Kruppstahl

Oh Jesus. You. For others here, this guy lives 24/7 in the "Sabres/hockey" thread over at Two Bills Drive. I think he's a member of the Sabres PR Department b/c all he ever offers is insane, off-the-wall, wrong takes about Sabres and hockey, all dipped in large amounts of ridiculous positivity sauce. Either that, or he's the biggest sucker Sabres fan you've ever known. Let's all hope he goes back over to TBD and stays there.

Sell it for some smack.

I just saw this thread titled and thought: "Oh my God. That's right! The draft lottery was last Friday night." LOL. I've been enjoying the vacation from sports this year. 8th huh? Well that was predictable I guess.

I just read the thread over at TBD discussing how Kim Pegula was wearing a headset for the last Bills game of the season last year. Won't be long before she is talking into that thing. She already has a reputation as being feared around the Sabres offices. Her meddling knows no bounds!

It'd be great if someone who has access to TBN could post relevant details. I found something elsewhere suggesting this was a furlough and Hamilton commented that this is "where we are at this point in time with the business." I'm wondering if he'll be back when hockey is.

Are there any details on this? I find that really interesting. Hamilton has been covering the Sabres and with WGR-550 for a very long time. There's more to this story.

Yes, that's true. It was the same with the Bills and the playoff drought. Unbelievable odds of actually doing something like. When there is this much failure for this long through many regime changes, there is only one place to look: ownership. This is why I suggest it's not going to get better any time soon. Pegula is definitely meddling with day-to-day affairs. He's gone so far as to override his own GM's protests and ordered player moves with long terms opposed by management. Leino and Ehrhoff are 2 examples of that.

I agree. Not yet. This is going to be a problem in another year or 2, unless Eichel proves to be almost unbelievably loyal and is willing to sacrifice his career for it.

The point about the team being locked into WNY is often brought up by Pegula apologists. I don't think it's a valid point. I refuse to be held hostage by that type of thinking. If economics and market forces are such that it is virtually impossible for the team to remain in a tiny market like Buffalo, let it go. Making an infinite amount of concessions simply in the name of the team staying put is not justified IMO. If the Pegulas are going to destroy the franchise to the level they have, please sell it. If that somehow means the team ends up somewhere else, such is life. We'll all find a way to survive, I assure you.

This made me laugh out loud. They are not fine, have never been fine, and are not going to be fine. That's just you talking as a fan, wishing for the best. This comment reminded of a guy over at another Sabres forum. This was when Ron Rolston was the coach of this team and he was taking a ton of (justified) criticism from most of the users over there. Someone who was always blindly optimistic to the point of coming across like a plant from the Sabres PR department said something just like your comment. I.E., it takes time, Rolston has made progress, he will make more. He's going to work out just fine. What made it worse was the snark with which the guy made the post and he was openly scoffing at other posters who suggested Rolston was in completely over his head and needed to be terminated immediately. There's always that guy with the "Calm down everyone, I know what's best, this is all going to work out just fine. You just need to be more patient" approach. It's very easy to say something like that. Doesn't make it accurate though. New Scotland, I'm not suggesting your post is snarky in any way or that you are like this guy I'm mentioning. Just the comment reminded of that situation. Sometimes in life it is a case of the coach being in way over his head, he does need to get fired, and it's not going to get better until that happens. With the passage of time, I think we can all agree Rolston was a colossal mistake and it was not a matter of time before it all got sorted. It was such a mistake, it cost Darcy Regier his job, after so many years of dodging the bullet. The very foundation that this organization is based on right now is unsound. They are exclusively trying to save money, and the Pegulas are shrinking into a tight circle of their own trusted corporate lackeys. Further, Kim Pegula has a great deal of authority and she hasn't a clue as to what she is doing. I don't see anything positive stemming from this, unless it happens by dumb luck--which is possible. It's not likely though, that's the problem. It's hard enough to win in pro sports when everything is firing on all cylinders.

Elliotte Friedman was also on The Instigators a couple of days ago, talking about all this as well. https://wgr550.radio.com/media/audio-channel/06-18-sportsnets-elliotte-friedman

Except for the times when you do know you're getting fired and it's just a question of when. Rex Ryan found himself in that situation with the Pegulas, to name one example.

