Thorner

It hurts to hear the truth sometimes, I know

-13, -7, -36, -22, +12, -12 Dahlin’s plus minus hole bugs me in that I hate the idea he might never climb out of it. That +12 from last year I thought might indicate the beginning of a potential climb out but now we’re right back in the muck. Used to bug me with Jack too Since I’m already that, perhaps I’ll get some double negative action going on

If we had 3 shots that period we didn’t get goalied

No I said namesake kin. I don’t know if that’s even a proper turn of phrase but I assumed the connotation was discernible. But it’s not that common of a name, I’d guess there’s a reasonable shot

What a great development from this season. KA has a really chance here to finally turn a weakness into a strength: passing up the opportunity to roster a capable backup next season would be disastrous when this close I’m not actually Spartacus, no

IM SPARTACUS Ally Sheedy! My most famous namesake kin Great shooting kid that was 2 in a million

Teams will be game planning in a way for Tage this season they didn’t come close to last season, that’s also a factor

Sure every team (in the east) made the playoffs with a positive goal differential, but teams miss with positive differentials all the time. It’s not tangibly relevant to this season. OUR team isn’t making up that kind of ground with a mere 13 further goals. Mathematically, ~ 6 are going to be spread out over games we already won. Of the remaining 7, half come in games we lose regardless. Probably an extra 3.5 wins with an average PP: that seems about right. 7 more points and we are still in a tie for 18th. This is what I mean: you are shaving fine on an already bottom of the barrel goal. When you haven’t made the playoffs in over an eon, surely we need to do better than that. That’s we’d be a positive differential team, maybe, with an improved pp isn’t enough given all of this context. If we don’t beat the Kings 7-0 the differential isn’t positive anymore. It’s way too frivolous, and devoid of context, to hang out hats on that. Maybe every positive differential team got in last year, but the minimum number in the east was +17. The year before it was +30. please aim higher than a pp coaching change followed by putting your feet up, KA

The PP is a big part of it: that theory is strong. Don’t mean to say it’s not. It’s just very important that we don’t pretend it’s a one-stop answer to all our problems. Because there are other very significant issues.

Sure, I’m good with that Just wanted to point out that the “squint really hard at a really low level expectation already and plan to make a solitary change that maybe gets us half-way there in a best case scenario and hope for the best” line of thinking is very frivolous.

A league average PP would have us with 13 more goals this season. That’s it - that’s the league average mark this season. The difference between 27th place and being a good, solid playoff team is not 13 goals over the last 50 games.

No, it’s not. Dangerously close to imbibing the Adams mindset This is exactly, exactly why we are in the position we are this season and we haven’t even finished putting the finishing touches our near-bottom of the league finish and people are calling for a reenactment of the same approach. Smh at some point we can’t blame the organization, im sorry

Matt Duchene went egregiously offside once and now the league needs to suffer death by a thousand paper cuts willingly by choice LOSING

You know what would be better than the current replay system in every sport? getting entirely rid of the replay system in every sport It’s a development year for our commentary team

Part of me wishes we got a coaching change purely for the feeling we had something to watch for, coming down the stretch here: I’m not sure that 3.4% playoffs odds mark is going to do it for much longer. Otherwise, any sort of potential uptick in play is going to being heavily reminiscent of “garbage time yardage” leaving us basically with a count down to this summer to see what Adams can do to shift the roster. I’m hoping it’s not tumbleweeds until the excitement of game 1 next season

Dead last, 24th, 20th, 27th. Those are our outputs. objectively ass

The real problem is sitting in 27th place, after 12 poor years. It’s not perception: we are the 27th ranked team when all factors that go in to measuring a hockey team are included. “5 V 5 offence” is the skewed perspective. It’s really a great example of how muddied and unreflective things get when people get to dial in on one variable. Maybe if we were FIRST in even strength goals it would be something to write home about. 12th is nothing, when that’s your highest rank and you haven’t yet gotten to: - even strength defence - special teams - goaltending (half the goaltending output this year has been provided by 2 non-NHL goalies) I don’t know exactly how to fix this but I can say with a great degree of certainty that the more management tries to pigeonhole the issues onto one solitary aspect, the less likely we will succeed. We saw what happened with the team when we ran it back an attempted to simply fix what we needed internally without any expected drop off Not to mention the fact differential is barely reflective as we are vibes based, “we back?” Front Runners. *inarguably* the most reflective stat is our record. Tale as old as sports time. It’s so much easier to understand the drop off this year when one accepts that. We finished 20th last year. We weren’t that good. Adams hasn’t fielded a good team in 4 years. This is a fact.

It’s bad that this was my first thought, too lol

I agree there’ll be an uptick. He’s very likely somewhere in the middle. I do think he can be a 60-70 point guy going forward. Point a game here and there not out of the question

Hmm have the Pegulas looked into this? Could be a solid business model

Realistically it’s hard to be a Sabres fan regardless of where you live. Living in Winnipeg has only ever made me dislike the Jets and become jealous of their success relative to my team but then again I can be a petty a-hole sometimes Consider for a moment there are infinite alternate parallel universes (there are):

If we go 29-0 to wrap up we can get to 108 points would have been good for 3rd in Atlantic last year. Nothing to schnozzz at