Thorner

And fart around and make the playoffs? Don’t want to get crazy here

If in his 4th season as GM Adams iced a team that can’t reasonably be expected to make the playoffs, that really would start and end the argument, no?

If true, that there was literally no option available (which I don’t believe can possibly have been true, especially because other teams have addressed GT) then it merely seeks to illustrate how poor of a decision KA made on Ullmark, when there was apparently no viable backup plan available. If the market was truly as bad as you are seeing, *ANYONE* could have seen it coming

My sabrespace persona switches from “beating dead horse narrative guy” in the offseason to “really? You still think they have a chance this season?” guy DURING the season, and I don’t actually change anything at all lol this place goes way up, and it goes way down

We need to trade for O’Reilly!

It’s always been about delivering a product worthy of the consumer. This is the final acknowledgement of the Fan. It’s on the team to create something for sale that people have an interest in buying: so it’s not surprising that when you make the purchase based on faith rather than results and actual output, that they’ll “get ya”. And thus the cursing It took a long time for the MCU’s box office to start to drop off, faith was strong for a long time

You should see the twitter convo I just completed wherein I was called a “bitch” and a “clown” for merely suggesting Adams *could* have meaningfully addressed the position in 4 seasons. Seriously, go read it lol

Didn’t you already pay for seasons?

Build it, and they will come

I swear to god if the “why make a change? we aren’t going to win the cup this year, anyways” talk starts I’ll poke my eyes out lol I don’t have any faith it won’t, but luckily I actually still have faith we turn this around in season. But who knows, I’m generally very hopeful at this time of year after worrying all offseason we’ll see how the first 20 or so go. US thanksgiving is usually a good barometer they need to do something about the 3 headed “monster” in net, Levi will probably need a break if he doesn’t already

Probably. 4 goals allowed from Levi on 4 “expected”, if you care about that stuff. So, an average performance. That’s all well and good, but clearly the team is constructed in such a way that we are counting on “good” output from our elected starting goalie, and not just “break even”. That was what Levi was supposed to represent, and that was baked into roster construction we have to assume, given lack of activity at position

Ya

It’s not relevant regarding the expectation of making the playoffs, so it’s just interesting fodder

Eh, Botterill had an expansive body of work to the tune of suggesting we need not dig deeply for a “why” beyond “he was a poor GM who made a lot of poor moves”. Moves that were bad for roster construction need not have a defensible “why” attached. Wasn’t even consciously aware that after all this time we were still looking for a “why”. We do know Botterill was interested in bringing it “down to the studs” and Dahlin would help with that. There were those rumours: those would still fall under aims of roster construction I can vaguely sense where this is headed, not in your estimation I don’t think but for the thread at large, I’d hazard a guess. Perhaps this will save time: Eichel made the chemistry bad, Eichel demanded ROR be traded, Eichel demanded MOJO be the 2C behind him to make himself look better

We didn’t get worse his second year, we were only a few points short and Jack missed the first quarter of the season with an injury. Remember that awful, deflating start? Still gives me the shivers And I absolutely believe it was unreasonable to think we couldn’t improve - just yesterday there was a thread abuzz with people taking the rounds on their “see, young players continue to get better, what do you know?” statements and that’s exactly what was happening with a young developing JE at the time. Yet people seem shocked when I point out his 200 foot game developments began in sincerity in 2018-19, wanting to act like development wasn’t possible without the trade, when in reality, much of that was correlation ill always wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t torpedoed that team by trading our second best player right at the time our number 1 became a true number 1

Judging by how they deployed Dahlin last year when they weren’t thrilled with their depth D, they likely run Levi into the ice if they can

Would have preferred veteran guidance by way of an actual capable back up vet goalie, as it would be a significantly larger factor re: on ice results (the games Levi doesn’t play), but this can only be a good thing

I’ve spoken about this ad nauseam, so while I respect this take I don’t have much interest in re-hashing it all. The ROR trade will never be good because it torpedoed a roster that was ready to compete / capable of being moulded into a contender *at the time*. We dealt ROR at the exact time Eichel became an actual mvp level player and rostered Marcus Johansson as the 2C behind him. Botterill ended up losing his job and we undertook another endless rebuild where we still haven’t made the playoffs since. The trade failed. Adams just picked up the pieces and salvaged it. In the end, I don’t believe in the logic. If we dealt Tage right now for a draft pick that in 5 years becomes prime Malkin, does that make it a good trade? Of course not. Context and timing matters “The Sabres weren’t gong anywhere with ROR” is just massively revisionist. And takes like this just, consciously, put zero value on the results on the 5 completed season since. It doesn’t value the 5 lost years.

The universe still owes us for the second RoR trade, I’m still collecting on his good plays without an ounce of shame lol

Josh Gorges once shut down Connor McDavid

Agree, the depth isn’t quite there yet. But it’s coming along nicely It’s mentioned sometimes that we’ll “need to find a spot” for some of the young players coming and I wouldn’t be shocked if Krebs isn’t a long term component of this team. He’s a leading candidate at this point for me, Thompson/Tuch/Skinner/Cozens/Peterka/Quinn/Casey/Benson/Greenway(?) I see likely/locks to be around LT…maybe 3 of the 12 spots overall are still under construction. Looking at a ~5 year period in my mind’s eye, unless something drastic changes If we end up only needing to cycle in ~ 3 prospects / outside additions it should be reasonably achievable given the pool we’ll be selecting from

One bad / one good re: Clifton and Johnson wouldn’t be the worst thing Krebs to me is pretty underwhelming just in general His D has been good but there’s nothing wrong with wanting more than a one dimensional player

Back up goalie tomorrow. Should still get a fair bit of those

When the stats meet the eye test (Krebs) when they don’t… Clifton?

I thought you were probably right and it was another thing I miss saw that’s why I went back. But it was definitely Dahlin and they said his name too