Marvin

Just read it from WBFO.

I think this is more than fair.

"Never ascribe to conspiracy what you can ascribe to incompetence." I think the GMs being incompetent at goalie selection is more than plausible.

Is it unreasonable to believe that a team who is comfortably in the playoffs by 10 points is automatically at least a dark horse as a Stanley Cup contender? By my definition, GMKA wants this team to be an outside Cup contender next season. I just expect that it means that he won't make what he considers an overpayment for an asset next season, which a serious contender is wont to do. YMMV.

That is a sad, sad indicator of what this team has put out there for a long time.

I have said that Hasek's positioning and instincts game him more chances to be lucky. Let's face it: he made a ton of lucky saves -- but no one else was good enough to be in a position to be lucky to make the save. For others, the goal was on the board; for Hasek, it just might not be.

Has anyone else looked at highlights of Comrie's games in Winnipeg for comparison. I wonder if part of his problem here is that he went from a veteran, defencively responsible team to one which routinely yields great scoring chances from prime areas. Sometimes, he looks the hockey equivalent of shell-shocked out there.

Here's what I think. Spock (to Dr. McCoy and Cdr Decker): Random chance appears to have operated in our favour. Dr. McCoy: In plain, non-Vulcan English, we got lucky. That is what luck is: the statistical certainty of several heads getting tossed in a row. Now, as Victor Mollo and Nico Gardiner pointed out in the bridge book Card Play Technique, or the Art of Being Lucky, there are still elements of luck which make it a skill to be acquired. It also applies to hockey. Dominik Hasek was the luckiest goaltender ever because he kept putting himself in position where he could make those miraculous saves.

If we do, could we be the first team to ride a 4-headed monster into the playoffs? I am just giggling at the idea that we could then win the Cup with 4 guys all with 3-5 wins and teams go back to playoff tandems as a result. (Recall that was normal before Grant Fuhr unless your team had a Bernie Parent after the league allowed teams to dress 2 goalkeepers for each game.)

It could be that he's been a wall in practice.

I didn't think of it before, but Lyubushkin definitely merits praise.

This is absolutely how I see this team in the defencive zone. They need to learn patience and tenacity in the defencive zone.

@GASabresIUFAN see Taro's first paragraph: Next year, playoffs are the goal.

Welcome to the board! A great perspective. Thank you.

I was at the game. According to his former teammates, Perreault used to do this to kill time at the airport and different guys would join in for different songs.

Who is considering rebuilding and has defencemen to move? I read Calgary was one team.

Good call on Girgensons.

I get that political opinion media encourage us to take the most extreme version of an argument we disagree with and use it as representative of the opposition, thus branding anyone who views things with nuance as flaky, weak, stupid, an enemy of humanity, and so on. Can we avoid such condescension here, please?

We need the "Confused" emoji back.

Looky here.

I think the trade deadline broke some fans. I just read a few posters decrying the wins because the Sabres are tanking because they did not get Meier and/or Chychrun, so they are ipso facto tanking. Thus, we know that because management OK-ed the tank, then the players have quit, so the draft pick is more important than anything else the team will do. I guess hard work and good play were just dumb luck and that floating through the last 10 games will help the team next year...how?

I played D-III hockey. This is great.

Which article? Please point me to the page. I just wanted to show the plausibility of threats against families in Russia against players around the world. Post Scriptum: The Soviets sent Viktor Korchnoi's kid to a forced labor camp before the 1981 FIDE World Chess Championship and coerced Florencio Campomanes into interrupting the 1984 World Championship because the Armenian Garry Kasparov had worn Anatoli Karpov down. It would not surprise me in the least if Putin has threatened people.

Addendum: I don't think that a player should wear a jersey promoting something they don't believe. That is what freedom is all about. We are also free to draw our own conclusions. Honestly, with something like a warm-up jersey, I don't know where showing tolerance ends and giving endorsement begins. Writing as someone with a now trans-nephew.

Putin routinely uses threats against families to control players abroad, be it hockey or chess. It is unrealistic to expect player to act differently. Let me speak to this personally from another country. In the 1984-5 academic year, the Indira Gandhi government got Penthouse magazine to write an article accusing my dad of being an arms supplier of Sikhs in India. They threatened my dad with the death of his 80-something parents by slow torture with picture mailed to him. This was because he was helping Jack Kemp on his re-election campaign. When nothing happened, India pressured the Reagan Administration to get my Dad run off what we now know was the B-2 contract. The part he was working on ground to a halt. They had to bring him back a couple of months later at a much higher salary because all the MIT, Princeton, CalTech, etc. grads could not do what the guy from Buffalo State could do. If you want to know where $1B of the several billion of cost-overruns on the project came from, now you know. I myself was threatened by the new Indian Student Union at Case Western Reserve to work publicly on pro-Indira publicity or "face the consequences." (All of them were new students. These cowards did not go to CWRU until I had established myself.) I found out from the INS that as a citizen, I could run the kids out on a rail just on my say-so for their threats. I take the belief in threats very seriously.