Samson's Flow

Putting this where it belongs: But even if Hutton has a 10% change of being a late-bloomer Tim Thomas type, the investment is minimal enough that there isn't much risk imo. Even if he regresses back to league average goalie or even further to backup level, that doesn't hurt us much in the long run. What I think i am convincing myself is that the Sabres as a whole kept making high-risk swing for the fences additions (ROR, Kane, Okposo, Moulson) that had to work out or we were screwed with a high AAV/term contract. We missed on too many of those to build a quality team. Now the strategy seems to be throw enough darts in the low cost market to increase your chances of enough hitting to make an impact. If you miss on those, they are only a few million and short term where you can trade them away or just wait them out without crippling your dart-throwing ability next year.

Dynasty

If we fire up the time machine and go back 5-10 years those players might be leading us on a long playoff run.?

Don't worry I get that. As a guy who knows and uses a lot of advanced stats in baseball (WAR, xFIP, wOBA, DRS, etc.) they tend to come up in my conversation when I am trying to justify my preference for one player over another. Just using those terms when discussing baseball with the 'average' fan makes me sound elitist, and I'm well aware of that negative perception. But I sure as $hit am not going to use traditional stats like wins or RBI's when there are better predictive stats available.

I knew it was coming! Randall at least gave us a cliff notes version this time ?

But even if Hutton has a 10% change of being a late-bloomer Tim Thomas type, the investment is minimal enough that there isn't much risk imo. Even if he regresses back to league average goalie or even further to backup level, that doesn't hurt us much in the long run. What I think i am convincing myself is that the Sabres as a whole kept making high-risk swing for the fences additions (ROR, Kane, Okposo, Moulson) that had to work out or we were screwed with a high AAV/term contract. We missed on too many of those to build a quality team. Now the strategy seems to be throw enough darts in the low cost market to increase your chances of enough hitting to make an impact. If you miss on those, they are only a few million and short term where you can trade them away or just wait them out without crippling your dart-throwing ability next year. So now I picture Bogo as an old guy with IBS. Great... ?

It's been improving lately, but there is still a big gap between the top MLS teams and even the average/relegation risk EPL teams. There's a reason that the old stars from the EPL are able to come to MLS and get big contracts and still make the starting 11 as impact players. It's also the reason the USMNT can't rely on MLS players if they want to be competitive on the national stage. It's a pretty significant skill and pace gap.

The most encouraging thing is that the USMNT seems like it can finally let go of the nostalgic players of old. For the longest time we seemed to have been relying on the aging Donovan, Dempsey, Tim Howard types that just don't have the legs for the national stage anymore. There was a huge void where the younger players weren't of sufficient quality to push for playing time on the USMNT. It will be nice to root for the young players again and given their early success at the EPL and European leagues, they might actually be good enough to make some noise in WC 2022.

Well the counterpoint to that is we tried to build a "stars and scrubs" team with GMTM that a lot of people on this board thought was primed to do some immediate damage early since we had big names in Eichel, ROR, Kane, Okposo. That obviously didn't work, so maybe the less sexy balanced team will be more effective by identifying the low cost economical players than can make an impact, where the sum of our team parts is greater than the individual talent (think Vegas). Finding the market inefficiencies (the goalie market was cheap this year v. the center market) and acquiring those players could be a route to success.

Is that more because the latest goal song is associated with the worst era in Sabres history, and such we didn't have many goals to celebrate? Was Song 2 really a better goal song or was it just associated with the era of a much better team and we are all nostalgic for that success again?

That chart seems to really like Carter Hutton. He's almost as valuable in GAR as Tavares and O'Reilly. Now that's obviously based on his career year last year, but the economic deal we got him on leaves plenty of upside. I'm going to guess the other two unnamed light blue pieces are Berglund/Sobotka/Thompson

Isn't that part of the problem? We're so focused on what we know we don't like that we end up voting (or not) based on who we hate least as opposed to who we actually believe in wrt to policy and viewpoint. Limiting the American public to only two parties creates this 'us against them' mindset. Multiple parties would (in theory) allow for each legislative item to be judged on its merits rather than who came up with it.

I think it was more we had built ourselves up to getting at least two of the Blues best prospects (Parayko, Thomas, Kyrou, Dunn) based on the initial rumored offers, that when we first heard that JB prioritized getting NHL players and a different prospect we all were shaking our head. After digesting, I see that his strategy was to get enough NHL level players to eliminate having to fill out the 3rd and 4th lines with AHL call ups. We'll see if it works, but adding 3 roster players for one is something that could work in ensuring we aren't DFL again.

It does that if you click the gold circle/star on the left of the thread title.

I vote for the new 4 as a choice. Predetermined tags only. EDIT: but not necessary to use the tag.

I meant more that the tag function is probably meant to group similar style threads for search. As such, having a set list to choose from will prevent duplicates from typos and will allow the tags to function as intended and not like a teen's twitter hashtags...

I too am one that used to manually type the :emoji: as a shorthand, so you are going to see a lot of posts from me that turn out like this with the new upgrade. Hope the prognosis is good Duda. ?

I'd say the Topic Tags are necessary, but only really needed to define "GDT" or "Off Topic" threads. I don't mind the other two predetermined ones you have in your image, but agree with the way they appear with the new upgrade doesn't make sense to be a free form field anymore.

I just feel like there is another 10 paragraph megapost from Randall coming in this thread...

We were just talking to dark to get you to come back. Nobody likes that guy anyways...? Thanks for the insight on the Trans discussion!

It's the Senators.

For the record, the pronoun portion of this discussion confuses the crap out of me. It's tough not falling into an accidental landmine and appearing insensitive when relying on message board text on this one. I can see how celebrities/politicians can get into trouble with this topic.

Interesting. I also worry when the people in Ohio and Florida are the ones with the most power to select our president. If you've ever heard Shredd & Regan's "OTF" segment in the mornings, you would realize how much questionable goes down in Ohio/Texas/Florida. Good point.

So taking it to a logical extreme it would be like if I was born with a third arm in my back, and all my life I knew "I really shouldn't have this arm there", despite other people telling me that it's perfectly normal to have that there (logical fallacy in my hypothetical). In that case I could definitely appreciate having the surgery to finally have the "right" parts to match with my personal perception, and how relieving that would be mentally. We have enough body shaming/body issues topics to deal with in our current society. I can't imagine dealing with this on top of societal pressures.

Some of this was the Dems own undoing, as they couldn't have imagined the gains the Reps have made in the last few years coupled with Trump beating out Hillary. I know this is monday morning qb'ing, but remember that it was quite a shock during the Presidential election and every projection had HRC leading the night before. I think many of the Dem's were overconfident and thought their political landscape would get better instead of worse in 2016.