MattPie

The Wilson thread is pinned on the top of the page.

It's been said here (I think), but raw goals scored is mediocre rating of a team, since it doesn't account for variations of how many goals are scored in the league on average that year. It would seem that goal diff or Goals For/League Average Goals would be a better stat for measuring this. You can't tell me that a team in 2005-6, when 16 teams averaged 3+ goals a game, and a team in 2013-4, when 6 teams average 3+ goals a game, are equal if they have the same total. Or back into the 70s when (it seems) the scores were a lot higher.

Surely it's "La fumee", non?

I think that logic does apply, but not in the first 5 or so picks. Anywhere else in the draft you pick the best player available. In the top 5 (maybe even just the top 3), you pick what you project that you'll need, since you're never going to get an equivalent player back in trade. This. +1.

For as bad as this season has been, it's worth pointing out that in my cursory glance at the last full seasons, the last place team finished with 57, 56, 71, 61, 62, 62, and 65 points (last year projects to 61.5). With 11 games remaining and at 48 points, the Sabres stand a chance at not being the worst team in the last decade, never mind "WURST TEAM EVAR!". Essentially, every year there's a team that is this bad. This is just our turn to root for that team.

Wow, RIP Ralph.

I think a player that makes other players could be a *key* asset for the Sabres. The question is if he can turn AHL players into NHL players.

Of course not! Cody's game is to make those slick baby-sauce passes (like John Scott). If he's making said saucy passes to AHL talent, he's never going to look good on the stat sheet.

Yeah right. We should keep Ennis and not Hodgson, he's smaller but he's been showing hustle.

Yes and no. I suppose on a normal high-speed network it's OK to have a lot more machines in the same broadcast domain. The Windows chatter is annoying, but shouldn't eat up too much bandwidth. The problems is when you get to development environments where you might need multiple concurrent instances of some piece of software that doesn't behave well when there's another on the same subnet. Or in the case of multicast video, something that'll eat nearly all the available bandwidth and everyone will be stuck seeing the traffic (yeah, multicast should only get to the endpoints that want it, but I've yet to see that work right).

To the first part: agreed. It's a lot easier for ICANN to survive if it's not an arm of the big, bad, US government. The US is already a minority of users, and (somewhat justifiably) some of of those users bristle at the internet being controlled by the US at the base level. It's good to remember that nearly all of the internet runs by agreement and cooperation and keeping up perception is a big part of keeping everything working. As for IPv6, I'm rather annoyed at the careless way the addresses are split up. I realize there's a *ton* of addresses, but it still doesn't make sense that the default way to create a local subnet is to give it 2^64 available addresses (18 quintillion). Each site prefix (organization) can have 65535 networks; that sounds like a lot but if you're a large company or government it's not so far out of the range of possibility. They could have easily balanced that out and had a mere 281 trillion per local subnet but each site could use 2 billion different networks.

Who is saying that? Most of the folks here are saying Reinhart is the only player that has a reasonable shot at playing next year.

Informal poll, choose one: Everyone should ignore his funeral People should picket his funeral WBC should picket his funeral :)

ZOMG! I hope the NHL is going to do something about this blatant tanking!

I usually take the label off before sex, it just chafes.

I'm breaking it down like this: On the surface, the D looks OK based on "vets" that are signed (Myers and Ehrhoff) and the prospect pool (Risto, Zadorov, etc.). Goaltending is a question mark, but none of the 3 GT we've seen play in the last week seem terrible, so hopefully one of those shows themselves as a #1. The team should be picking at least a GT in the later rounds each year since there's more variation in GT in the draft, and 3th-round and later D and F rarely work out. Forwards: Teh Sabres have a bunch of bottom-6, and a set of prospects that we should be able to find 3 to put together a 2nd scoring line. Ideally, the next two drafts will net us 2 1st line forwards (I think this year there's a very good chance that 3 1st round picks in the next two years net 2 1st line players). After that, it's swapping out the guys we have for the guys we need (the right players, not necessarily the best) and hopefully bringing in UFA to fill the last spots where the prospects don't pan out. The UFAs will be the last step (as Tim Murray said); the team needs to get good so UFAs will consider coming to Buffalo. 4 years out, that's when it becomes interesting. (I know I'm not breaking ground here, but please point out the massive holes in this prognostication as I can't see them!)

At center or wing?

Gogol Bordello? MARKING MY CALENDAR! Slackers at a brewery near Philly June 7th; I better arrange a ride.

I agree there, 25 mile commute in NYC is nothing to sneeze at at least Brooklyn -> Uniondale is against the traffic. I believe a lot of the Flyers players live over in Camden near their practice facility.

FWIW, Uniondale isn't that far from Brooklyn roughly 25 miles. If you did sign there, you'd probably buy a place based on where you want in Brooklyn and commute out for the year. Or buy in Nassau Co. and commute in (via train if it were me) to Brooklyn.

Intoxicated with hope. It's better than resigned to mediocrity.

Huh? 13 guys signed paying out $32M. Roster is 23 players, let's say the cap floor is $48M next year (up $4M from this year's $44M). Are you really saying there's no way they sign 10 guys for an average of $1.6M/year?

Kind of. If we're, say over the cap by $5M until the trade deadline, we can be under the cap by a bit for the last month or two and still spend to the cap floor (I think). Can someone verify that the cap floor is how much you spend on salary per year, but it doesn't apply per game? A more concrete example (using easy math). Lets say the limit/floor is $64M/$44M (like it is now). If you pay a collection of players $63M per year for the first 60 games (near the limit), that's 63M * (60/82) = $46M spent up to game 60. After game 60, you trade off $20M per year in contracts for picks and are now under the "floor" . You play out the remaining games at 43M * (22/82) = $11.5M, for a total $57.5M spent over the course of the year, well above the cap floor of $44M. I haven't looked, but I bet the Sabres are under the floor if they had been playing this set of players all year.

You know, that's a benefit of this season being *so* bad I hadn't really thought of. At least for these last few weeks we can unabashedly root for the team, and maybe even genuinely feel bad when they lose.

So this seems pretty reasonable (without looking at whether the Foligno and Conacher contracts fall into a bad spot age-wise). So what's the problem? It doesn't even factor in scoring a mid-name UFA (Ott, Callahan, etc.)