Archie Lee

Also meaning nothing: the team’s winning % after 8-10 games. This time last year ours was .700.

To provide some context: - Prior to be becoming an NHL goalie last season, UPL had consistently been a ranked top-10-goalie prospect or an honourable mention top-goalie prospect for several years on many prospect lists - In UPL's first 13 NHL games split over the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons, he had a .913 save %. - Last year, through January he played 20 games and had a .901 save %. He was the NHL rookie of the month for January 2023 - It's worth noting that UPL's save % through his first 33 NHL games is objectively better than Levi's to this point in Levi's career (not in any way a shot against Levi, who I am excited about) - UPL's Feb and March last year were very bad (though he did end the season with 2 wins and a .911 save % over his last 3 appearances) What team waives a young goalie who has been considered a top prospect for years, because they had two bad months in their rookie NHL season? Thankfully, not the Sabres.

I enjoy advanced stats. Using them for single game evaluations can be misleading though. Goals saved above expected really does not work as a single game stat. To begin with, you can’t give up 1.26 goals in a game. If you face a Jack Hughes breakaway the first shot of a game and are scored on you will be negative on goals saves above expected. Doesn’t really tell you much other than you got scored on by Jack Hughes. Also, UPL faced 22 shots against NJ in only 28 minutes. Vanicek saw 27 shots over 60. Workload matters. What was the team corsi over the 28 minutes UPL played against NJ? I was listening to the new Expected Buffalo podcast last night. They are not UPL fans. They glossed over Levi’s poor start, largely blaming it on how the Sabres managed his workload (I agree that they overused Levi to start the year, but can also acknowledge he has been below average in performance through his four games). Then they proceeded to pick apart individual goals that UPL gave up while labeling people who defend him as “UPL-lovers”. I don’t see a lot of people blindly loving or defending UPL. I mostly see that some of us want to put in context that he is a young goalie who for most of his NHL career has not enjoyed the luxury of a stable defensive environment in front of him. At the start of the season the Sabres were the league’s youngest team by average age at 25.5 (per capfriendly). UPL is a year younger than our average age, playing a position where it is universally understood that development takes longer. Some of us just think there is a good goalie in there and want to give the kid a break.

Worst case scenario with Krebs is he is a versatile bottom six forward who can kill a penalty, win a draw, get under the other teams skin. If those are the things he can do in the NHL, then he will probably be better at them when he is 25-26 than he is at 22. No need to lose patience or be disappointed yet. No reason he can’t be our Casey Cizikas.

Thanks for this. I agree. I should add though, that I think Adams did himself no favor when he failed to get Ullmark signed. My position going back to Ullmark's final year with the Sabres is that the Thatcher Demko 5 x $5 million deal was the benchmark for getting a goalie like pre-Bruins Ullmark signed long-term. It is, basically, the deal Tristan Jarry got this off-season as well. All three were basically .911 - .915 goalies (not stars, but upper-mid-level starters) at the time they signed their current deals. Ullmark, to his full-credit, is benefiting from the team-impact on his #'s. Had Adams offered Ullmark 5x5 before the end of the 2021-2022 season, I can't imagine that he would have declined. Adams's reluctance to go past 4 years, I think, helped Ullmark decide to test the market and when the Bruins matched our offer he took the opportunity to go to a winning team rather than stay with the Sabres through a rebuild. Make no mistake though, Ullmark at .911 - .915 here, would be plenty good enough. Vanicek, in my opinion, is at least a grade-level below Ullmark, Demko, and Jarry and I'm not convinced he would be better here than the goalies we have on our roster have been.

NJ were 3rd best in xga last year. We were 27th. I’m not convinced that Vanicek would have thrived here or that UPL/Comrie would have floundered there. For clarity, I’m not of the view that this is undoable. We are 8 games in and I think there is a clear effort to get the team to play better defence. I don’t think Eric Johnson makes the comment he made if coaches were not emphasizing D. He was, in my view, imploring his teammates to take serious what is being preached. The lack of great results thus far does not mean it is not being stressed or that it won’t be successful as we get deeper into the season.

If the point is that Adams should have got a better goalie then my answer is, fair enough. I think you judge results and thus far the goaltending results have not been good. But not every team in the league is 25th in expected goals against. 24 teams do better (so far this season). UPL won’t magically turn into Connor Hellebuyck. It doesn’t take magic to play better defensive hockey than we are playing. We can wish and hope for better goaltending or we can reduce the number of opportunities we give to other teams.

No, we could stop turning the puck over and giving the other teams multiple odd-man rushes per game. The 2nd and 3rd goals against yesterday started with unforced and careless turnovers that lead to breakaways. We could commit to reducing those type of plays, without sacrificing scoring, and allow fewer goals against.

It would, honestly, require a Saros or a Hellebuyck level goalie for the Sabres to look like they have good goaltending. If this team could just learn to commit to team defence and be offensively patient at times (not passive, just patient), we could have dragged 2 or 3 games to OT this year, we would have 2-4 more points in the standings and our goaltending would be fine (not great, just fine). Until we stop being careless with the puck and being happy to just trade chances with the opposition, including in the 3rd period of tied games, this is just what it's going to look like. Per MoneyPuck, we are 25th in the league in expected goals against at 5v5 and in all situations. Our expected goal differential in all situations is -3. We are at -4. Our goaltending has been far from great, but it has not been the issue.

