Drunkard

I'd take Miller back as well to rotate with Ullmark. At the very least we'd be able to hold our own in shootouts once again.

Sounds right. 54.5 cents per mile is the current government rate for reimbursement whenever I have to drive my personal vehicle for work related matters. We get no reimbursement for regular commuting miles though, only from the office to work related locations and back to the office.

O'Reilly is far and away our best defensive center. He should not be moved to wing. I'd put Eichel on O'Reilly's wing before I'd put O'Reilly on Eichel's wing.

The problem with this is you can only retain on 3 salaries at any given time so retaining on O'Reilly would only allow us to retain on 2 salaries for the next 5 seasons. Not exactly good for flexibility with future deals. If a team is willing to offer enough in trade to satisfy GMJB but is short on the cap space to make the deal we'd be better off taking a dump from that team with a couple years of term on their deal rather than hamstringing ourselves for the next 5 seasons.

At this point we're guaranteed to draft top 5. While some luck in the lottery would be nice, I'm not expecting it whatsoever.

Not really. I actually agree with a lot of his post, minus the religious babble. Patrick Kaleta was my favorite player and they ran him out of the league for all of his questionable and dirty hits, so if fair was fair the same would happen to Hartnell and any other player that repeatedly injures others with dirty hits. Like many others, I'd prefer consistency in the punishment process. For the record I don't care that people are religious in their personal lives. I have concerns if/when people in positions of power (coaches, owners, GM's, politicians, teachers, school boards, etc) use their personal beliefs to normalize their personal belief structures as standards that should be adhered to by everyone. That isn't the case here so it doesn't bother me one iota.

It can happen but basically everything has to go right and the all the new pieces have to click. O'Reilly is a good two way center but if he's your top center your team is toast. If he's cetering your third line you're probably a contender. Now we just have to get enough ancillary pieces to make that happen. Mittelstadt and a top 4 pick probably aren't enough to get that done next season, but it's a good start. We just need to move out some dead wood from the roster while hoping their replacements prove to be upgrades. If GMJB knows what he's doing the process starts next season and it comes to fruition shortly after. We'll see how it goes.

That Tkachuk review makes him sound like Ryan O'Reilly with a mean streak. I'd still rather have Svechnikov or Zadina because we are in such need of goal scoring but Tkachuk doesn't sound like a bad consolation prize if we lose out on the lottery and pick 4th.

He's definitely not untouchable, I just don't see anyone being interested enough to overpay. I agree about the rest of your list though. I think most of the roster changes will come from internal moves like CJ Smith, Baptiste, Bailey, and Mittelstadt replacing the plugs like Nolan, Josefson, Pouliot, and maybe even Pominville. Hell, they might even buy out or waive Bogosian (assuming he's ever healthy enough to get put on waivers) just to send a message that serious changes are needed.

I'll take Svechnikov in a heart beat even if he didn't play a lick of defense. Guy is a scoring machine and from the little map that gets posted on here from time to time comparing his goals and Zadina's goals, he scores from all over the ice. On a team where scoring is so difficult to come by, we can afford to overlook his defensive game. Put him with a guy who can play defense like Ryan O'Reilly or whomever and step back and watch him assault the other team's goalie with shots. Plus it's much easier to find defensively responsible forwards than it is to find scorers. They don't tend to be nearly as expensive in free agency or as expensive to acquire in trades.

Reinhart's season has seen plenty of ups and downs but in looking at the entirety of his ELC, he's managed to stay consistently healthy and produce seasons of 42, 47, and 44 points (plus whatever he produces in the last 5 games). There are a dozen bigger problems on the roster to deal with. Unless someone wants to severely overpay us for a 40 point winger, I don't think he'll be moved.

I'll ignore your outright blasphemy regarding our lord and savior Casey Mittelstadt (pbuh) for the moment. I also think Tkachuk will be ready to go next season as well, but no one really knows for sure so I'll move on. You may be right. If GMJB really wants to do a total shake up of the roster he should have no trouble selling off O'Reilly for a solid return. For all the griping about his emo mentality he's incredibly consistent, both in his time with the Sabres and previously with Colorado. I personally wouldn't want to trade him without getting a younger center back in return. He's our best defensive forward by a country mile and I'd worry about how badly our team defense would regress even further without having him to rely on. I hope he does allow the young guys from Rochester to start replacing our current bottom 6 forwards though. Our current bottom 6 is nothing to write home about so even if the new guys don't provide much of an upgrade they should at least be younger, cheaper, and faster. I'd rather watch CJ Smith make an occasional boneheaded decision for the first or second time than watch Nolan or Josefson make the same mistake for the 40th time.

