dudacek

Wow! A little surprised, but if he's legit, that's a wonderful contract. And he certainly looked legit last year.

puckpedia tweeted that UPL’s hearing is on July 29.

He'll be 28, so unless there is a weird clause I'm unaware of, he should be. It's 7 years NHL experience, or 27 years year old, which ever comes first.

I’ve shifted a bit on that one, from two directions. First of all they’ve got nobody who can make plays like Zegras can. He’s going to set up Thompson and/or Cozens in a way the other top 6 forwards can’t, particularly on the PP. 2ndly: Jost, Mitts, Skinner and Olofsson don’t play for this team anymore and the new forwards come hard; the identity up front has changed. I wouldn’t have wanted to add him to last year’s group, but I think there’s room for him in this year’s.

Ah, so it's because the arbitration had already been filed for. Makes sense. Love the breadth of knowledge on this board.

I find the internet chatter on Malenstyn gratifying. There's a lot of "who?" and "a 2nd-rounder for him?" and discussions around his charts. But whenever you come across a poster that has actually watched a lot of him play, the verdict is almost universally "fast, physical and honest, Sabres fans are going to love him."

Thanks. Am I wrong that settlement was a weird choice of words? I'm used to signed, or agreed or some other more active/positive term. More importantly, can Malenstyn be a better player than Girgensons was last year at half the price?

Elliotte called it a settlement? Does that mean he's not sure if it was the result of a hearing, or a negotiation?

So you thought I was disagreeing with you? I agree with the bold. Never said otherwise. Things like that don’t mean you are mature, they challenge you to mature. And they affect your choices in other areas of your life.

. I’m agreeing with you that being a veteran is more about experience than age. But if it’s your contention that it’s solely about the number of games played, I think that’s equally as narrow Being a veteran is really about a state of mind. External factors, especially ones like these have everything to do with one’s approach to life and career

Exactly. I think there are 2 streams and they’re both important The first is on-ice experience: having enough games under your belt at NHL speed that you know what you can and cannot get away with during a game The 2nd is off-ice experience knowing the kinds of off-ice routines and behaviours that can help maximize on-ice performance. I think the Sabres can benefit from more experience, but I also strongly believe most of them have been around long enough that lack of experience is no longer a flaw, its a crutch. They’re beyond having a Gionta hold their hand. 24 and 200 games and you should be ready to stand on your own skates. Zack Benson is a boy. Cozens, Dahlin, Samuelson, UPL, Thompson…? Young men who need to approach their vocation as such,

Agreed, but you can’t dismiss age entirely either. It’s maturity and arrives at different times and different ways. Power got engaged. Krebs has a kid due soon.

And there’s the whole thing about what makes a veteran. Dahlin is 24 and has played more than 400 games but never played a playoff game. Byram has been around 4 seasons and played a key role on a Stanley Cup winner. He’s also 23 and has only 160ish regular season games played. Whatever their age and experience, most of them need to show some maturity.

Kids (18-23) Benson, Power, Peterka, Levi, Quinn, Byram, Cozens, Krebs, Prime (24-29) Dahlin, Samuelsson, McLeod, Jokiharju, Luukkonen, Malenstyn, Bryson, Thompson, Greenway, Gilbert, Tuch, Aube-Kubel, Clifton, Lafferty, Veteran (30+) Zucker, Reimer A little deeper look shows that by January, that the 11 italicized players — about half the team — will be 23, 24, or 25.

Good post, but I disagree with the bold. He's saying the other two caught a break sometimes that inflated their numbers whereas Malenstyn did not. All three were mostly charged with holding up a wall, and all three were good at it. But Malenstyn was always charged with holding up the wall and sometimes he had to do it without the help of the other two. The other two got breaks from wall-holding and rarely had to wall-hold without Malenstyn. You're saying that the deployment doesn't prove Malenstyn was always wall-holding, and you may be right, but it suggests he was a lot more than it doesn't. And it is coming not from 'just' a number-cruncher, but a number-cruncher who regularly watches the Capitals and should have a good sense of how those guys were being deployed away from each other. I may be underestimating Aube-Kubel. He's a guy a haven't seen much and Malenstyn not really at all. Lafferty, at least, I've watched my share of with the Canucks. I need summer to be over so we can get a look at how Lindy plans to utilize his tools.

Listing J Fresh cards doesn't prove anything other than how what a player did shows on J Fresh calculations. (Trying to be funny to make a point, not be snarky. 😁 I see it as all relevant information to weigh as each of us sees fit.)

J Fresh may be right, but the Sabres disagree. That's why they spent one year, $1.5M on Aube-Kubel, two years, $4.2M on Lafferty, a 2nd-rounder, 2 years and over $6M on Greenway and a 2nd-rounder and the risk of arbitration on Malenstyn.

