Thorner

Very fair. Like this

Well said. - - - We need a win, and I think we get it. But what we really need as well is a Caps loss. Hopefully things continue as they have now for a while on the out of town scoreboard

Because it was a load-bearing scoreboard

it’s basically “Reductio ad absurdum” It’s just the idea of creating an argument or stance no one actually has and arguing against it to prove your un-contested stance true. Curry example: someone makes a valid criticism “curry had a bad game today”, and then once he goes off in normal fashion 2 days later, your ardent Curry defender, who can’t hear a word against their black and white stance, chimes in, “oh, I was told Curry totally sucked?” It’s the same thing with Adams sometimes, Sabres example: people ask “where are all the haters?!!” When we go 5-5, as if people demanding playoffs were saying “the sabres are incapable of ever winning another game ever” Ultimately, it’s just the refusal to accept even a small, valid criticism

Well that’s because you know ball

Honestly, “I told you so’s” are fine imo, encouraged even, as long as someone is calling their shot in advance. Put it in writing. Most of the “I told you so’s” around here are in the vein of “I was told Steph curry couldn’t shoot?!” when we win 2 in a row and people ask where all the Adams haters are. i don’t care if you don’t expect playoffs until 2030: just say that’s your expectation. Admit your bias: everyone has one. I have one. I’m biased towards measuring by macro results above all else. But I’ve admitted that constantly. But more so, like Adams, there are some who just want to leave the metrics they are going to evaluate by twisting in the wind, so that we don’t ever actually have to achieve anything concrete: the stance never has to be amended. There’s a poster here who takes personal shots at me endlessly rather than focusing on shots at the posts themselves and I was still the first to give him props for “calling” UPL when he said his “told you so.” As the Irishman says: “It’s what it is.”

I’m quoting you but it’s like no one read the article/post I thought it self-explanatory at first too but there’s actually an interesting variable at play, it’s about a team’s goal differential swinging wildly from one period to the next it’s specifically about this year’s team

Ayup. Dollars to donuts I’m a “killjoy” yet multiple posters say I’m dreaming when I say we can make the playoffs, and say I’m waisting my time when I’m drawing up and detailing all these scenarios for making it. The truth is I’m in the middle, and talk a lot, so whether the board is going off the rails with a loss, or going off the rails with a win, there’s a certain segment to which I look like an outlier a little less for the extremes would be welcome

Name em

It’s interesting to think about. What the philosophy was. Granato and Okposo stated outright it was about winning this year. Obviously they are versed in league relative reality. I’ll link those quotes after. The funniest quote in retrospect is what Adams had to say: “Our expectation is to win the Stanley Cup. Period,” Adams said. “And, so, I don't want to get lost and all the other things that have to happen but here's the reality: “To win the Stanley Cup you have to win four rounds in the playoffs. To win four rounds in the playoffs, you have to make the playoffs. To make the playoffs, you have to win a lot of hockey games. “To win a lot of hockey games during the season, you have to be a consistent team, a resilient team, a team that is able to handle adversity, highs and lows, matures. Those are the things that add up. So, at the end of the day, if you peel it all back and you boil it all down, it's about getting better every day.” You can literally *feel* the sweat adding up on his forehead as he says it. You can see what is happening, right? He simply refuses to say “the goal this season is to make the playoffs.” Because he’s hiding. He boils it down to the simplest thing, “get better every day”, b/c HE KNOWS he can put his tail between his legs and revert back to “process!” at the drop of a hat. We don’t need to win the cup, we don’t even need to make the playoffs this year, cause don’t worry, we are ALREADY DOING ALL THOSE THINGS, we just can’t see it, yet! “So, at the end of the day”. Absurd. - - - “And, so, I don't want to get lost and all the other things that have to happen” LMAO “I don’t want to get lost in all the markers like making the playoffs that would indicate whether my plan is going well or not.”

Freaking frauds. All of them

I don’t know who the captain should be but it sure as shite shouldn’t be this fool “Still.” We got *younger* this year, by choice. It’s a choice. It’s not a hidden loophole for having expectations. Dear lord. They may be even younger next year. No expectations if that’s the case? dear LORD. Ice a winner. Stop tricking the fans into saying anything needs to be “built.” Just insulting the fans right to their face. Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a fan of this organization

