Marvin

"Help run the team" and "sell the franchise" are miles away from each other. They are not selling the team. And remember: his daughters are the ones who really, really want the team. Now "Give an ownership stake to someone who knows something and can make the team look less like the Keystone Cops and more like the Bruins and Lightning" is much more likely. Maybe a small-ish stake, like Larry Quinn got from B. Thomas Golisano. But until we get something more concrete from the Pegulas' end, it is speculation and fan-fiction. And as a former writer of a lot of fan fiction, I can tell you that it is not flattering.

I think Thorny's and PromoTheRobot's posts have each other's answers. I would bet significant money that Don Granato has a lot of information from friends of his about players in this draft.

One person who was spectacularly good at this before he was kicked off of two boards for his truculence was @jame. He just nailed things like who will develop, how far, timelines, etc.

I can still hear the announcement of the goal in my head: 9:18 of the first overtime period. I remember Robert broke the shutout in game 6. And, of course, I remember Rico's goal with 12 seconds left. Aside: I am lucky enough to have a friend's audio tape of the third period of game 6 of the 1973 series against Montreal. In 1989, I was a the Clarion Writers' Workshop in Lansing Michigan (hey, my activity fee went to that, so why not?) where we were to write a brief short story around an exercise from Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction about an incident from our childhood which was meaningful to us and to examine why. So I picked the fans and the players for "Thank you, Sabres." I wrote a fictional story about who was the first person to yell that, how it caught on, and how the players reacted, and the post-game interviews. "First Buffalo goal scored by number 14, Rene Robert. Unassisted. Robert, unassisted. Time 11:41." "Second Buffalo goal score by number 7, Rick Martin. Assists to number 8, Jim Lorentz, and number 11, Gil Perreault. Martin, from Lorentz and Perreault. Time 19:48."

Your build up just reminded me of this...

It has pitted virtually the entire hockey world against the Sabres. If he is that Machiavellian and wants out that badly, it might have been his plan to engender pressure to force a panic trade where we got bupkes in return.

Being pedantic: 1. Hutton is not under contract after the end of the league year and there is no evidence that he is being brought back. 2. There is no evidence that they will just let Ullmark walk; indeed, I recall Adams saying keeping Ullmark was one of the top things on his list. Opinion: I was never going to be 100% comfortable with any of the the potential coaching hires. Then again, I felt funny about Lindy Ruff, Marv Levy, and Sean McDermott, so what do I know?

Holy Crap! Get well soon, Rene!

Let me quote Jeff Klein and Karl-Eric Reif from The Death of Hockey on how good Hasek was: "(Hasek makes) the often hilariously inept Buffalo Sabres masquerade as a contender because he bails them out of their numerous mistakes every night." They were right. Oh, they worked hard and were a borderline playoff team when they got above-average goaltending. But they were not contenders in any sense without Hasek. And I loved that team.

You snatched the words right off my keyboard. I thought immediately, "there's something already wrong with his neck."

Please don't do things like this. Every time I see this sarcastically rhetorical question or some variation of it, I am reminded of a similar question asked of Cornelius Bennett. I always want to answer the way he did.

@carpandean is our resident plot maker.

You forgot the verbosity of Dickens.

That's awesome. Thanks for the update.

Thanks a lot, Paul.

Yeah, I guess I was being over-exuberant. I need something to grab onto.

I am largely with you -- Just as I think the roster finally will give Jack and Sam the support they need to lead the team out of the wilderness, WHOOSH out the window they go.

4 of our main suitors are in the top 9. Even in this draft, 3 picks in the top 9 is a helluvalot better than 3 picks scattered throughout the first round (Columbus). If this board were running the draft, I would be very confident that we would come away with 3 very good players. With GMKA, I can't think of why it would be that much different. Beniers, Guenther, and Eklund anyone?

Correct. I was the last game for sure and some other personnel decisions after the TDL. But before then, no one there really thought so.

Thank you for creating this thread. Question: What is the purpose of a rebuild, whether it be a tank or not? If your answer is some minor variant of, "to get better players than we have now and to have a better team in the future," then your answer is incomplete. To my mind, the tank is inextricably linked to its rebuild. IMHO, all of the following need to be considered in a rebuild, whether it be a tank or not. What do I have that is working and how do I maintain it? What players can I bring in who are unheralded but who might grow if given a chance? What veterans can I bring in to teach the young guys the ropes and are OK with that being perhaps their career's epitaph? How do I create a positive culture for the eventual fruit of the rebuild? How do I prevent the negative vibes of losing get to the team in the inevitable downturns? If there is youth on this team, how can I make sure they learn good habits and become mentors for the fruit of the rebuild? Can I identify the depth players who emerge from the rebuild and the early sages for my team? What are my back-up plans if things go awry either in the bottoming out itself or in the rebuild? How can I build an appropriate support staff for myself and the franchise (e.g.,, ANALYTICS)? In each and everyone one of these parts, which involve keeping the best of the old when possible or creating a good foundation from which to build, the Sabres did very poorly with because it was only concerned with losing as many games as possible to get his shiny new toys. (Notice how the rebuilding aspect impinges upon the tanking.) This was because the ownership was convinced somewhere to go on an all-out tank and was myopic in its goals as well while the GM was not cognizant of the other facets of a successful rebuild. The Stink of The Tank starts at the top -- and its negativity wafts down through the organisation until it contaminates everything the organisation touches. And, as I stated in another thread, XGMTM and XGMJB acted as if they were arrogant enough to believe that all their top draft picks would hit, all their trades would be wins, and all their FA signings would work out, that they did not need analytics because their evaluations were so perfect, had no back-up plan, and had no margin for error. That is a recipe for disaster -- and we have 10 years of bilge and dross to show for it. This is why I don't favour all-out tanks -- it is too easy to lose sight of the other facets of a rebuild and far too easy to stay in the mentality of a tank. If my tanking team finds chemistry and great goaltending, the answer is not to trade the goaltenders; it should be to find some pieces to help out. If my team suddenly wins 10 games in a row, but then starts to fade, the answer is not to denigrate it and do nothing; the answer includes identifying its most glaring weaknesses and trying to address them immediately. The Sabres are acting as if they were tanking before now because each GM gets a reset to mould the team properly. If you never accept losing, GMs will be less tempted to blow things up.

I have been mulling over this for much of the day when I was not working. Does it seem to you that XGMTM and XGMJB had way too much faith in his drafting ability and player evaluation skills over anything analytics would tell them? Because they sure acted as if all their draft picks would hit, all their FA signing would work, and all their trades were good.

Reminisce? You, kind sir, have a streak of toughness bordering on masochism which I do not have the machismo for.

IMHO, if you are arguing that Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart are part of the problem, then you are arguing that the team around them has had enough talent to competitive on the ice without them in the line-up and that the coaches they had were good enough to have the team competitive without Jack and Sam. I just looked at the rosters from 2015-6 to 2021. Although Bylsma, Housley, and Krueger each had flaws and blind spots which severely impacted their effectiveness as coaches, I can't think of any coach who could have made 4 functioning lines and 3 functioning pairs of defencemen from those line-ups -- even with Jack, Sam, ROR, etc.. The bottom of those rosters were just that bad. Therefore, how can I hold these problems against Eichel and Reinhart?

Do the Sabres consider two forwards instead in the top 10?

I know. I am facetiously suggesting that management is so incompetent that they would get Arizona's 1st in a trade this year.