Then we take Tkachuk and field a top 6 next year of consisting of Mittelstadt, Eichel, O'Reilly, Reinhart, Tkachuk, and Okposo. Not a bad crop of talent to choose from to fill out 2 scoring lines. After a few years we can hopefully hand Okposo's spot over to Nylander and move Kyle down to the 3rd line as he transitions into his 30's.

I think getting this 6 game look will help his adjust to the speed of the game and what it takes to produce in this league. Then he gets a summer off to train, build up his strength, and prepare for training camp. If he is somehow not ready, he could always go to Rochester but looking at the team roster, I find it hard to believe we'll have 12 or even 9 better forwards than him preventing him from making the team. We'll see where the chips fall next fall though.

Well, he didn't smite his enemies single handedly, but Lord Casey did hold his own and didn't look too out of place for the most part. He's speed is abundantly apparent and once he gets acclimated to the overall speed of the NHL he should prove to be one of our better players. I'm looking forward to seeing his next game.

I like it. Bless us all, Lord Casey!

Huh? That's not what I asked. You said that tanking required us to purge our top line, starting goalie, and replace the defense. I asked who was the center was from that top line that we had to trade in order to tank? We dumped a top line LW in Vanek, and a top line RW in Pominville, plus a quality starting goalie in Miller, so I'll give you that we dumped 2/3 of a mediocre top line in order to kickstart the tank, but we had no centers to speak of which is why we needed to tank to get one. Most of what we gave up for O'Reilly were spoils from the selloff as well so tanking did help to provide the assets to get him (Grigorenko and Zadorov were both first round picks that we took in years that we had multiple first round picks from selling off assets and tanking. I doubt Colorado would have been interested in trading O'Reilly for Vanek and Pominville. They wanted younger players and high picks.

Who was centering this theoretical 1st line that we had to eliminate to tank? Roy? Gaustad? Ennis? Bueller ... Bueller? I'm pretty sure the main reason we tanked was because we didn't have a 1st line center that was worth a damn and we're not the Rangers so it was impossible for us to just buy one.

Would we have even had the assets to bring in O'Reilly if we hadn't tanked? I don't remember the specifics but didn't we use tank assets to get that extra 1st round pick we used to get Zadorov, who seemed to be the key piece Colorado wanted in the O'Reilly deal? I think it was Gaustad but it may have been Pominville and we shipped them Grigorenko was well who was one of our 2 first round picks in 2012. Either way we also added a bunch of other pieces including Lemieux and another late first/early second that we wouldn't have add if we hadn't been stock piling assets by selling off our old core. Removing tanking from the equation and the O'Reilly deal likely never happens because some other team with more assets to spare likely outbids us easily.

They were supposed to keep their aging veterans like Pominville, Miller, and Ott while making Vanek the highest paid player in the league. Then we were supposed to rebuild the right way, with a bunch of picks in the teens. Anything less would be considered tanking and there would be a pox on us all.

Even if they try it, he'll just light them on fire and send them to hell. Problem solved.

Welcome to Buffalo Lord Casey (pbuh). Now give us a damn Ovechtrick already!

Yep. I'm interested in seeing who they believe should be the new face of their franchise and how they'll sell the fans on him.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I appreciate the insight.

What's your take on the Pegula organization touting the whole "man of faith" mantra recently? Pegula mentioned it when he hired McDermott and that guy (McDermott) seems to pimp his faith every chance he gets in press conferences. When Taylor got benched for Peterman they seemed to pump up what a man of faith he was before his train wreck of a first game and AJ McCarron is covered in religious tats. Do you get the sense that faith plays a significant role in the decision making process with the Bills and/or Sabres? Are any of the quarterback's expected to be drafted in the 1st round this year particularly Jesusy? At this point I expect them to draft the most religious one but I don't do social media (other than team message boards) so I don't have the patience/desire to figure out how to e-stalk these guys on twitter/facebook/Instagram or whatever to try to figure it out.