Archie Lee

There is nothing about structurally sound defensive hockey that equates to playing without pace or intensity. Perhaps these are growing pains as we learn we can do both.

Ha, ha.

There is a narrative that Olofsson scores 3rd period goals in 5-1 games. I have no evidence to support this isn't true, but I've yet to see a post from anyone that includes supporting evidence either. Olofsson can be streaky player. He had 9 points in the first 8 games of 21-22, before getting injured. Last year there was a 12 game stretch in January where he scored 10 goals and added an assist. The record shows that there were many close games in those stretches. We are offensively challenged at the present. Olofsson looks like he might be getting into gear. We might be wise to lean in to him rather than away from him, over the next couple of weeks.

The good news is that UPL and Comrie have been objectively good so far this year. I'm not down on Levi at all, but lost in the less than exciting start for him and the team is that our other goalies have been good. Hopefully Comrie is healthy soon and he and UPL continue to play well.

We are going to find out what Granato and this group of players are made of. I realize that something that happened almost exactly 30 years ago has questionable relevance. But, the current scenario reminds me of November 1993. The Sabres were coming off of a year where they were a high-scoring and exciting team. In 92-93 they finished 2 games above .500. As exciting as that team was and as much as we fans generally adore many of the players from that era, they finished 15th out of 24 teams; they likely miss the playoffs in a modern day 32 team league and MayDay never happens. Lafontaine and Fuhr are injured early in the 93-94 season. Mogilny, also due to injury, is not quite the same as the prior year. In late November 1993, two things happen. 1.) Overnight the Sabres change their style of play to a more conservative defensive game. 2.). Hasek I’m near certain we don’t have a Hasek. But Granato has said for two years that defence is easier to coach than offence. Here we are. Our best offensive player is injured (maybe our two best if Tuch is also out long-term). The goalie we were relying on is maybe not quite ready. We are headed out on the road. Time to see if we can adjust how we play and if a player or two will step up and play at an all star level.

I just don't recall it happening in-season. I understand that if you have an assistant coach or AHL coach under contract and they get an opportunity in the off-season to interview for a job that represents a promotion, that it is bad form to block them from that opportunity. I've just never seen a guy leave a position with one organization for such an opportunity in the middle of the season. Usually when an NHL head coach is on the hot seat and people are talking about who might replace him if he is fired, the discussion swirls around the veteran guys who currently aren't working (Gallant, Boudreau, etc.), or the assistants on the NHL team, or the head coach of the NHL team's minor league affiliate. I have no issue with it; it kind of opens up the options for mid-season head coaching changes.

Yes, if things that are not going well continue to not go well then it could be a rough year.

Fair enough. My post is in the context of: if we haven't waived Olofsson to this point then we probably aren't going to and, therefore, we are better to try and find a way to get him scoring than to put him in positions where we are working against his strengths. I would not call Olofsson a floater. He is a one-dimensional player who, at best, is a neutral on-ice presence when he is not producing offensively. He didn't score 17 goals at 5v5 last year by floating.

Am I missing something? Is it normal for an NHL team to hire the head coach of another team's AHL affiliate mid-season?

