Drunkard

It's worth it. I got to drink a beer with Rick Jeannret and also met Lindy Ruff, Harry Neale, and Kevin Sylvester when I attended a Road Crew event in Raleigh several years ago. I would assume all the tickets are general admission. When I went it was held at a Buffalo Brothers Pizza restaurant so there weren't really any assigned seats.

I don't think Rage qualifies as rap because they have an actual band with a guitarist, bassist, drummer, etc. despite the fact that the singer raps between screams. I'd reclassify them as more rock than rap.

Casey Mittelstadt should only be addressed as Lord Casey (pbuh) or Lord MotherF*cking Casey. Anything else and you risk being smited and sent directly to hell. You heathens and non-believers need to respect a goddamn deity when you discuss one.

The Bills might not even win a game before the Sabres do at this point. I'll set the over/under for both team for early November at this point.

Gotta love how even in a twisted moment of self delusion, the best a Bills fan can hope for is to go to the Super Bowl, not even win it.

It's gonna be hilarious if the goalie coach for the Islanders makes him sharpen his skates and Lehner ends up winning the Veznia.

I'm not sure how anyone else sees it, but I perceive it in a negative connotation. I'm using it in a weighing the line down sort of way, similar to the way Eichel had to drag around Pominville's corpse last season. And for the record, I mean no insult to real anchors which are actually useful. Personally, I'd rather stick the old slow guys all on one line together and have them carry the load defensively with the tougher matchups. I'd rather let our younger speed guys like Eichel and Mittelstadt play easier match ups with offensive minded players like Sheary, Skinner, Reinhart, and whichever of the young guy step up to grab a spot with them. I like this. If we can change the colors to blue and gold, I think we've found our new shoulder patches for the 50th anniversary jerseys.

Can you imagine how much worse it would look if we traded Ristolainen just to shake up the core? People wanted to ship him out for Klefbom (another LHD) and a draft pick. It just boggles the mind.

This And this. Guhle is probably good enough to make the team (top 8) but he's better off playing top minutes in Rochester rather than playing spot duty or bottom pairing with the big club and since he's waiver eligible they should probably send him down until his play forces them to keep him up and feed him minutes.

The old three nickels and a slug for our shiny quarter. I call that The Botterill special. You get Botterill on the horn to iron out the details and I'll peruse HFboards to see what kind of 3rd liners fans are sick of that we can acquire. Then we can meet back up and have a team chock full of depth with no good players. We can probably trade Ristolainen for 3 or 4 left handed Swedes for the bottom pairing and trade Mittelstadt for a backup goalie, an entire 4th line, and 2 first rounders in 2022 and 2023! Look out NHL! The Sabres are gearing up to be contenders in 2030!

You know it's going to happen. Instead of creating a MEH line of Sobotka, Berglund, and Okposo they are going to "spread the wealth" around so every line gets an anchor! Come on down, Jack, you get an anchor! Come on down, Casey, you get an anchor too! Anchors for all!

Yes. Imagine all the first round picks we could get! I can imagine the mock lineups now!

I guess Eichel isn't either.

Even die-hards have a breaking point though. If every Catholic church stood empty this coming up Sunday and the donations stopped coming in, they'd find the motivation to clean up their act quickly. Of course it probably won't happen though, so they'll continue on with business as usual. It's not unlike sports fandom in a way. The Sabres have thousands of die hards who bought tickets no matter how bad the team was/is and every year like clockwork they continued to raise prices. The waiting list for season tickets suddenly evaporates and they decide to NOT raise prices. I doubt it's a coincidence. Every individual church goer probably has his/her breaking point, it's just a question of how many more scandals have to break before guys like Eleven and Smell, (I'm going out on a limb and assuming you guys still attend services and put money in the collection plate) and the millions of others who attend service regularly say enough is enough. It probably won't take empty pews, maybe a 50% reduction in attendance and funds sends the message. Outside of that, I don't see anything changing. Scandals and bad press have been happening for decades now and nothing has stopped it yet.

Empty pews and empty coffers is the only way it happens. Bad press and very public lawsuits certainly hasn't shamed them into doing the right thing. Like any corrupt business (and religion is a business) the only way to hurt them is to hit them in their wallets.

You never know. The Kings have missed the playoffs after winning the Cup. Chicago had a dynasty and they've missed the playoffs recently. I didn't expect the Blues to miss the playoffs last year so a bottom 10 finish isn't exactly impossible. Injuries, bad goalies, something bad happening in the personal life of a coach or key player could make anything happen. We'll likely get the picks in 2019 but it's not in the bag yet.

