nfreeman

Nice little play by McCabe to get out of the D zone there.

Hutton needs to deliver the W, both for his own confidence and for the team's (in him and in themselves). I don't think the checking line is having a particularly good night.

Very strong shift from Reino.

2 very strong saves by Hutton.

I thought it was a pretty sweet feed! Toppings? Separately: until the last 7 min or so of the 2nd, I thought CBJ looked like they were mailing it in. The Sabres continue to play soft on D and to get mediocre goaltending from Hutton. The top line has looked quite good though. It's been a game between 2 lower-echelon teams.

I don't think we'll ever really know the locker room situation. It definitely seemed to me (and I think many others) that the whole was much less than the sum of the parts last year. In any case, I'm willing to defer to JB's (and presumably Howie's) judgment on this, and I think @Brawndo's point about 2 teams giving up on ROR is pretty compelling, although I can certainly understand your and @Drunkard's skepticism. As for the $7.5MM -- YMMV of course, but I'm not going to dismiss it as a consideration when it's someone else's money.

...for a team that was DFL! Scandy was pretty good last year -- there were plenty of games in which he was their best defenseman. That trade wasn't a franchise-changer, but it was a solid trade to pick up a quality defenseman for whom the Sabres only had to give up a solid 3rd/4th line winger in Foligno and take one extra year of a bad contract (Pommer's deal had 1 more year than Ennis' -- but the Sabres have gotten more from Pommer than Minny got from Ennis -- so kinda a wash there). Scandy's had a disappointing year this year. That doesn't mean it wasn't a good trade.

You're claiming that the thread title format on a message board does not impact the on-ice performance of a bunch of professional athletes, none of whom post here? How dare you.

Good thread. @jame -- welcome. Some of your posts are, as others have noted, a bit caustic, but hopefully that will improve over time, and so will Mittlestadt. In any case your posts are knowledgeable and reasonable. I don't think your (or anyone else's) posts about ROR can just ignore what seemed to be major locker room issues in the team last year. Obviously it wasn't purely an on-ice hockey trade. As I've stated previously, I am willing to give JB and Howie the benefit of the doubt on this as they were much closer to the situation than anyone here. I also don't agree with you on Reino's contract, or that JB blundered in not paying Vegas to take KO or Moulson in the expansion draft. I don't think you can make the assertion about Vegas without examining the cost that Vegas would've required -- and upon examination of the comparable deals, the cost would've been too high. I think @GASabresIUFAN has nicely summarized the positive moves JB has made -- and there have been many. However, your positions are mostly reasonable and well argued. I am increasingly convinced that both Mitts and TT should be in Rochester. There are going to be growing pains with a first-time GM, a first-time HC and a young team. On balance I am pretty optimistic about this management team and the state of the franchise.

Awesome stuff @Wyldnwoody44

Swamp -- I understand the feelings of betrayal, and I agree that the Sabres suffered a loss relative to what they were hoping to get in trade, but it's not like he misrepresented himself to JB in trying to get a big FA deal. He's also not asking for anyone's sympathy or money. And he apologized to the team and the fans and said the team did everything right. It sounds like the guy was already going through some depression, got blindsided by the trade and pretty much had a major breakdown that most likely had his loved ones very concerned he was close to jumping off a bridge, and they all decided it would be best for him to go home and have his homies around him 24/7 to make sure he keeps it together. You're a good man. Wish him a healthy recovery and be done.

Let me just say that I really hope @dudacekis at this game and that he had a good view of that very sweet goal by Reino.

@Taro T-- logically, you are 100% correct, but I expect that he likely wasn't capable of thinking logically at the time. I wonder how much his wife/agent/others close to him pushed for something like what you are suggesting. They may have been so worried about him that they just went along with his wishes.

It seems pretty clear that Bergy's issues went well beyond hockey -- that sounds to me like he was suffering from pretty severe depression. That wasn't the impression that I got from ROR, FWIW.

For the record, I think LTS, AudSmell, TBPhd, D4rk and the others in this thread who have effectively stated that it's OK to slur whites, and only whites, are all good and honorable guys. (Or at least as good as can be reasonably hoped for in light of their toxic whiteness.) I just completely disagree with them on this point, for reasons I've expressed many times. And with that, I'm signing out of this one.

Have you done any research as to the frequency with which non-whites engage in similar behavior, and how that frequency compares with that of whites? Is it reasonable to expect someone to do so before throwing around assumptions that this behavior is associated with whiteness? Or is it OK to make those assumptions -- and state them in public -- and if they turn out to be incorrect, well, that's OK because it's only whites who were slurred, not a different race?

Well, I don’t agree with your description of the circumstances in which I push political talk to the politics club (I don’t think I’ve done so more than a couple of times since the opening of that club, so I don’t think there is a discernible trend), nor do I think of pushing back against racial slurs as political in the same way as a Kavanaugh discussion is — more as sociological — but I recognize that others may differ.

Your post was not the one I was referring to. I neither started nor turned the conversation. Someone opined that Gilbert’s alleged harassment of a young woman was somehow related to whiteness, and others agreed. I called BS. That’s got zero to do with Kavanaugh, other than the fact that purveyors of the “toxic whiteness” worldview heavily overlap with the group that opposed Kavanaugh.

What culture is that? And what door was opened?

The Kavanaugh temper tantrum belongs in the politics club and as a bonus has literally zero to do with the nonsensical and gratuitous introduction of racial slurs into the workplace harassment discussion upthread that I was referring to.

Let's keep this thread limited to actual trades not involving the Sabres, and use the trade speculation thread for hypothetical trades.

If Gilbert were black or Latino, would his conduct have been equally deserving of opprobrium?

All of this is fair -- and again, it has zero to do with whiteness. It has 100% to do with the fact that he was her boss. If he were black or Latino, would you or LTS have thrown "black" or "Latino" into your earlier posts? Again, the question answers itself.

Well, I suppose we'll need to ask him, but the part about banning analytics seemed like a joke to me (not the part about decrying analytics though).

PA was joking you hoser.