First, it is still way too early in the year to panic about anything. The Sabres are a strong week or two away from being 3rd in the conference. Hanging around true .500 (not NHL .500) for 40-60 games keeps you in the race. Until we have a truly bad stretch of 3 losses or more in a row, there just isn't anything to panic about. I realize we all wanted a surge like what New Jersey had last year. It might still happen, but it is more likely that we are going to be haning around a WC spot for most of the year and that it will come down to the last few games. We can fret about the bottom 6 production, but the reality is that our bottom 6 has produced goals at only slightly below the average for Eastern Conference teams. Most teams get the vast majority of their goals from their top 6. We are no different. The one thing we don't have at the moment is a player who is having a great offensive season. Look at the top teams in the East right now and most have one or two players who are having strong offensive years (Pastrnak, Panarin, Larkin, Reinhart, Hughes, Bratt, Kucherov, Point). Our top scorer is Skinner who has 13 points in 15 games. Those are good Skinner numbers, but it means we are not getting what we expect to be getting from Thompson and others. Again though, it is early. We are on pace to allow 40+ fewer goals than a year ago. That is a positive. I stand by earlier comments; spreading out offensive production can result in diluting it. Greenway has been one of our best players this season. Playing him consistently with either Thompson or Mittelstadt, however, might be serving to limit the offensive production of two of our top scorers while depriving the bottom 6 of a player who can thrive in that role. We need to get Cozens and Olofsson going. Olofsson worked well with Thompson in the past (That 70's line, along with Asplund) but does not seem to work with Skinner. How about: Skinner/Mitts/Tuch Cozens/Thompson/Olofsson Greenway/Krebs/Peterka Girgs/Jost/Okposo What we have seemed to be doing all year is take the 3-4 guys who are struggling the most and put them together on the 3rd line and hope that they can find something. They don't and then the 3rd period comes along and we are rolling 3 lines including an exhausted Girgs and Okposo. The recipe hasn't worked. Time to give Cozens and Olofsson and Krebs an extended stretch with players who compliment their skills.

Krebs had a 90% xgf, 80% Fenwick, 70% Corsi in his 6 minutes last night (per Money Puck). On the season he is 4th on the team at D-zone shift start % while being one of only 7 players on the team with a corsi of 50% or better. Not saying he can’t be better, but he isn’t going to generate much offensively playing where he is in the lineup and for the minutes he plays. He is not hurting us defensively.

This is also why it is fine for Benson and Savoie to just go back to junior. The idea that they have nothing to prove or learn there is just not accurate. Both ran out of gas a bit in the WHL final last year. They can both get physically stronger and more mature and play for Canada at the World Juniors and have another deep playoff run with what appears to be a good team (hopefully their coach issues are resolved). There is lots of development that can occur with another year of junior hockey. The other factor, I think, is that you diminish a player's value when you have them playing a level too high. Nobody is down on Benson or Savoie, but if they are tearing up the WHL right now the hockey world in general has a different view than what they have when they see a 19 year old in the NHL playing less than 4 minutes or an 18 year old injured perhaps because they are not ready for the physical rigor of NHL play. If the Sabres are going to trade one or two of their high-end assets at some point (and I'm not sure they will) then the best way for them to retain their value is to be dominant players at lower levels as opposed to struggling players in the NHL. To bring this back to Mitts, if he had gone back to college one more year and then spent a year in Rochester before coming to the NHL, a lot of the negative vibes around his development never occur.

It's true. The Oilers don't have the VGK depth. When I watched that game I remember thinking that the Oilers were a lock to be a playoff team and here they are playing an afternoon game in Columbus, a non-conference rival, and they are pushing McDavid and Draisaitl in the final half of the 3rd period like the game was do or die. It seemed like a great opportunity to give some other players a chance to step-up. I don't mean that they shouldn't have had McDavid or Draisaitl on the ice at the end of the game, but it was odd to me that leading up to that moment they chose to almost entirely lean on their big two and deny the team a more collective stake in the outcome.

This is an anecdotal observation from a random Oiler game from last season that I happened to catch a portion of. The Oilers were playing in Columbus in late February. With 6-7 minutes left they were trailing 6-4. McDavid and Draisaitl were taking extended double-shifts. They eventually made the score 6-5. The Oilers called a time-out with a minute or so left. When they showed the Oiler bench during the time out, with the exception of the guys who were on the ice trying to get the tying goal, it was a collection of the most disinterested looking players I have seen. Nobody was into it. Nobody was standing up encouraging the guys on the ice. Guys looked entirely uninvested in the proceedings. I recall seeing one of them yawn. They looked like a group of guys who knew they had no role. The team would win or lose with how well McDavid and Draisaitl played and the rest of them were there to fill out the bottom half of the roster. Speculation is that McDavid is battling an injury. If he is not rolling at near 100%, I don't think there is a culture there that will see the team rally.