From a Caps fan on HFboards: I wanna take a little deeper dive here to point out just how brutal the minutes for Washington's "4th" line are and how nuts it is that they're performing so well anyway. The individual members of that line have started their shifts in the offensive zone 7.98% of the time (NAK), 8.02% of the time (Malenstyn), and 9.29% of the time (Dowd) over ~400 minutes of 5 on 5 play each. As you mentioned, as a unit they've outscored opponents 13-6 at 5 on 5. OZ Start% as a statistic dates back to the 07-08 season, and in that time only one player has posted a sub 10% season while playing at least 300 minutes at 5 on 5: Paul Gaustad in 15/16. He had 5.76% OZ Starts and was outscored 6-21. Coincidentally, Gaustad had been traded with a 4th for a 1st as a pure rental at the 2012 trade deadline, the only 4th line center I can think of who was traded for a 1st rounder. That year he ranked 8th out of 626 skaters with 31.98% OZ Starts. One of the things you notice as you go through OZ Start% year by year is that giving players extreme deployments in one direction or another is a pretty recent phenomenon. In 07/08, the skater with the lowest OZ Start% was Bobby Holik at 29.62%. This season, that number would good for 30th. Long story short, the Caps 4th line is at the forefront of the current trend of highly specialized deployments, and as a result they're playing quite possibly the most brutal minutes of any line in the history of hockey, on a team that's overall been outscored 71-90 at 5 on 5 (58-84 if you factor their line out)... and they're outscoring their opponents by a 2-1 margin in the process. It's insane, it shouldn't be possible, and yet it's happening. Nic Dowd should've been the Caps' All Star, and he should legitimately be in the Selke conversation. More, same source: Tangent from the Beck Malenstyn stuff - Beck is a textbook example of why with/without models are flawed. The RMNB article gives this player card from Evolving Hockey which evaluates him as a bad offensive player and an atrocious defender. At the same time, it rates Dowd and NAK as both being average offensively and elite (90+) defensively. It think Beck was the passenger on that line, but in reality Beck was the player that defined the shutdown line. You can see through Natural Stat Trick's Line Stats tool that when that line was together, they got 7.65% OZ Faceoffs. So what happens when they break up? NAK solo: 53.1% Dowd solo: 35.7% NAK+Dowd without Beck: 35.3% Beck solo: 20.4% For some league-wide context, if Malenstyn had 20.4% for the season that would drop his rank amongst forwards from 1/771 to 8/771, min 100 minutes played - still 1st percentile for hardest deployments. What does a with/without model see in this context? Well when Dowd and NAK play away Beck they get significantly easier deployments with more skilled teammates, so their numbers improve away from him. Meanwhile, when Beck's away from Dowd and NAK he's being asked to play the same shutdown role, but now with teammates who aren't as well suited to it, so those teammates who are normally being sheltered by Beck's line see their numbers plummet. The model interprets this as Beck being a drag on all the players around him, so it gives him low scores. This is the fundamental issue with these kinds of models. They'll always underrate players who consistently get tough, defensively-focused deployments, and they'll always overrate players who consistently easy, offensively-focused deployments. Hence why these models always seem to love the sheltered third pairing offensive defenseman or the speedy young winger the coach doesn't trust in his own zone and hate the steady, D-first guys that coaches lean on. I think there's some value to these models for the guys in the middle, but it inherently can't handle the edge cases.

