LGR4GM

As an American, I don't really have an attachment to the monarchy but it is sad that such a long standing figure has passed away.

For the top 6. He will be a mainstay on the 2nd pp unit in the Olofsson role so I am not worried there.

Who are the other winger options he has to beat out? Really it is Mitts (if they move him to lw), Hinostroza, Bjork, and maybe Krebs?

FTR I don't think Perrault was arguing to just add a fighter but wants someone on the roster who will fight (hence why he mentioned cozens) but in my mind I don't need one guy who will do that, I need everyone on the ice coming to the defense of a teammate. I hope that explains what I think of better. Fully agree with the bolded part.

1 person being able to "answer the bell" means jack *****. We have a decade of the Sabres adding that one fighter guy to protect guys, all it resulted in was losing. You either fight as a team or you fail. One guy doesn't mean much.

I think that is what is happening, yes. I would guess it is a software limitation.

Yes, I know that Stutzle is 4 years younger.

Stutzle just got a bigger contract than Tage. He is younger but still interesting.

I'm skeptical of it. I think there are about to be 2 TE out of Georgia that can do more but maybe Knox proves me wrong, hope to see more out of him this season.

His SHL club jerked him around all season with low playing time because surprise surprise, the 19 yr old kid wasn't SHL ready. Getting 9-10min a night in the SHL isn't exactly great development and in Rochester at the very least they can control when he plays and if it is 10mins a night they can directly work with him to get more ice time. It took until February to get Rosen into the Allsveskan which is the 2nd tier of Swedish hockey, the level he probably should have been at. Also I think physically speaking Rosen needs the NA environment to work on his muscle. Also also he needs the NA American development staff to teach him how to play better without the puck, he can't just rely on his speed and skating all the time. Basically I think that he wasn't SHL ready, instead of dealing with that early his SHL team forced him to play where he wasn't ready. I think his development stalled somewhat and now in NA the Sabres can directly control that development hopefully jumpstarting it.

and we have no idea who had access to this stuff, or who paid for access.

I think Lybushkin is here if Power shies away from anything (which I don't see happening). As to the second part, Mattias Samuelson losing confidence under this coaching staff and knowing what we know about Muel's personality seems highly unlikely.

I will add to this quickly so y'all can see the numbers. In the 3 seasons Tage played (2017, 2018, 2020), he had 144 games with 18 goals and 259 shots for a total of 6.95sh% Last season (2022), Tage played in 78 games with 38 goals and 253 shots for a total of 15sh%. That means that on 49.4% of his shots, his shot percentage was 15% In reality, we don't have a good idea what Tage's sh% really should average out to because of this. His shots per game went from 1.8 shots per game to 3.24 and we have the better shooting. I fully get why Skinner comes up in conversation but if we look at Jeff Skinner, he had shot 2177 times before we gave him that contract. The year he shot 14.9% with Buffalo he had 268 shots which was only 12.3% of the total shots he had taken in the NHL to that point. His sh% average of 11.2% to that point was basically locked in. That is what Jeff Skinner will shoot year in and year out. This past year he shot 12.6 which is within a standard deviation (trust me, I am not doing the math). The issue with Skinner is that 9mil was always too much (8 was probably the number and for 6 years), the cap stopped going up so it looks bad even today, and he had 2 years under Kruegers system and IK this seems like a scapegoat but... Ralph Kruegers style of hockey is the polar opposite of how Jeff Skinner plays and it shows when his sh% dropped to numbers that he hadn't had since 2014 and then dropped below that in Kruegers 2nd year. Good news is last year we got the rebound to 12.6 which is again right around his career average (which is now at 10.7 because of the atrocious krueger years of 7.7 and 6.3%). Okay so where is Liger going with all of this. What I am trying to say is Jeff Skinner is a bad comparison. Sure we can say that his 14.9% in his contract year is an outlier but it isn't that big of an outlier, Jeff Skinner should be a 30g scorer most years. He is overpaid for sure. This however is very different than Tage Thompson because where as Jeff Skinner had shot 2177 times, Tage has shot only 512 and the 38goal season accounts for 49.4% of all the shots he has taken, not 12.3%. This leads me to the conclusion that it is far more likely that Tage is closer to a 15% shooter than the previous mark of 6.95% because we have seen players in years 1 and 2 shoot about 250 times and have similar-ish numbers and then in year 3 it bumps up and levels off. Where Tage falls between those 2 numbers is up for debate but right now his sh% of 11.6 seems right. If he is even slightly above that for his average, say 12%, that means he will get 30 goals on 253 shots which is probably who he is (40 goals seems too high but again, we don't know yet). The comparable here is Dylan Cozens who currently sits at 222 total NHL shots with a 7.7sh% for his average. If he is going to jump, we need about 200 shots from him this year to start to pinpoint where he will jump too. He already went from 6.5 to 8.1 so there is movement there. Time will tell but if he can hit 10%, we will be in good business. My conclusion is that the Sabres are gambling but not as much as looking at yearly sh% would indicate. If you judge based on shots taken, I tend to believe that if he can shoot 15% on half of his shots, it's likely that he isn't the 6.95% shooter he was in his first 3 seasons. The jump in sh% seems logical. We will know by the All-Star break for sure. I agree. If we use the eye test, Tage Thompson looked different. Idk about you but I and others yelled for years that Tage loved this big slap shot that never worked and resulted in blocked shots or even getting stripped of the puck. Haven't seen it outside of a powerplay one timer.

He has some Czech players in Rochester to lean on. I think the Sabres value the ability to control his toi and development as opposed to leaving it to the whims of others which is what happened to Rosen.

I'll keep saying it. Sh% is only half of an equation and the other half for Tage is important. He took 50% of the total number of shots he's taken in the NHL last year. That's right, his 253 shots last year accounts for half of all the nhl level shots he's ever taken. So if we blindly go year to year looking at sh%, we're missing a key element. Something significant changed for Tage and it wasn't just a 1yr sh% increase.

Since I appreciate where you're coming from I'm gonna defend you a bit. Kulich has some easily translated skills. His shot and skating. He's probably the strongest physically of the 3 firsts and he's pretty smart. I love Kulich and am really glad we got him.

It will be an easy decision. Kulich isn't making the 2022 Buffalo Sabres. In 2023 it might become a difficult decision but this year, it's really easy to pencil Kulich into Rochester. He won't be Sabre.

Rochester's? Don't see how they could, Kulich was going to play against men either way this season.

Im tired of playing this game though. It is always, "well we have these other centers so we could move on if needed" yet none of those listed guys have come close to Tage's production. Mitts is already being talked about at wing and Krebs finished on the wing last year. Kulich is most likely a NHL winger, not a center so that gives us what? Mitts (maybe), Cozens, Savoie, and Östlund. You need at least 1 in this scenario to get 35g and almost 70pts in their prime to replace Tage. I would rather bet on the guy that did it once.

To be honest, since he is AHL eligible and already played against men last year, there is very little reason to send him back to the Czechia league as opposed to simply developing him on NA ice in Rochester with your dev staff.

NA ice Kulich with a full year of Sabres dev... sign me the F up.