Thorner

Rangers have always been like watching paint dry and Paul Maurice coached teams are unfailingly insufferable. I’m biased against Dallas and Edmonton admittedly but Dallas is always boring with their defensive style So that leaves Edmonton and Canadian teams stink so..🤷‍♂️

No respect needed

Ya, of the 4 remaining teams there’s no one to root for Uninspiring final 4 for sure, not even sure the hockey will be exciting Good teams definitely though, maybe the 4 best

Who? Could admittedly easily just be put down to a textbook example my waning interest in the league at large but I’ve never even heard of this guy. Looking at his stats a guy with this sort of late emergence would be a reasonable addition but reek of desperation if he’s the “big” add

Interesting, so you think we retain Granato had Ruff not been?

So well put. Field the best team you can next year. I’d HAPPILY take the ensuing “problem” of locking up the players that produced good results, finally. That’s a step up in relevancy If anything, winning will *aid* our attempts and discussions to lock up players, inside and out. We talk so much about how “no one wants to be here”. Win. Too many players wanting to be here would be a good thing. Stop worrying about Online GM Simulator mode for PC: 20 year Dynasty mode

And 70% of the team will be Botterill guys. Goes both ways

Thinking here is too cart before horse. Worry about fielding next year’s team before stressing about “needing” to lock up players from a core that hasn’t yet made the playoffs - - - Also, the message of seeing some of our players have success elsewhere isn’t “don’t trade your players”, it’s what we draw from the contrast between failure here and success elsewhere: the message is that you need to assemble a team with balance and depth. Not a team of kids, not a team of scrubs expecting a star player to carry them. It’s not at all about being patient: it’s about being proactive in assembling a team of depth if you aren’t going to do that, might as well be impatient and deal your guys away to teams where they’ll have success. Just sitting around won’t yield results either

Completely different level of competition helps too The kind that leads to Byram - Keith comparable tbh

They certainly weren’t in a “take the best you can get” situation for Mitts at all, no reason to necessarily sell if not getting exactly or close to exactly what you want so while I said Adams didn’t like Mitts I just meant relative to his other top centres- he had adjudged Mitts to be in the “tradeable to achieve or help facilitate the improvements we want” category but likely not a “players to be moved” category. I don’t know about the deal but I can comfortably say Adams either doesn’t see or care about a “redundancy” issue on the backend nor likely a handedness issue and has a conscious idea of how he figures he wants to build the team from Levi out through the puck movers and into the now likely speedier forward group with the departure of Mittelstadt. unless Krebs is the 3C then I dunno what the forwards are supposed to be

He really likes Byram and didn’t particularly like Mitts, it’s almost certainly that simple. Team building can’t just be collecting talent, mix is a big consideration. We’ll see if he’s right. The only thing that would be wrong on it’s face is not replacing Mitts at all

Disagree. of course it supports my point - it’s not fair to look at a 50 game output and claim it’s fairly reflective - a look at the 3 previous seasons in combination would present a far more accurate sample size PARTICULARLY because of Covid related anomalies. Jack Eichel was apart of our talent base - trading him or not he was still an asset that wasn’t reflected due to injury in the 21 season to the extend we knew he had value to the team and we could have a) kept him and B) the trade accounts for Tuch who we didn’t have in 2021 and is a much better output than hurt for 21 games Jack

A post that ignores not only real world context, but the point I reiterated multiple times: Jack Eichel played 21 games, total, while hurt during that “season”. We played in a ridiculous division that “season”. The Covid relatives anomalies of that season are BLINDING. No, our record over 40 games does not define what they “were” and your comparative stats are rendered unfortunately rather meaningless We were nearly a .500 hockey club in 19-20. We didn’t morph into a .300 club overnight. I beg anyone to please just look at the *real world* context. Adams WAS THE GM WHO TOOK OVER the .500 team Can we be serious for one moment lol. Your telling me Adams can be placed at the helm of a .500 club, manually cause or allow the team to be changed into a .300 club on his watch, thereby granting HIMSELF, according to you, what, 5 years? This take isn’t based in reality. Like it sounds like what Kevyn Adams would say, I’m sorry You gotta pick one, here. If poor Adams is blameless for 2021 then our record is unreflective because it’s covered in Krueger related taint. Combined with the other factors I mentioned I’m inclined to consider the reason unreflective, yes, and not count it towards “Adams plan”. We know the bones of what we had was represented by the near .500 the year previous

Taking 5 years to make the playoffs is already wrong. He can’t “turn out correct.” the red wings aren’t relevant to that - - - The only reason people mention the red wings is to feel better about the sabres: our competition is with the league not one team. There is nothing gleaned by comparing the sabres “patient approach” and the wings “more aggressive” approach: both have sucked. Neither represents a verdict on the type of chosen strategy: the league has hundreds of teams providing hundreds of examples over a hundred years of GMs moulding their teams into playoff contenders over a year or two or 3, or teams successful implementing a more patient approach. We don’t need to look at these two failed approaches. Either strategy can work. Either strategy can fail based on the aptitude of the person implementing it. Both GMs have been bad. Trying to achieve a victory over Detroit is purely cope

I give you full credit

How many tires can he flip?

We’ve created roster environments not capable of being led The leaders haven’t been the issue, it’s the job being asked

37. I mean I’d say 40 is middle middle age so I’d be early middle age currently transitioning to that. But I know what you mean because people don’t consider middle age till at least 40 so early 40s would be “early stages of being middle aged” I dunno if that’s specifically relevant though. Maybe? That’s part of why I need the sabres to be good. You do raise a thoughtful point, I was 19 when the Sabres beat Ottawa 7-6 in OT. I’ll be at least double that when they do it again. More of my life will have been lived since it’s..I don’t even know what it will be like. I told you, I’m worried about how all this shakes out

Because he’d fetch the most? Because he’d hurt to lose the least? Somewhere in the middle, or other?

You don’t need to be smart you just need to be a little bit quicker of wit than the guy running from the same bruin

I understand what you mean, but personally the greatest angst comes from the fact it’s *not/hasn’t* been all bad. Not all. Even after the Eichel disaster we only missed the playoffs by a single point. The Sabres always seem to find themselves on the extremes, a league outlier. Tank better, miss the playoffs more, can’t just stop at a great prospect pool: we need to continue adding to it so it’s the best prospect pool ever… I don’t even like Adams strategy and we’d still have been in the playoffs with better GT two season ago. One small budge on Adams “Levi timeline” and we’d be in, REGARDLESS of the other bad you correctly mentioned. But he wouldn’t do it. It was the Levi timeline, after all. We adhere to the plan or we adhere to nothing at all

It doesn’t escape me that the biggest justification for why we couldn’t win with Eichel was a short Covid season where we…didn’t have Eichel

Agree with a lot in here but not really the semantics on Eichel - if Adams desire to rebuild was the “final straw” that means it was salvageable before that: I believe the evidence bears this out as well: we shouldn’t forget that Jack initially rescinded the trade request when Adams briefly committed to winning: and did so WHILE PLAYING HURT Dude was willing to put his body and career on the line during the shortened Covid year for the Buffalo Sabres. Shouldn’t be forgotten. He suited up, injured, for 21 games in 2021 because Adams said they’d commit to winning.

Absolutely not. I meant what I said, and I mean it in the the macro: what the heck are we even doing here talking hockey if everything we talk about ultimately ends up bullshite: why do we talk about picks and prospects as currency if the team literally most in position to utilize said strategy in history of the league won’t do it?