Marvin

We had frost on our front lawn this morning.

Funnier version of this: I remember there were several hockey sites in 2005-6 who were incredulous and disgusted that Buffalo's "pond-hockey pansies" (that's a direct quote from a very reputable site) could win so consistently without a true #1 goaltender, a decent top-6 centre, or a great defence. In this argument: Miller, Biron, and Noronen were considered sub-standard back-ups; the defence was considered adequate; Briere was a low-end 2C while Connolly was a passable 3C and Drury was an overpaid 3C. The writing team concluded that the NHL had so distorted the game that even though "Lindy Ruff could get blood from stone", the Sabres were bad for hockey and proof that the league "encouraged figure skaters, not hockey players." I should note that I still go to the site regularly as its Admins are very good analysts and ferret out better-founded rumours.

Sadly, I think that @Xzy89c has a point. They use "1C" for those who are clearly top-flight centres. Similarly, "2C" is "1C who is clearly behind the top 1Cs to top 2C". And 3C is behind that, but clearly not a bottom-line C. So when scouts talk, their evaluation is distributed in the 10-15 1C, 20-30 2C, and 30-45 3C. Everyone else is "dispensable".

Larsson in there too? That can't be the Sabres -- there are 4 legitimate NHL lines. Oh, wait -- new GM...

I stand corrected.

Duh: the re-incarnation of 1994 Dominik Hasek. 😉

Two years ago, I would have traded 2 firsts for him after the 10 game winning streak. Aside from the Skinner trade, which was a gift, Botterill didn't do half as well his entire tenure on the trade front. Dare I say it: IMHO, this greatly improves the chances that Larry and Zemgus stay and we can play 3 lines at will.

It's "competitiveness" when the internet consisted of 400 baud modems. If that's the consensus and we don't trade the pick, I think he takes either Jarvis or Lundell.

I agree: January 2021 at the earliest.

Much as I like to think that, the original sin that year was yanking Mike Peca around. Then again, you have to wonder how penalties were getting called with Lemieux's return and Bourque going to Colorado.

My coin stood on edge for this. For the moment, Team Tage Thompson takes the trophy. (Given how fractious we seem to be, some consonance seemed appropriate.)

If Botterill had traded O'Reilly at the draft, Montreal would have had to pay the $7.5 M.

When he went to Edmonton.

Aim for people on the outs with their organisations. I'd target Strome and Domi and hope I get lucky.

If I remember correctly, he IS worth more, but it is not liquid. From what I heard, he should sit on that stuff while his other normal revenue streams (energy, entertainment, hospitality) take a bath for a year or two.

We are creating some because we envy those who have had news because of the extended playoff. My friends in Detroit, New Jersey, and San Jose are griping the same way we are.

The trade of a 1st round pick for him did no good either: he had to be the 2nd coming of Dominik Hasek to quiet some of the boo-birds. That had to weigh on the team in general and him in particular. I can imagine him thinking that he was never going to get mentally healthy in Buffalo.

Speaking from experience: The treatment of mental illness is really up to the potential patient. Even if someone recommends that you get treatment, you have to want to. I don't know what the Sabres actually did or did not do, but ultimately Lehner had to be the one who wanted to get help. Especially when you are potentially at the top of your profession, as even marginal NHLers are, it is hard to admit that you need help -- particularly if you view your mental illness as part of what made you a success.

Uncles: Peter, Marion, and Anton were brothers. The other "lines of brothers" who had been in the NHL by then were Bill, Bob, and Barclay Plager of the St. Louis Blues and Doug, Max, and Reg Bentley of the Chicago Black Hawks (Reg only played 11 games, though).

Zemgus Girgensons (2016-7) was a regular centre more recently than Mikael Granlund (2015-6).

Until we get a real centre spine, wingers even as good as Gaudreau don't interest me. I am that fed up.

The Sabres really have been an overall planning, strategic, tactical, and analytical failure in myriad ways for multiple years. Here's my 1/50 of a dollar. I was philosophically opposed to The Tank. It is one thing to rebuild and accept a couple of down years, as long as you acquire your next generation of players in large enough quantity that you can afford the odd miss, the losses due to injury, the learning curves, and the like while filling the NHL team with high character veterans who will take pride in teaching the youth. (Think the 1995-6 Buffalo Sabres.) It is quite another to underman the team with Benoit, Meszaros, and Strachan and then undermine it by trading away players who cause, heaven forfend, wins. That makes the team a joke internally to the veterans you brought in. The youth who make the team (Girgensons, Larsson, Grigorenko) may be permanently stained by this stink and may never recover until they leave. I consider this a broad strategic and tactical failure. Even if I am correct, this is not fatal if your planning and execution afterward are solid. Once you have made the decision to rebuild, you should plan on their being a lot of youth. You can't hire a youth-averse coach like Dan Bylsma. When you have a lot of high-end skill, you should not get a coach whose system de-emphasises possession like Dan Bylsma's. And, with an all-out tank, you have so little talent in the system that you need to husband all your draft picks and other resources so that you can tolerate injuries, the odd bust, etc. and not spend them on players I like in ROR and Kane until they can put you into the playoffs. Nor can you spend assets like a misbegotten youth just because you can. Moreover, as defence takes longer to develop, you need to field complete defences to help the youth break in more gradually. On all these points, Murray failed. But just because you make a commitment to a modern system does not mean that the previous regime's evaluations were useless; it just means that you need to take it with a grain of salt. In any event, there is still no excuse for failing to have 4 lines of actual NHL-quality players in the NHL 3 years running. You can't be behind the 8-ball on goaltending ever. And whatever you do, you can't trade away proven players for scraps, no matter how you and/or your owner feel. It would also have been nice to not force your coach to have 4 of the bottom 10 Corsi forwards in the league on the roster at once. And when he manages to win anyway nd then keep the team in playoff contention for months, you can't undermine the team by failing to use your assets to fill in the gaping hole you yourself had created at 2C. So Botterill failed across-the-board.

IMHO, +/- is a very tricky stat. I consider it a primitive metaphor for a statistic -- it was the first attempt to measure skaters beyond simple goals + assists = points & penalty minutes. As such, it is quite crude. First, you need to put every team on the same scale with Adjusted Plus-Minus, which I commented on in the Analytics group. This puts the entire league on roughly the same scale. Even then, it's still imperfect. Good teams tend to have a bunch of players just below an adjusted 0.0 while they have a few players well into the plus. Conversely, bad teams tend to have several players near an adjusted 0.0 while they have many in the debit column. And after that, you still need to be aware of player usage and their team situation. Dave "Cementhead" Semenko got good ratings as Gretzky's bodyguard. Wayne Gretzky's plus-minus dropped fairly steadily over his last few years because he was not a defencive stalwart in the DPE and he was tasked of carrying a team when his back wasn't up to it in more ways than one. However, IMHO, if he had been in Buffalo int 1999 between Sanderson and Barnes, they might win the Cup.

Is Ehlers a centre? If not, then no.