Thorner

It was truly just, “4 guys pacing for 80?! I’ll take a TEAM that can pace for 80, thank you very much. Amirite folks? Folks?” Nothing more.

I knew I would get this response. It was a joke. About how the team is pacing poorly while individual players are not. I used 80 because *that is the number in the thread title* Yes, we need more than 80. No, 71 point pace is not good either. There is no way to spin a sub .500 team that doesn’t even match the 15-16 total as anything other than a disappointing season overall for the rebuild. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be several noteworthy positives. Or that the build has failed. But the result in totality would be sub-par. It wouldn’t be the type of progress we’d want to see at this stage. To a man, not a solitary soul around here was saying a finish in the 70s would be “acceptable”. No need for anyone to go revisionist (not saying you).

Maybe this fits better here. Does anyone know how often we’ve run out 2 of Casey/VO/Asplund in combination with Hinostroza on the right? Didn’t Hinostroza have successful metrics last season? They may have already tried this, if so someone can point that out and debunk this post. But I feel like we haven’t seen that much, just off the top of my head. Asplund is good defensively, I’d line him up at C, Hinostroza on the right, and Olofsson (he scores actual goals) on the left. Give Mitts a rest and let him switch off with VO depending on who’s contributing Skinner - Thompson - Tuch Peterka - Cozens - Quinn Olofsson - Asplund - Hinostroza Girgensons - Jost - Okposo 2 good lines One reasonable 4th line

I’d trade it all for a team on pace for 80

I know people dislike talking about handedness, if I had to guess it’s probably NOT a factor in this case, but correlation (likely) or causation, it DOES almost always lately seem to be the line with all left shots that can’t find success. Even the 4th line always has handedness balance. I wonder if there’s an outside shot it slightly ups the degree if difficulty re: things like exit pass options, etc Prob not, just thinking about it this afternoon. But it’s line 3 always and it always has all left shots. I’d try Hinostroza there just to rule it out

There is some merit to this - very much front-runners in that we seem to score a lot in games we are already scoring a fair few. Including a lot of EN goals. Still, maybe it’s not *quite* reflective of our offence, but even accounting for all those factors it’s doing very well: we are certainly a good goal-scoring team

This has been discussed ad naseum so I personally don’t feel like doing it again, so I’ll just say that I, and others, have pointed out before that we had several opportunities to sign Ullmark, and to think we had no chance at all when Ullmark literally came to the negotiating table for many months pushes the limits of credibility If you see what amounts to a joke (yes, saying “bump” is a joke) as a circle of nothingness, you could just... not respond to said joke about how poor our GT seemed to be yesterday - check the time stamp on the post As far as I know, I haven’t seen very much Eichel stuff being posted. My contribution was posting a solitary highlight at beginning of the season, after a stream of Eichel crtiticism in the Around the NHL (this) thread, in an effort to get it moved to its own thread so this one wouldn’t get clogged up. It worked, it WAS moved to an appropriate spot and..I haven’t posted an Eichel highlight since. I don’t think anyone has actually. - - - Re: the bold - Forgive me, but I’m going to call this out b/c, 50th time seeing you post something like this is frankly enough, do you ever seek to add value or do you just like to criticize other posts and posters? Actually asking Maybe this can get it out of the way: Zamboni, we *know* you’ve never doubted any Sabres player, even the vast masses that never panned out. You’ve never doubted the GM. You are very high minded and never dwell on moves that have happened beyond your control as a talking point. You are a very positive fan and we could all learn from the zealousness of your support. I only strive to transcend the masses in the way you’ve so elegantly achieved. Please, forgive me the talking points you’ve deemed “uninteresting”.

He will if we force him too. All 82. Kevyn Adams said. He wants players who are dying to be Buffalo Sabres.

Anderson is better than Tokarski and he’s not yet 50 pass

Agree.

Always shadows directly over top of his right eyebrow whereas on his left side you can see it sits noticeably higher. This doesn’t mean anything I just notice a lot of dumb pointless stuff. File this under Reinhart adjusting his helmet an abnormal amount

Seriously asking: Has anyone noticed that his helmet is always slightly tilted to the side?

The math isn’t being fairly represented by breaking down each individual goal, this is what people misunderstand when it comes to math and sample sizes. Say, for argument, UPL had only a 25% shot to make any one of the 6 saves. If you break it down individually, you can make a case for how realistically we couldn’t have expected a stop as he only had a 25% shot on each. But if you get *6* chances with 25% odds, looking from the perspective of the data set as a whole, one would be CORRECT to assume and predict that at least one will go our way. This is why I said the thing about: if the total against is high enough, there’s assuredly blame to go around for the goalie Just because it’s very unlikely on any *one* spin that a roulette wheel comes up on #4, if you spin it 500 times you can expect it to land 4. if it somehow didn’t, it would be a statistical anomaly, it wouldn’t be a case of “well what did you expect? Which one spin do you think should have hit?” No, it’s that, when the spins are all viewed in totality, the math changes hope this makes sense

Back to my point about how we always face back ups, though: sure, we gain tonight from having a true #1 in there..but Tampa also can do the same thing re: vezina winner vasilevskiy. I agree we’ll be much better once we have a true guy, but today is a good example of what I was getting at when I say the improvement isn’t just “plug and play”. Much of that improvement in this case would be offset by also getting THEIR best roster

Let me help If the following fill in the blank: "Im not sure which of the *insert #* goals he was expected to save" is populated by a number 5 or greater, the goalie shares in the blame. full stop. It's ok to expect your goalie to provide POSITIVE value, and not just the literal bare minimum of "don't hurt us" It's a position on the team where you *look to gain advantage over the other team's equal but opposite guy* same as any other people are so weird with goalies

TBH, and with all due respect, I'm not THAT sure gritty would fix the GT situation but, really..you know what - he might be an upgrade of course lol

It's true. This is why I purely watch WWE now and have forsaken the 4 major NA sports Say what you want, but at least I know what's happening is f*cking real

For posterity: Tampa Bay is the 12th most penalized team this season by way of Minors Buffalo is the 19th most penalized team this season by way of Minors Tampa also gets the 9th most powerplays Buffalo gets the 6th most power plays - - - Tampa is being hit with more minors than Buffalo, and are receiving fewer PPs Just some overall context fwiw

Our best hope is that the guy who SHOULD be easily blocking pucks given his size washing out gets paid back to us in the form of the littler guy who SHOULDN'T be easily blocking pucks...doing exactly that at the NHL level ala our Saros

Does he? I think/hope he's looking to supplement, now, in the pursuit of greater progress - - - Bolded would be a decent place to start, but I don't think we see a G addition in season. I pray we aren't waiting on Levi. I don't THINK we are, we at least took a swipe at the concept of Comrie

I disagree. Except in egregious situations Im not the blame the officials guy, and I didn't see this as close to egregious. Darth had a good breakdown above. We just played a game where we got like 10 PPs in a row, can't remember who it was against, but we had a parade of PPs. This stuff just happens

This game didn't suck at all, it's another game in a long list where we are clearly icing HALF a good team. Where's @DarthEbriate....half a ship, amirite? There are spots were we are no doubt about it, certifiably good enough, and other spots that so clearly need to be upgraded. It's the bad parts costing us: that's a good thing. Particularly in light of the recent intimations from Adams, if they can be believed, that he's made the identifications and is moving towards addressing the lineup now

We got their B goalie who played like a B goalie, that's for sure. Oddly enough, Elliot doesn't usually play that way against us Our scoring is certainly improving

In Tuch's defence it wasn't a "dream come true" game, or whatever

Tuch had a poor game