Drunkard

Maybe so, I couldn't find the link so I'll take your word for it. There are plenty of budget teams who would love to have a good player like O'Reilly, especially given his favorable contract. Don't you think it's likely that a team like Carolina, Arizona, or Ottawa would have been willing to beat what the Blues gave us for a good player with a $7.5 million cap hit who they would only have to pay $1 million to? Those teams have tons of former top 10 picks from many years of drafting high. I think it would be highly unlikely we wouldn't have been able to pry at least one player better than Tage Thompson out of their hands.

Don't lump me in with anti-vaxers, buddy. I've had my shots.

I was googling to try to find the link, but had no success. Someone on this very board posted a link a while back that said Carolina was interested in O'Reilly but not until after the Sabres paid his bonus on July 1st. Considering how they traded both Lindholm and Hanifin to Calgary and both of those players are better than anything we received from St. Louis, I don't think it's a leap that we could have gotten at least one of them if we had agreed to trade them O'Reilly after his bonus was paid. Botterill either set an arbitrary deadline or failed to convince a novice owner that setting an arbitrary deadline would severely hamper the value in a trade. Either way he failed.

Let's not twist words now, nobody is dumber than Botterill. Other GM's just weren't as smart as Armstrong or they have owners who were too cheap to pay a new guy $7.5 million on his first day.

A lot of teams couldn't fit him under the cap and there were reportedly several budget teams like Carolina interested in him but they wanted to wait until after his $7.5 million bonus was paid before picking him up. I'm sure after seeing how badly Armstrong spanked Botterill on the trade though teams up against the cap were probably kicking themselves after realizing they could have had the cap space by sending Botterill their cap dumps like St. Louis did with Berglund and Sobotka.

I get it, I just don't want Ristolainen traded, especially by our Dart Thrower in chief. GM's thinking Ristolainen could actually be good doesn't mean Botterill will get anything good for him. Without bringing up the name of "he who shant be named" everyone in the league already knew he was good and that didn't stop Botterill from trading him for magic beans.

Yes, let's trade him for more darts! If we can get 4 or 5 middling pieces for him I'm fairly confident that one of those pieces might turn into a half way decent player 3 years after Botterill is fired.

That would suck for current STH's but it would be awesome to see, especially if the stadium in Montreal was an outdoor one. I don't think I've ever seen a baseball game in the snow.

Not necessarily. If a team really wanted to screw the Leafs they could give Marner an offer sheet at $11 million per year for 4 years and if he signs it Toronto only has the option to match it as written or take the compensation. Since they likely match, Marner then gets top dollar and he gets to UFA status as soon as possible. I would love to see it happen, but I won't hold my breath.

Maybe so, but Carolina probably didn't want to risk it, so they decided to go ahead and move him when he agreed to waive his NMC rather than risk getting nothing. Plus given that they are a team on a budget they were probably happy to not have to pay his $5.6 million or whatever salary he earned last year. Just another reason why we got screwed by the O'Reilly trade. Carolina would have probably given us a good defenseman for O'Reilly with a $7.5 million cap hit while only having to pay him $1 million in actually money.

Skinner had a full NMC and we were the only team he was willing to waive it for who could fit him under the cap. Given how crappy we've been this decade, I doubt we would have been buyers at the deadline.

Speculation: Botterill is bad at player evaluation so he has to rely on volume in order to try to find good players. Rumor: Botterill will trade our good players because he needs more darts to throw because the darts he's already traded for are duds.

This seems like playing both sides of the coin. Were the phones hot for Kane for weeks or was there no serious interest? How can it be both?