I think that is more or less exactly how it played out. The Pegulas wanted to retain Botterill as part of their cost saving plan. Over the last 3 weeks they sat down to really dig into how to arrange things going forward. They told Jason of the purge, and he refused. I hated Botterill as GM, but I give him credit for standing up for himself and his staff in this manner. He obviously realized that the Pegulas were turning the franchise into a joke show, making success on the ice that much more difficult, and Botterill didn't want to be a part of that. Good on him. Having said that, I'm still glad he's gone. But in the wake of all the other changes, I don't think it really matters who the GM is going forward. As I've written here many times in the last few days, I find myself hoping for an ownership change at this point. Given that the Pegulas own the Bills, I don't think it's unrealistic to suggest they would sell the Sabres.

I still believe they are going to sort of cancel themselves. The owners of these leagues are going to do everything in their power to keep the money faucet running. But once they go far enough down the path, as I said earlier, I think the virus will spread. Once it does and some stars get the virus, public perception might start to change, it will become a bad look for the leagues to continue going forward (putting money ahead of lives) and that will be that. I've been saying since April that the NFL season will NOT play out as planned, starting in early September. We'll see if I'm right.

Kings had plenty of studs. Are you kidding? I loved the makeup of that team. Drew Doughty? He was the best puck moving horse on the blue line in the league! Plays half the game, shuts everyone down. And Kopitar? Big, talented guy, contributes offensively, defensively, takes opposing teams 1C away from the game. Quick at that time was one of the best goaltenders in the league, I can go on. Jeff Carter was even playing elite level hockey back then. They had a great team made for playoff hockey with elite level talent on O and D zones. For what it's worth, I think you do need some elite talent to win the Cup. Along with a ton of luck, lack of injuries, and about 10,000 other things. The Cup is the hardest championship to win in N. American team sports, by far.

I don't know how they aren't all going to contract the virus, once they start spending enough time around each other all the time. Sweating, sharing towels, spitting every 3 seconds (Sam Reinhart, I'm talking about you), sharing water bottles, breathing the same air in a small interior space, etc. That goes for pretty much all sports once they start trying to play.

I'll be happy to offer ministerial support services. He's going to be doing a lot of praying.

Not to make light of a man losing his job, but I did laugh out loud when I saw the name "Mark Ferner." A classic Sabre name from the past.

Not sure this works as a mascot, per se, but it could definitely be used as a new crest for our uniforms. No, it's not a sabre, but you get the idea.

They actually did a pretty good job coming up with "Sabre Tooth". Our nickname is an inanimate object, so it's kind of tough to turn that into an animate caricature that can walk around, like if we were named the Bears or Lions. The "Sabre" part of our name doesn't really lend itself to any animate mascot I can think of, other than what they already came up with. So then you are left to work with the Buffalo end...which could be used as a basis for a cute and cuddly bison type of mascot, I guess. I would suggest ditching the mascot entirely, but introducing "ice girls" who go out and scrape up the ice during commercial breaks. Some of them around the league are absolutely fantastic.

"Didn't properly monitor the HVAC." I believe that means they melted the ice, turned off the lights, killed the power to save a few nickels, and locked the doors. LOL. *As an aside; Buffalo was never going to be a hub city, and it never will. It doesn't have the hotel room capacity to support a bunch of teams camped up in town at the same time. It's one of the reasons why Vegas is desirable. I believe they have a couple more hotel rooms there than in Buffalo.

This is a good point about franchise value increasing over time. Indeed, this is where the real money is made in sports ownership. I recall reading a year or 2 ago that the Bills had been estimated to already increase in value by like $200 million (or was it more) beyond the purchase price of what? $1.3 Billion? It's also why the NFL ownership club immediately embraced Pegula and loved him. He was a single owner, he paid cash, and he likely overpaid to get the Bills by probably a couple hundred million. His overpayment helped push the value of all other franchises up that much farther. I still believe that if the team doesn't improve, the day-to-day drain of ownership could make them want to sell. They don't need the money, and likely don't need the headache.

In a back-handed way, this could help us as fans. I genuinely believe the Pegulas might sell the team if it becomes too large of a nuisance for them. They have won the lottery of life and are enjoying some limited success with the Bills, which is the true jewel in their sports ownership crown anyway. Why would they want to be confronted with a really negative situation over and over again with the Sabres? As I keep writing since last Tuesday, the purge is not inconsistent with ownership looking to sell in the near term. They may be way ahead of me. If not, I think selling is a viable option for them down the road. As long as they sell to someone with WNY connections in some way, expressing a good faith desire to leave the team where it is, I would gladly roll the dice with new ownership tomorrow. If the Pegulas are going to achieve success with the Sabres, it will be the result of blind luck.

Especially dumb ones.

OK, I'll give you that. But I am still holding out Vlad Sobotka as the Number One cause of our problems. ?