ska-T Palmtown

Helluva shift - seems fine.

PK looked fine for the most part. First unit was very aggressive, but disciplined. Did not see Cozens out there.

Boo.

Le Challenge!

No backup for us tonight ... sigh

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna tune in before dinner ... here it goes

I wish this was not so accurate 😞

Hawks are my second team, since I have spend a large portion of my life in Chicago after Buffalo. And they are a Western conference team, so, ahem ... cough, cough - there is no appearance of conflict of cheering interest 😉 Although I do wear my red goat head practice jersey when the Sabres are in town to get a couple fewer insults hurled my way, lol. That said, I sure hope they don't find a way to ruin Bedard. The kid is special, but the last interview I saw with him - he looked frustrated. It might be another case of an outrageously talented kid who is finally encountering players at or above his skill or hockey IQ level for the first time and struggling to find his footing a little. I think they asked him to play "real" hockey this year, not just be an O-zone highlight reel and he is struggling to balance it all. He hates to lose and has done nothing but since joining the Hawks and I think it is eating him from the inside.

haha - wait what? This is one of most interesting discussions in a while! Certainly better than all the doom and gloom Sabres threads 🙂 That article was sweet - being an engineer, I would be in the "stat nerd" part of one of those 4-way graphs, for sure. I like knowing the nuance of things - and I find outliers (like how in 21-22 Matthews obliterated expectations) to be fascinating. It is also fun to find negative outliers to try to pin point where things go wrong. Player? Model? A little bit of both? Good stuff!

I will first say that I am a HUGE Benson fan for all the reasons you said and what most people have ever praised him for. He is gonna be a "glue" guy on a really good team some day (Lord, let it be in Buffalo!!) Just to be contrarian, (why not?), on the score sheet I would not say Benson has contributed significantly. 3G and 4A and a +/-0 in 19 games gets most other players a pretty "meh" reaction (obviously ignoring his age and ELC). Personally, I feel his impact is harder to measure since he is, at this stage in his promising young career, an "effort" guy. I think it is just to say that I think we'd cut Quinn the same slack if he were the tenacious forechecker that was lifting sticks and swiping pucks but maybe not lighting up the scoreboard. But as you said at $7M ... Cozens needs to either win the Selke or be at least responsible in is own end and still put up 60+ points. Maybe he gets to be Nylander/Skinner (allergic to his own zone) if puts up 90 points?

I'll jump back into the fray and attempt to elaborate my understanding and personal opinions. (I was late for a meeting earlier and had to rush, lol) Both +/- and any of the xGF% stats are a combination of what has happened while that player is on the ice, in total. So, if two players hop on and off the ice at the exact same time every shift, every game, their numbers would be identical - even if one has 60 goals and the other has 2. So, if a player has an xGF% of say, 45%, that means if you look at all the shots taken by both teams while that player is on the ice and assign them the NHL average shooting % (someone jump in here if it is from that location or overall - i think it is from that location?), it would say that Player X's team should score 45% of the goals that occur when they are on the ice. Which, if you are a shutdown line that regularly faces the other team's top line - that is pretty good. But a less than 50% xGF% tends to mean you give up better chances than you get. Just personally, where I find that a little lacking for judging Player X, let's say they are McJesus and are just regularly burying goal after goal - but their linemates are a bunch of Cozens and Quinns - getting good shots, but not many, and certainly not burying many. Player X's xGF% might be pretty high, but their actual GF% may be low - so it was sorta my point that not too many stats are good on their own. I guess over a full season, you would expect xGF% and GF% to normalize to a team's abilities?

My bone to pick with the xGF% family of stats is that is looks at the "average" shooting percent across the league for the spot on the ice where the shots are taken and does simple math to say player X and their linemates get these chances and give up these other chances. It does not account for the actual skill of the person taking the shots, etc. So, things can be skewed one way or the other, given that a MacKinnon vs Lafferty getting the same scoring chance is way different. Again, not saying it does not have its spot - but it also requires several grains of salt and other information to be truly useful* *the author fully reserves the right to have completely misunderstood xGF%, etc and thus further cluttered the thread with non-sensical babble.

Not defending the play, just adding in that this IS a strategy employed by a lot of teams. Did Quinn execute it properly? Possibly not. Sending your weakside (non-puck supporting) winger on a fly pattern can be a very useful tool to get the opposing D to give up your d-zone blueline more easily. There is a chance (not saying this is true), that someone else in the D-zone missed a rotation that was supposed to happen. In my opinion it is more likely that Quinn did not recognize how the Avs were set up which probably should have triggered "abort" in his mind. I will say - if the Sabres get the puck and make a good pass, Quinn has a good chance there. I know way more is made of it in football because there are hard resets after every play - but good NHL teams (I jest, they all do) run preferred defensive and offensive schemes that often require near-constant real-time adjustments to continuously counter your opponent's adjustments. Maybe the Avs had noticed that the Sabres like to do the back-door fly-pattern and MacK banked on the Avs keeping the puck and slid to the space he knew would be open if/when Quinn took off. I am honestly not that mad when we get "Gretzkied" by a MacKinnon or McDavid type, you just tip your hat to super savvy veteran moves. What really grinds my gears is when we let the other team's equivalent of Girgs do it to us 😞

The Jests are practically guaranteed to hit 14 years this year before the Sabres do ... so for a few months, we won't hold the longest active playoff drought in major North American sports!! Odd that the NFL is the only one that does not include any teams from our pals to the North ...

