Marvin

So funny it makes me cry.

Welcome to the forum.

Eklund and Beniers are hardly "reaches."

Last I heard, he's not due back until December.

My beef is that the media always seem to devalue players the Sabres have and over-value other teams' players, depending on where they are based. And guys from Buffalo like the late Jim Kelley never pumped the Sabres' tires.

Honestly, I always feel that way about national coverage of the Sabres: inflate prices for what the Sabres are buying; depress prices for what the Sabres are selling. Aside from that, I am glad to hear that GMKA is holding firm. I agree. I infer that the rest has helped and that the doctors have told GMKA to hold firm against the surgery and that it will heal itself. Unless, say, it's a hockey trade with Calgary or some such, that's what you should expect. We should get 1 prime piece and we can hope for 2 prime pieces. But the idea that some team is going to empty the cupboard for even a healthy Eichel is, frankly, delusional. That's why I focus on the other team's current #2C, good players buried on some part of the depth chart, and conditional picks based on Eichel's health and performance as places to hunt for a return.

Is there a reason everyone is omitting Asplund from their line-ups?

1st underlined: I am not surprised at that, but has that been said publicly? I have had a couple of people say this privately. 1st and 2nd underlined: This probably hinges on who is on the hook if he gets hurt afterwards. Overall: is part of the compromise on a trade some conditional picks based on Jack's health and play? It seems like the simplest and fairest way to split the risk.

Russians too.

Now we need a GM who does not use analytics as ex post facto justifications for trades of guys like Wayne Simmonds.

Oh my God. 24.

Ack! Yeah, how could I have forgotten that?

I want to take a step back and evaluate some. How much of the impending resolution is the agent trying to get Eichel moved fast? IMHO, the agent has a very strong vested interest to coerce the Sabres into making a bad deal because that will make the team he's going to better. Do we have any indication about how the rest has gone for Eichel's neck? How much is that situation playing into the talks? Have we got any indication of what are acceptable pieces that teams will part with versus what the Sabres are asking for? Does anyone have an idea of what a compromise looks like?

I would say Terry went 1-for-2. The Eichel deal, if he wanted to stay here, looks like fricking genius. The Skinner deal looks like idiocy. This is why XGMJB getting a free pass from the NHL old boys club puzzles me. He was flat out wrong in diagnosing O'Reilly as part of the problem here. (IMHO, you blame XGMJB for wanting to move O'Reilly and TP for wanting it done before the bonus was paid.) IMHO, he was right about Evander Kane not being right for the youth. He was the yahoo who wanted Kreuger first. He was wrong on the Eichel contract. He was right about the Skinner contract. He could not get more than two and change useful lines for his coaches. His drafts looks solid so far. That is a very mixed bag. How he gets absolved of all of the gaffes just baffles me.

I will never forget that Carnac the Magnificent.

People like myself are convinced he wants out and won't play for the Sabres again, come hell or high water, which certainly decreases leverage. Add on his injury and the Sabres have less leverage. The impending NMC decreases that leverage. Moreover, once the free agent frenzy is over, very few teams will have enough room to acquire him this season unless we take on garbage on the level of the ROR return. We saw how much letting this get into next season can look like with Mike Peca. Thus, GMKA has a lot less leverage than he should and will get neither the quality nor quality that people want, expect, or accept.

Getting rid of Miller and Vanek was so that we could get into the mindset and habit of losing. It was subtraction by subtraction. We then exacerbated the problem by wasting capital to try and take short cuts. We failed to build depth. We failed to find quality depth. The main parts were talented but ill-fitting. We then added insult to injury by unnecessarily resetting. We again failed to find quality depth while starting to build franchise capital, so tried "addition by subtraction" from where we had a comparative strength at the time (but not real, excess strength) -- which was as unsuccessful as you indicate. This time, the players want out. This is recognised as painful reality by most. Only a few people believe that unloading The Tank Three is addition by subtraction. Most of us recognise their trades as the negatives that they are and as the necessities that they are.

I figure that they would be part of the other side unloading a bit of cap.

My feeling has been that the trade of Jack Eichel will be somewhere between these two. A couple of conditional picks for 2022-3 plus a blend of good prospects, current mid-range NHLers, and a quasi cap-dump (more useful to us in the short term and overpaid). So a bit of hockey trade and a bit of rebuild with hedged bets on both sides.

Life isn't fair. Life. Don't talk to me about life. Me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.

Tenth. Tallinder, Lydman, McKee, Kalinin, Numminen, Campbell, Fitzpatrick, Jillson, Janik, Paetsch.

If the trade is only for futures? Probably. If it includes the right "now" players, then we can actually improve.

If Boston were playing, I would assume it was a Shoebottom.

Oopsie-daisy.

If I knew that, I'd be working for some club making well into the 6 figures. To actually answer your question, I think it's a bit of coaching change, a change in philosophy, better mental make-up of the players, less pressure, better offencive positioning, a superior offencive philosophy, and player growth. So some of what we saw was legitimate improvement, but some was a mirage. You don't do as well as this team did with 4th-6th string goalies with mirrors, but it is not an accident that they were at the bottom of the heap either.