I wasn't happy with the Kane deal either, even though he lucked out in the end and got a 1st round pick because San Jose extended him. I know the minute I type this it will unleash the parade of Botterill apologists running to his defense regarding Kane's flaws, market forces, and whatever other excuses but that trade was the first look at his dart thrower/volume shooter approach and it was not good for the following reasons. 1) If he knew he either didn't want to re-sign Kane or that Kane didn't want to re-sign here he should have moved him earlier rather than waiting until the deadline 2) The organization under his tenure has been remarkably tight lipped (which is fine or even good) but it was well known and reported that he demanded 4 pieces including a 1st round pick to move Kane and basically every GM in the league thought that was way too much. 3) Because of his 4 pieces demand including a first round pick and the fact that he held firm to his asking price until right near the deadline it severely limited our ability to replace Kane (an important part of our top 6 at the time) without waiting multiple seasons for whatever futures he would gain to develop. I for one would have rather gotten a near ready prospect that could have helped the team sooner than a conditional pick more than a year out (at the time) and a mediocre prospect like Danny O'Regan who will probably never contribute to the Sabres in any meaningful way. In the end we got a 1st rounder though and he was able to turn that late first and Guhle into Montour so it looks better now than it did at the time. I'm not a fan of his dart thrower approach though. For a guy who is supposed the subject matter expect for all things Buffalo Sabres hockey, I'd expect better than a guy who seems to prefer the volume shooting approach rather than using his knowledge and skills to identify specific guys who can improve the team.

He was practically gifted Skinner by virtue of Skinner have a full NMC and Buffalo and Toronto being the only teams he was willing to waive it for, coupled with Toronto not having the cap space to take him on. Yes, he won the trade, but he held all the cards it's not like it was some huge coup. I've never said all his moves were bad, but all his good moves haven't even come close to making up for the bad move(s).

Because someone else used it in a positive connotation earlier (I think in this very thread) like we're supposed to just kowtow to his genius because he has one. His schooling doesn't buy him an automatic benefit of the doubt.

I think he said it himself in some interview. I'm fine with throwing darts if that means taking flyers on guys like Antipin and Pilut. I'm not fine with trading quarters for nickels, pennies, and slugs in order to hold out hope that one of those pieces will eventually turn into a dime. Mr. MBA should be smart enough to realize that acquiring as many darts as he can in hopes of hitting an occasional bull's-eye here isn't a sound strategy when trading prime assets.

We have the wrong GM for that. Mr. Dart Thrower prefers to trade quality players for quantity so he has more darts to throw.

That's where our paths diverge then. I think at his absolute worst he's our 4th best overall defenseman after Dahlin, Montour, and McCabe, but I'd argue that Montour and McCabe still haven't proven to be more valuable than him at this point.

There's only one way to find out and that's to actually try it. If he doesn't improve he still has value to the Sabres because he is in his prime and on a good contract so there's no need to get rid of him. Even if reducing his minutes and overall role doesn't improve him whatsoever, he's still good enough to have on the roster. Even the people who hate him can't think he's worse than Bogosian, Scandella, Nelson, Hunwick, or Borgen, right?

That's still to be determined to me at this point. I like the move to acquire Montour but as soon as we got him it felt like half the board saw him as Ristolainen's replacement instead of an addition to the existing defense. If Botterill has the same mindset then it's not really an upgrade to me. Montour is an offensive minded puck mover, but to me the greatest benefit to adding him will be if it means we can slide Ristolainen down to the second pair. If we trade Ristolainen, that kind of goes out the window so we'll have to wait and see if the defense is actually improved from that perspective. I hope we keep Ristolainen and use pick 31 to get a 2nd line center. If that happens it definitely improves Botterill's overall trading "grade" from my perspective, but the O'Reilly trade was such a turd that he's still in the red.

I guess it's possible, but I personally doubt it. I think O'Reilly is the best player listed of the 5 so the fact that we upgraded from Kane to Skinner doesn't make up for the downgrade from O'Reilly to Miller and at this point, we can't even count Miller. I'd like to add Miller for pick 31, especially because that means we don't have to move Ristolainen to get him.

This times 1,000. It should also be noted that in order to get that cap space he lost 2 top 6 players in O'Reilly and Kane and only added one top 6 player in Skinner who now makes more than either of them. Given that a worse #2 center in Hayes just signed a long term deal north of $7 million there's a good chance that whomever we get to replace O'Reilly will take up the bulk of that space.

He got Skinner cheap from a position of power, but I still see him trying to sell Ristolainen off for quantity rather than quality. Mr. Dart Thrower seems to have a fetish for the multi-piece deal. I just hope he learned his lesson with Berglund and Sobotka. The number of pieces received doesn't mean anything if half of them are worthless or hold negative value.

He's been our top pairing defenseman for the last 3 or 4 seasons, whether he's deserved to be there or not. It won't be all that funny if Montour can't handle the role and we're stuck seeing Bogosian play there after they trade Ristolainen.