Agreed ... although that is a SUPER low bar - lol. And while there is little doubt that Kulich's play passes the eye-test far more than Quinn's, the score sheet is not much different for the two of them. But, as @mjd1001 was pointing out, Quinn is actively hurting us most nights, where maybe Kulich is helping a little. Sad state of affairs, to be sure. I think where my head is at - we have kept kids up before because they have "looked good". Cozens, Quinn, Benson, JJP (?), Power, pretty long list, really ... and it is pretty apparent most of this board thinks they are not fully NHL caliber, yet. Or at least not for what is being asked of them. It would be WAY different if the average age (swap out an NHL game experience number, if you wish) of our forward group was 28 and someone went down and we brought Kulich up. Same on D ... There is something missing. I still bristle (or are my feather ruffling? 🙂 ) at "real men", "soft", "country club" and other terms that sound like old men standing on their lawn yelling at clouds ... but honestly - maybe they are right and I am just a snowflake genX/millennial cusper who is weak and soft? 🤷‍♀️

I was slicing open a package from up North and out slid a pretty cool autographed Jiri Kulich hockey card that I got at what I think of as the "Sabres discount" on ebay and I had to come back and find this post/topic. The fact that we have a lineup stuffed to the gills with young lads is why I get pretty agitated about keeping Kulich up any longer than necessary. And, as much as I love Benson (I really do!), a better organization would have sent him back to the WHL last year. Why? Because he would not have been able to beat out a "rostered player" definitively at camp. The way the team is playing this year - no need for Kulich to stick around and get this stank on him.

I just watched that Dion Dawkins hype video over in the Bills thread ... made me so incredibly happy! Then sad that the Sabres may never know the pure unadulterated joy that Buffalo sports fans feel when their team wins. Then joy again when I thought about how awesome Dion is!

Crap - I actually meant to go back and delete my post since I was totally thinking of the wrong play. Pimlach set me straight. I think it was pretty weak that no one responded, although I may quibble with whether or not that should have been Quinn or not. (Agree with the bold) I actually agree with you that I went a little "keyboard warrior-y" in my response, and I'll own up to that. I thought your post calling him a "coward" was kinda over the top, but in turn I also went over the top. The internet, amirite? I think it is easier to disagree in-person and in real time, honestly. We'd be at a bar, you'd say "Quinn is a coward", I'd say "aw, c'mon man - that's a bit harsh" you'd say "nah - he shoulda at least whacked him" and i'd say "meh, maybe?" and we'd move on. Probably sitting at home gives one way too much time to think of a response. It seemed like such a personal attack on Quinn's character versus his play, that it definitely elicited a strong reaction from me. Calling him a coward came across as attacking him, not his actions, and it seemed wrong to me.

Balls, I musta been thinking about a different hit? I still don't think "a soft coward" is the correct label for a player on the receiving end of such a play - but I now strongly agree that the lack of response by the team is sadly telling. They are a bi-polar team in that regard ... there have been a few games this year where every sideways glance has been met with a slash, hack, or other nastiness ... and other games where "meh - better skate to the bench" was the answer.

As @Pimlach pointed out in his response - in no world (my words) is it cowardly to get knocked down by a clean body check and not try to go after the guy. The original comment called the recipient, Quinn, a soft coward for taking the hit and not retaliating. That is just preposterous. That no one on the Sabres attempted to lay a clean shoulder into Marcus ... that is fair game. **I would give you a "red x" for misunderstanding that the original comment was direct at Quinn, but a "green check" for the observation about the team ... so they cancel out i guess, lol

It's really just that calling a professional athlete that got knocked down by a good clean check a "soft coward" is peak pathetic internet keyboard warrior nonsense. Normally I enjoy your remarks, even if I disagree - but that comment was bleh.

Yeah, the call on Cozens was borderline horseshite. Way worse (for the game and in terms of blown calls) than the "icing".

Yeah, even when he was here and had practically no one to pass to, the could still thread the needle backwards without looking. I might be in the minority, but I hold no ill will towards young Jack. He hurt his neck and wanted to chose the option that gave him the best chance of being 100% again. The team blocked it. Total d1ck move by the team, so he left. Turns out, based on his play since returning, he was right. Shocker. (something something something body autonomy)

The key, as the Bills showed, is to be up by more than one score - then there is pretty much nothing the refs can do about it. 🙂

Well, US Thanksgiving was yesterday - and by point %, they were in a spot ... so there is that. And this is from the article ESPN published last year about historical "US Thanksgiving" Standings. so between 3-5 teams in a spot drop out each year. Last year in the East, only Detroy-it dropped out and the Aisles hopped in. There's one. In the West, St. Louis and Seattle were replaced by Eulers and Preds. So, three total - the trend holds. 18% of the Turkey Day teams fell off. I don't see the data for previous years and I am way too lazy to look, but what is interesting is that all 12 of the top 3 teams in each conference stayed that way, but 3 out of 4 (75%) of Turkey Day WC teams fell out. So ... maybe it is best if we pretend they were not in a WC spot on Turkey Day? lol. **After actually reading the article, not just looking at the chart - in the time frame covered it was VERY common for division leaders to fall out. 14-15 and 16-17 both saw the top FOUR teams in a top 3 spot in their division all miss! A third of the non-WC teams in a playoff spot on US T-giving missed the playoffs! Wild. (Yes, Buffalo was on of those teams 😞 )