to say, well the team has $13MM in cap space so my guy should get $6MM to get the team in line with other teams around the league. You don't get to look at a guy that signed a UFA contract to justify a certain $ amount for an RFA. But you ABSOLUTELY look at comparables and what they get paid. That's the whole point of going to arbitration. Btw, am getting that directly from the CBA. The CBA SPECIFICALLY lists that the following is admissible in an arbitration hearing: "(G) The compensation of any Player(s) who is alleged to be comparable to the party Player, provided, however, that in applying this or any of the above subparagraphs, the Salary Arbitrator shall not consider a Player(s) to be comparable to the party Player unless a party to the salary arbitration has contended that the Player(s) is comparable; nor shall the Salary Arbitrator consider the compensation or performance of a Player(s) unless a party to the salary arbitration has contended that the Player(s) is comparable." That seems suspiciously similar to other players' salaries, no? 😉

Pretty sure that was his point.

And Pominville signed for 5 years the previous year ('08).

Miller signed for 5 years back in '09.

Personally, want whichever of the 2 that reaches closer to his ceiling to be the LT #1. For Levi thats Saros. For UPL, wouldn't have believed it before watching him last season, but it's Vasilevskiy. Either would be awesome should it work out. And if somehow they ended up w/ both, well, seriously sweet. Edit: And btw, am not saying either will necessarily get to their ceiling. But those are what they look like.

Pretty sure a 5 team NTC doesn't do much at all to tie the GM's hands. And it's a sign of good faith that if the time to part ways arrives that they won't be sending him off to the NHLs (figurative) version of Siberia (so, no, @Thorny not expecting he'd end up in your neck of the woods without a NMC; was referring to the next Arizona whomever that may become 😉 ). Looks like a deal that works for player and team. Again, SWEET. Danke for the update.

Sweet. Hopefully there are no full NMCs in it, just in case down the road they decide they want to move him. Guess this puts to rest the concerns that UPL didn't want to be here.

They DO use player comparables to determine what the player should receive in arbitration. E.g., this player gets so much ice time, scores X goals, gets Y shots, sets up Z plays, etc. etc. which is comparable to so and so who gets A, so and so who gets B, and better than so and so who gets C. And both sides have to tell the other side which players they are going to consider comparables to the player in the arbitration hearing. (And the player has to be in a comparable situation career-wise to be considered a comparable too. So a UFA who signs somewhere for $10MM wouldn't likely be a comparable to a player that still is an RFA for 2 more years because the player isn't a UFA yet.) What they can't do is say, for example were this the previous off-season, well he's more valuable to the Sabres than Skinner is because he did this and Skinner only did that so he should get way more than Skinner's $9MM. (Especially when the player in question is UPL and though he is more valuable to the Sabres, he plays a completely different position and Skinner would never be a comparable player to him.) And they couldn't say, well the team needs to make sure they're over the cap floor and the only way they can guarantee it would be by paying him so much. Likewise, the team can't say, well we already have to bury Stone on BF-LTIR next year so we can't give him more than $2MM even though on a team without cap trouble he'd be worth $5MM.

Nah, it's the same one he wore to Tim Horton's funeral. You can tell by the wider than currently in style lapels. Heard he was pretty proud of it still fitting after all this time.

And again, you are COMPLETELY discounting how much better the PP would've been had somebody besides Skinner been on the ice to retreive loose pucks, win battles along the boards down low, and not make lousy passes once he had the puck. But he scores at a higher rate than these other guys that aren't stationed at the front/side of the net. Cool, never would've thought that being stationed nearer the net than the other players on the ice might help him score more goals. Again, but how many goals WEREN'T scored by the Sabres because Skinner was the guy in the role of the garbage man? There is a reason that the vast majority of points that Jeff Skinner has scored throughout his career come at 5v5. Other players on his teams have skill sets better suited to being on the PP. Granato needed to knock him off the top PP long before he did (and he also needed to relieve Matt Ellis of that portion of his duties) and MAYBE he would've still been the coach of the team. Btw, Girgensons had an EG/60 of over 12. Maybe they should've kept HIM for the PP too. 😉 Look, personally didn't want Skinner dumped this year as IMHO it made more sense from a cap perspective to cut him next season (or even the one after it). But there's no doubt that Ruff didn't want him here. So, he's gone. And also btw, when Eichel and Reinhart were in Buffalo, 5 players had P/60 on the PP of greater than 5.0 and 2 more were about 4.0 and another 2 were within 0.1 of 4.07 this season. You know, when the PP actually didn't stink. And Skinner wasn't even in the top 10 for P/60 on the PP; he was 13th.

Well, we'll never know, but it is very possible that the owners didn't want to hand O'Reilly the C when the very 1st thing he did after signing with the Sabres was drive his truck into a Timmy Ho's. It definitely soured the owners on him. The question is to just what degree did it sour them? There are times that it REALLY seems as if this team is cursed. (Realize it isn't; but those that want to claim it is can make a persuasive case.) Hopefully, we're finally watching them get back onto the right track. Time will tell.

And, again, how much of the issues with the PP were due to him being on it? Maybe, just maybe, the PP would actually have been better with him NOT on it. And, if memory serves, the PP did actually get better when he was off it. (Of course, the PP was so bad, it having been better might merely have been a case of it getting luckier.) Additionally, as he was typically the 1st player to get swapped out for the 2nd unit when the team went back to regroup after the puck got sent down to the other end of the ice once again; might it be possible that his playing less time on the PP than most anyone else on the top unit could account for an increase in his pts/60 on the PP? (Reducing the denominator makes the overall fraction greater.)

How much PP productivity got killed when Skinner was unable to win a battle to keep control of the puck or made a pass that was nowhere near the target. One of the shortcomings about analytics is you have to start getting into the really granular and subjective to be able to quantify the effects of things like that. How much better would the rest of the PP's #'s have looked without him doing stuff like that? Those sort of things tend to be addressed better via the eye test. And, merely for clarification, you aren't trying to say Skinner was/is GOOD on the PP are you? Don't believe you are, just trying to confirm. Because there's a reason that he tends to get most all his scoring at 5v5.

Like Meatloaf used to say "2 out of 3 ain't bad." 😒

Cool. Now get an agreement with UPL. (Then make a trade for that mythical additional 2W and we're cooking with gas.)

To the bolded, w/ all due respect, no, he wasn't. He still had a lot of pieces that as it turns out, and several here argued, were actually pretty good hockey players. He decided that he didn't want players that didn't yearn to be Sabres and because of THAT decision he ended up "more or less stuck with this model." But he could have judiciously added to the key players that were Sabres. But he'd come to the conclusion that the core was rotten and if it wanted to be elsewhere he was fine with accomodating those pieces. He also decided that with very few exceptions (Tuch being the prime example) he didn't want to bring back players in their prime for those assets but rather he wanted prospects and picks for them. And he expected the team would be competing for a playoff spot ~last year (and because the East was so screwed up, they "competed" for a spot a year early, though finishing with 91 isn't exactly competing in most years and that sure seemed to affect how he and his former coach approached last season) and presumably making the playoffs this year and being legit contenders in a year or 2. He might turn out to be correct that the team will be legit competitors a season or 2 from now; but if he isn't right about making the playoffs this year, there's a good chance that he won't be here to find out if he was right about when they'd be legit contenders.

Probably. (Narrator: It wasn't.)

How old or how drunk?

Well, like Jeff Allen says "Happy wife, happy life." (Know he didn't come up with it, but that has kind of become his trademark.)

Umm, isn't that what happens every time you fire up the grill? Or does your wife expect that possums possess some magical germs that can withstand several hundred degrees of heat over an extended time?