They need a reformation. They should start by appointing some sort of board of directors (with no one from current leadership) and it needs to consists of mostly women. Organizations that exclude women from leadership tend to run into these problems whether it's the US Military, the Catholic Church, The Boy Scouts of America, many businesses, and so on. They need to make an example by kicking out the enablers in addition to the offenders all the way up the chain, even if that extends to the Pope himself. Anything less is just slapping a new coat of paint on a termite infested and dilapidated house that will continue to rot from the inside out. Allow women to be priests, cardinals, bishops, and pope and allow male priests to get married so the position isn't such a magnet for closet homosexuals. Major changes like this might actually help them get their act together and hopefully prevent the bulk of abuse in the future.

They aren't guaranteed to be 2019 picks. If I remember right they have protections that could push them off another year.

Yep. That's what I cling to at night as a fan. Those sweet 1st round picks in 2020 that might even possibly make the team in 5 years. That's certainly better than having either O'Reilly or Kane on the roster scoring goals and lacing up for the team now. We should just trade Eichel now. I bet we could get some team's 1st round picks for the next 5 years. Imagine the excitement!

Yes, I would have held onto the core and added pieces to it. Imagine having a center spine with Eichel, O'Reilly, and Mittelstadt while actually adding competent wingers like Skinner and Sheary to play with them. The core was productive, it's the ancillary pieces like Larsson, Girgensons, Pominville, Pouliot, Wilson, Josefson, etc. that didn't do squat. Move out the bums who can't produce, even if it means you're just re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic. That's better than moving out one of the handful of guys that actually produces. As for beating the dead horse either, you flat out asked me, and I answered.

It very well could. The difference is he'll be 28 or 29 when it ends and not 35 or older so the chances of it happening are less. That's one of the reasons I'm so pissed off at the O'Reilly trade. Sure he was signed to big money but the contract ends when he's 31 or 32 and most of the money had already been paid out. It would have been easy to dump it on a cap floor team in a couple years if he got hobbled by injuries or his production fell off a cliff.

You don't. The difference is young guys are cheap and cost controlled so you're not locked into any serious term with them. Even the Cody Hodgson contract was able to get bought out at only 1/3 the contract value, precisely because he was so young when he signed it and when we terminated it.

I wouldn't have traded Eichel, Reinhart, O'Reilly, Scandella, or Ristolainen. The rest of the roster (excluding the young promising guys/propsects like Mittelstadt, Guhle, Ullmark, etc.) I could take or leave. I would have at least talked to Kane about an extension which they failed to even explore based on what little information leaked out, although I still probably would have traded him around xmas when he was tearing it up and not held out for the 4 pieces that must include a 1st nonsense that was widely reported. I'd rather have (for example) one good prospect rather than a basket of lesser pieces. I'd rather have gotten a team's second best prospect (assuming they had a decent prospect pool) than what we got for Kane which looks like a nobody and a draft pick that might be ready to contribute in 2022 or somewhere along those lines. I definitely feel like they sold low on O'Reilly. Trading a quarter for 3 nickels and a slug that you hope turns into a dime or quarter is something that good teams up against the cap need to do, while bad teams like Buffalo should be looking to add to their talent not trading away one of their 5 most productive players. Also, I'm perfectly fine with the Scandella and Sheary trades as well as the Skinner one. I'm ok with taking on an anchor in order to secure a player they wanted. Taking on Pominville was a win because not only did we get Scandella but we moved out Ennis who is almost as big of an anchor as Pominville. I'm fine with taking on Hunwick to secure Sheary as well. Those anchors were necessary to secure the guys we really wanted. In and of themselves they aren't so bad but when you aggregate them together with Berglund and Sobotka it makes me feel like we may have enough anchors to sink the boat.

It's just pessimism based on how disappointing the team has been. Fool me twice and all that. Yeah, maybe they'll surprise me. I'm not going to hold my breath on that one though. I'm hoping they put together a MEH line filled with all my non-favorites (Sobotka, Berglund, and Okposo) and just give them all the grunt work but they'll probably have each guy on separate lines because every line needs an anchor (yeah yeah I haven't even seen 2/3 of them play for the Sabres but that's how I feel at the moment). Maybe Eichel will play like a $10 million per year player as well and Housley will win the Jack Adams. We'll have to wait and see. At this point the only reason I'll probably even bother to watch is Lord Casey (pbuh).

They usually are (minus a few superstars that seems to have struck some sort of Faustian deal with father time). See practically every major UFA acquisition since Free Agency has come into play. Fans celebrate as their teams lands some big UFA fish (usually a 27-28 year old) to a huge deal and within about 3 years (usually around 30-31) the team is regretting it, while there is still a half decade of declining years left on the contract. At least the league has limited contracts to only 8 years now though. Before that they were regretting the contracts for much longer.