Keep saying it, it’s fun to be “in the hunt” but that it’s even theoretically possible is significantly more a reflection of how bad this range of the league is this year than any sort of aptitude on our part. It comes back to the most frustrating thing about the drought: *it’s not hard to make the playoffs*. A team that isn’t good is going to make it and we can’t even be that, ever We didn’t even need to improve this year, we merely needed to equal our 91 points and we’d likely be in. But instead of attempting an offseason where we actually built on things, aimed for something, didn’t sit on our laurels and left it all to career-year chance, we just ran it back and left ourselves no room for step-back error its infuriating. If they weren’t allergic to expectations and moving this along as slowly as humanly possible we could have easily been in a position where even the set backs we saw wouldn’t have prevented a playoff berth. We always just run a “if everything goes right” strategy rather than incorporating fail safes in acting like achieving a goal is actually being demanded

I still emphasize Cup in lord stanley’s Cup No one says LORD stanley’s cup none of this obviously matters I just agree with PA There are lots of bays but people don’t usually say GREEN bay. They say green BAY. At least anecdotally from what I see on tv a game against TAMPA bay…a game against Tampa BAY. At least I personally say it with emphasis on the latter good discussion for a distraction

It’s the stanley CUP There’s only one Cup in hockey worth winning so emphasis on Stanley just seems wrong

Kraken in their joint today. I’ve only got it in me to smoke one of those tonight, Sabres gotta hold up their end of the bargain

A win against Seattle and Detroit losing to Pittsburgh is worth just as much as beating Detroit head to head. If we win any 10 games we would have a reasonable shot of making it, regardless of the 4 we lose Those teams are simply losing a bunch of games right now If we win the amount of games we need it’ll likely get us in regardless of which games One thing you can’t do is look past Sidney Crosby and his leadership and ability. That’s the only team that actually is individually scary imo. There’s a Rushmore talent on that squad who rounds out his all around game for every point that erodes away with age.

If Philly totally tanked it would help, but Islanders would get their spot in the division so we’d still have to ensure we are ahead of Detroit and Washington basically it would prevent us from having to catch the islanders specifically but I’m not sure if they are the favourite at this point

These teams lose all the time it’s more about finding a way to win 9 more than winning those specific games. If they don’t drop them to us they will drop them to someone else the next day If they pick up any 20 points out of the 28 remaining the have a good shot

Bump

Devils down. Islanders down. Wings down. Like I was saying… there’s hope here for like a cutoff at 89 points or something Actually yes, if the Caps lose tonight the current projected cutoff would be 89 points 9–3-2 gets us in the playoffs probably.

It’s not that buffalo doesn’t have some issues that affect them vs some teams but the issue is there’s an astronomical gap between how one measures how much affect those things have, vs our actual output. The Winnipeg Jets are LESS desired of a location and they’ve been in the playoffs MULTIPLE times over the last 13 years. We haven’t made it once. We generally haven’t even come close. It shows you how much of a definitive factor “GM aptitude” is. It made all the difference Yes, there are challenges but there’s a chasm between 13 years missed and the success they have had, as a LESS desired market. It presents an excuse for why winning the cup is hard. It presents an excuse for maybe why we’d see a 3/4 year drought when most teams see only 2/3. But we went to 13. 4 purely in this regime so far. With the amount of variables that go into building a team, our deficiencies in one area relative to only some teams don’t come close to presenting a viable excuse for anything close to what we’ve seen. It’s an infinitesimal portion of it Also imho your comment on Eichel is just wrong. It’s sort of flabbergasting that, still, while being first hand witnesses to the ineptitude for this long, and seeing how these guys have gone on to IMMEDIATE, upper echelon success after leaving, that we STILL can’t grasp the concept that in the NHL it doesn’t matter how good your star player is if you don’t build a team the issue was never that Eichel wasn’t McDavid, the issue was we employed a strategy where we were *counting* on Eichel to be McDavid its wrong on two severe levels: - it’s an incredibly dumb, shot in the dark hope to pin your franchise fate on - even if he was it doesn’t matter if you don’t build a team

I think age is probably a bigger factor. Especially in this case: what good is “experience” if that experience is a net negative under Krueger? If anything Dahlin went backwards For a time, and had to claw it back. I’d take the 3 years in the mile high over 5 in this mess re: development ground

Sabres could probably lose 4 more games and still have a shot. If two of those are in OT that’s 91 points. Washington leads the pack pacing for 90.6 right now There are no “good” teams in the mix 10-2-2 It’s very unlikely we do even that but, again, that we are sitting at 69 freaking points (nice) with a handful of games left and are still realistically alive is a testament to how bad this area of the east is this year

They are a year apart. I don’t see Byram having a greater development runway than Dahlin The appropriate question is: Is Byram this year as good as Dahlin was last year, when Dahlin was the same age. It’s a resounding no