I recognize it was Savoie's 1st game, still it seemed odd to only play him 3:55. Krebs played just over 6 minutes. Last night was maybe the best indicator that Granato doesn't trust Krebs at this point as the underlying numbers matched the eye-test: when Krebs was on the ice the puck was in the Wild's end. It seemed weird to me that Granato put a lot of trust in him last season and now, even in a game where all indicators were that he was playing well, and where there were clearly guys getting more ice-time than their legs could manage, Krebs was stapled to the bench in the 3rd period. There is no fairness in pro-sports. A player gets the opportunity he gets and he either makes the most of it or he doesn't. Still, a little strange to me that we invested in Krebs as we have and do not give him extended time with any of our higher-end offensive players. I'm not down on Okposo and Girgensons. Last night was rough. I don't think Okposo should be on PK much if at all. But, if we are going to dress one or two players a game that Granato doesn't trust, then it is only going to further expose the weaknesses in Okposo's game. I don't think it is a sustainable model. We can look to the Tuch and Quinn injuries and say we will be fine when they are healthy, but the reality of an 82 game NHL season is that there will likely be others injured by then.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but are you comparing Gretzky being dealt at age 35 to McDavid at age 27-28?

If I could add a former high first round pick who is currently rehabbing from hip surgery, it would be Jesse Puljujarvi. Big, the right age, I think has always had good underlying #'s, but has just never produced the offence expected when he was drafted.

The Sabres did get the equivalent of 3 first rd picks for Eichel, at a point where Eichel needed neck surgery. I think the Oilers would do significantly better than that. The Gretzky trade was 35 years ago and involved the owner of the Oilers getting what would be the equivalent of $40 million today. I don't see a modern day McDavid trade as comparable. I do think that trade talk around McDavid and Draisaitl will definitely heat up if the Oiler season does not progress towards playoff contention. If things don't turn around significantly, extending either player (Draistaitl this off-season, McDavid next) seems unlikely. The Oilers will need to decide which is worse: being pilloried for winning nothing with McDavid and Draisaitl and having to trade them, or being pilloried for being the team that won nothing with them only to then see them walk as UFAs. It isn't something I would be interested in, but a Sabres trade for McDavid would likely start with Power and one of Thompson/Cozens and then add a combination of 3-4 top prospects and 1st rd picks.

I do think that spatial awareness plays a role in injuries. Some athletes have a natural ability to recognize when to bail-out of a situation that is potentially injurious. Others don't, at least not at the same level.

I’m not certain the statistics tell an accurate story (though, I’m also not certain they don’t). Do elite face off men put 100% effort into every neutral zone draw or into o-zone draws when they are up 3 in the 3rd? Do they ever set-up a future face-off win by intentionally losing a less critical face-off? How do elite face-off men fare in critical draws against non-elite face-off men? I’m certainly not trading valuable assets to get a guy who isn’t good enough to play PK/PP/OT, just because he wins face-offs 53% of the time. But no question we will be a better team if 1 or 2 of our centres become really good on the dot.

Who said it was ok? He was trying to avoid a d-zone face-off when he should have prioritized fresh legs. Declaring that no goalie in the league makes that mistake is kinda ridiculous, even taking post-game frustration into account.

UPL is the only goalie in the NHL who has ever had a brain cramp?

I agree. Some will interpret this as being ok with losing the extra point. That’s not it at all. We’ve lost 4 or 5 games in regulation this year where the score was tied in the 3rd. If we get 2 of those to OT we likely have 3 more points. We will win more of these than we will lose. It’s possible to be unhappy with the loss and happy we got the point at the same time. If the Islander score holds, we are tied for wild card 2. I realize we have played a game or two more than other teams, but we are 3-1-1 in our last 5. The trend is in the right direction.

Agreed with everything here. Olofsson is prone to being streaky. Even last year there were stretches where he was the only guy, or one of the only guys, who was cooking offensively for a stretch or two.

The %’s you have noted actually prove that there is movement after Thanksgiving among bubble teams. The Sabres went into this year as a bubble team. I doubt that will change between now and Thanksgiving and we are likely going to be in the wildcard race for most of the season.