Dr. Who

I liked the kachina sweaters. Given the relentless injury and sickness news, it sure would be sweet if some of the young fellas stepped up and kept the season from spiralling into the pit. Lot of folks wrote this guy off as an AHL ceiling player. Maybe not.

Happy Terry Pegula weekend.

The margins for error are too narrow. The WR room is a joke, and criminally neglected by Beane. Neither coordinator is good. Brady's ceiling is competent. Babich is bad. McDermott's scheme is tired and decoded. If the owner wasn't the sort of chap he is, there would be consequences.

From the players to the coaching to the GM to the dim owner, count on lack of rational response to any concrete situation. Prudence is a virtue that has learned wisdom to the point that there is a natural "feel" for the proper response to the particulars of a situation. You'd think there'd be some of that with Ruff, but the pervasive fog of imbecility seems nearly invincible.

You know they sure as hell won't.

And don't forget we had the advantage of losing Bryson early.

Because he's a Sabres' fan, God help him?

The roster construction is not good. Beane has missed a lot, and his FA acquistions generally are misses as well. McDermott's scheme is tired and exposed. The WR room is terrible. Josh Allen is now pressing and getting beat up, because there aren't any easy buttons. We win when we don't turn it over at all and the defense gets timely take aways. It's not Sabres' bad, of course, but in the world of sports, what is?

Good for them, if so. But does anyone have any reason to think that even by random change the chucklehead silent owner would luck into smart hockey folks? The dim leading the dim isn't working, and Captain Yacht doesn't want anyone who will tell him he's a dunce.

All the same, no one is as predictable as a dead man. And investors like predictable. The Sabres are a sure thing that way. Even the fans of the Sabres are more and more like ghosts who are forced to think about events decades in the past if they want to recall a time when the team had a semblance of hope.

Look at any sport. The teams that are routinely bad have bad ownership. Everything Pegula does is wing-and-a-prayer combined with obtuse stubbornness. Imagine going into year fifteen of not making the playoffs in a league where it shouldn't be that hard, and relying on this combo in goal.

I think it's called being a Buffalo Sabre.

I suppose, but particular judgments will be proven more or less correct or not by how the future plays out. So far, the bleak side is on a fourteen year winning streak. Let's hope the ridiculous odds for even a badly run team missing the playoffs that length of time finally tilt in favor of the long-suffering fans. (Unless, of course, one secretly blames the fans, and believe they deserve it. There are the odd sadists out there who think like that.)