They should do what they should have done from the start of the season. If all are healthy, rotate them like a rotation of starting pitchers until one or two emerge or show they aren’t the answer. The NHL sample sizes on all 3 are too small to draw any conclusions yet. If you can’t decide based on what you have seen to date and therefore need all 3, then play all 3 and let them sort themselves out.

It is beyond me that anyone could watch tonight’s game and come away thinking that UPL didn’t play well. The last 5 minutes was a complete collapse of the team’s focus and commitment.

The way hockey used to be back when there were never any cheap shots? In all my years watching hockey, there has never been a time where being physical with a player like Tkachuk, stopped said player from being a cheap shot artist. Now, if your argument is that at some point a good team needs to be able to “fight fire with fire”, I can accept that. But players like Brady Tkachuk won’t stop being who they are because they took a few heavy body checks. Indeed, that’s the sort of thing that encourages them.

Very happy with the win. Disappointed that the priority in the 3rd seemed more to be getting Skinner a hat-trick than preserving a good game for their young goalie.

Hockey, is a strange game.

I think this is oversimplifying things. The message E. Johnson was trying to send this week is that the offense is going to be there and we will win games by out scoring the opposition. But, if we want to take the step from being a .500ish team that flirts with the playoffs to being a true playoff team and contender, then we will need to play better defensively so that when the offense dries up for a spell, as it currently has, we can win low scoring games with some consistency. This will, obviously, also serve us well once we are in the playoffs. I agree with you that if our offense was clicking right now we could be 3-1 and nobody is panicking. That would not change the fact though, that ultimately we need to be a better defensive team.

Just my view, but you have reached a number of conclusions without much evidence. I’m not making excuses. They have not been good through 4 games and need to be better in all phases. But I’m not ready to conclude at this early stage of the season that the youngest team in the league is incapable of committing to growth in any particular area.

I don’t think we did it backwards. I can think of examples of young players and teams that needed to embrace defensive play to take the next step. I can’t think of a team that was great defensively that then added offense by committing to a more offensive game. Offensive is typically added by adding offensively gifted players. Defense is something you can get better at through commitment. That the results aren’t showing does not mean it is not being stressed or worked towards.

So, no possibility that they just haven't fully figured it out yet? The Sabres are not the first NHL team that needed a "come to defense" moment.

FYI, the Devils started last season with back to back 5-2 losses and Devils' fans were chanting "Fire Lindy". My thoughts on the start are that we are 0-2 after 2 games not 4-14-2 after 20. Last year's cup finalist Panthers are also 0-2 and so are this year's favourites, the Oilers (who have given up 12 goals in two games against the Canucks). So far our top 5 goal scorers from last year have 0 points and are a combined -14. This is like the heart of an MLB team's batting order hitting .125 with no extra base hits through the season's first series. It's not how the season is going to go. There are a lot of games left. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own despair and I'm not trying to sugar coat what has been a disheartening start to a critical season. But even the best teams will have stretches over an 82 games season where they lose a few in a row and look bad doing so. I don't think there is any evidence to support that it is worse to have that happen in games 1-4 than it is in games 42-45.

Agreed. I would elevate Krebs, put Jost between Girgs and Okposo and Olofsson to the bench. Not panicking yet though. Today was much better than night one.

I think this is true, and also speaks to the reality that none of those players took what you would really call a "team-friendly" deal at the time of signing. All three could have played out last season without an extension. Had they done so, the deals they got might have been different (certainly Thompson could have got quite a bit more, Cozens likely a little bit more, Samuelsson I think comes in about the same for a long-term extension). In Thompson's and Cozens's cases, the deals now look team-friendly, but given all knowns and unknowns they were fair for the time they were signed.

For what team to claim?

I'm not entirely above getting excited or worried about a pre-season result. But I temper my excitement or worry by reminding myself that by the time we get a game or two into the regular season, the pre-season will be forgotten (if it isn't already). If we had won 7-0 last night only to then drop our first 3 regular season games, I would not be taking solace by reminding myself that we destroyed the Pens in the final pre-season game. Last regular season, before November ended practically every playoff team had at least one loss like the one we had last night. Many playoff teams had multiple such losses in the first 2 months of the season. The Sabres are going to lose games like this. Hockey is more baseball than football. Last night's game is far closer in relevance to a MLB team getting hammered in a split-squad game in mid-March than it is to the Bills' opening season loss to the Jets.

I’m not worried about anything based on 3 pre-season games. But if I were to be worried I would be much more so by our defensive play than the goaltending. We have been outshot in every game thus far and by a total of 111-77. We will need to play better D and give our goalies a chance to be good. Specific to goaltending: - Comrie was fine and gave us a chance to win - Levi was excellent, but probably had the lightest workload - UPL didn’t help himself with the first goal, but that was a fluke in my view; he faced the most difficult shot distribution of the 3. You can’t take away a bad/fluke goal, but other than that goal I thought he was fine. Going into this year I strongly believed that improving our defensive play was as or more important to our improvement as improved goaltending. Through 3 preseason games my view has only been reinforced.

Biro might be perfectly positioned to be the 13th forward. Assuming Olofsson isn’t going anywhere, the top 9 is full. It serves no purpose to have Kulich or Rosen playing 4th line duties. Rousek does not need to clear waivers. Biro can play wing or centre.