Another player I'm really curious about after the off-season shuffle is Peyton Krebs. The off-season changes and acquisition of McLeod has, in most people's minds, pushed him from a poor fit as 3C to a spare part as the 13th forward. Given his actions (and rumours of Krebs being trade bait) I'm inclined to think Kevyn Adams' post-season positive comments about Krebs to be utter bullspit. But what if it wasn't? I think Donnie Granato did a fine job of developing the young Sabres under his watch, but Krebs always seemed to be the lowest man on his totem pole. While guys like Peterka and Thompson kept getting given prime ice time and opportunities to "learn by doing", Krebs got treated like a normal rookie: bottom six minutes, bottom six linemates; keep your head down, skate hard and don't ***** up. A thing that doesn't really get talked about much is how much his game has changed as a result. Remember, this was a kid, who, in his last year of junior, was playing a 1C role and putting up numbers like Matt Savoie. You can't always put a ton of emphasis on counting stats, but I think these numbers are reflective of how much Krebs has transformed in just two seasons: 2022: GP: 48, P: 22, +/-: -20, Hits: 19, Giveways: 31 2024: GP: 80, P: 17, +/-: +2, Hits: 108, Giveways: 13 I watched quite a bit of Krebs before he got to the NHL. The pace is similar, but he doesn't really look like the same player. The teenage Krebs loved to have the puck on his stick, was always around it, and was constantly looking to make plays. Last year's Krebs looked like your textbook NHL 4th-line centre: skate hard, hold the fort for 40 seconds, get off. Don't get me wrong. At 20, Krebs was a turnover waiting to happen; he needed to learn how to be responsible with the puck and take care of the details because he was never going to be driving offence in the NHL. But now that he's discovered a more responsible base — he's actually pretty good now defensively — I wonder if there's room to tap back into his offensive game. And that's where Lindy Ruff comes in. With his rough edges now smoothed, Krebs does seem like a Lindy-type player: competitive, plays fast, works, coachable. With no baggage, will Krebs be able to forge a new role under Lindy? Could we see him feeding Zucker or another shooter on a 2-way line, while the new guys handle the heavy lifting defensively? Could he move back to wing and carve out a role next to Cozens, like he did so well for Team Canada? Can he grow and expand his role as a 4C so he becomes, in effect, another version of what we think we are getting in McLeod He's right at the crucial 200-game spot, with a new coach and a measure of opportunity in front him. it's a pivotal year for his career. Personally, I don't think any of the above happens. I think the writing is on the wall for him in Buffalo. He plays a fair amount in the bottom 6, gets moved to another team, and goes onto a decent career as a 3rd-liner elsewhere. But it's July, and it's fun to think about possibilities.

I've seen a lot of people taking a forechecking 4th-line of Malenstyn-Lafferty-Aube-Kuble kinda for granted. And while I like that line, I'm still kinda fixated on two things: I don't think the Sabres gave up a 2nd-round pick for Beck Malenstyn to play him 12 minutes a night on the 4th line I'm not going to force Don Granato deployments or Sabrespace prejudices onto Lindy Ruff. What if Lindy is thinking of putting his three best defensive players together and running an old-school 3rd line checking line: Malenstyn McLeod Greenway What if Malenstyn is tapped to be the hammer and the defensive conscience with more skill guys in the top 6, like Grier was: Malenstyn Cozens Quinn or Malenstyn Thompson Tuch Not enough offence? Grier had 7 goals and 23 points in 81 games in '06 playing with Drury, who scored 30. Malenstyn had 6 and 21 in 81 games last year with Nick Dowd.

🤷‍♂️

Adams' feelings about UPL aside, I think you guys are forgetting the context in June of 2022 with the Leinonen pick. The Sabres had drafted just one goalie in the previous 4 drafts and only two in the past 7. They had the rights to 2 college goalies, but there was some uncertainty as to whether either of them (Levi, Portillo) was going to sign. Their NHL goalies the previous year were UFAs Craig Anderson, Dustin Tokarski and Aaron Dell And UPL was literally the only goalie in the system. He might have been a ***** pick, but the concept of him had become a necessity because of years of ***** management.

Maybe my arguments fail because you're having an entirely different discussion than I am? My post had nothing to do with excusing the Sabres for being ***** — for Adams tenure, or the entire 13 years. I never suggested anything like the bold. You're not arguing with me. My post was entirely in the context of the discussion that preceded it; I was describing why I want to "be good," not "just make the playoffs". It's not good enough to be Philadelphia in the East. I want to be the team that makes the playoffs 8 year in a row, not the one that makes it 2 out 12.

I'd just like to point out that the Carolina Panthers have been in the playoffs 6 years in row. Before that they missed 9 consecutive years. The Tampa Lightning have been in the playoffs 11 years in a row. Before that, they missed 5 out of 6. Toronto? 8 years in a row. Before that, they missed 10 of 11. Florida? 5 years in a row. Before that, they missed 6 of 7, and 16 of 18 Boston, Pittsburgh, Washington have been good for a long, long time Sure, it's easy to make the playoffs in the eastern conference — once you're good. Yes, making the playoffs like New jersey has — once out the past 6 years, 2 of the last 12 — is better than what the Sabres have done, but the Eastern conference is a collection of haves and have-nots, and has been for some time. I wanna be a have.

No I'm not saying the bold either, at least not exactly. Yes, if the Sabres put up 98 points next year with Dahlin and Tuch out for 60 games and still miss, I'd probably keep him on. But in most cases of a miss he'd need to go, not because he missed the playoffs, but because his plan failed. Accumulating a critical mass of young talent and letting it grow and emerge at the same time together is a good plan: it's how most of the best franchises get built. Generally speaking, if this core does not emerge this year, after 3-5 years pro, it's not because they were too young, it's because they weren't good enough or developed properly. Like you always said about Murray, it's not the plan that was wrong, it was the execution.