RochesterExpat

Wahlberg eats his wheaties

Housecat’s time to shine.

Seeing as I had nothing better to do after the Sabres game--and considering how often the Bills game was mentioned during the Sabres broadcast--I decided to give watching football another try after going 2 years without watching a single game in full (or even half). In fact, the last NFL game I remember intentionally sitting down to watch was the New Years Eve game in 201 7 that let Buffalo sneak into the playoffs--and that was the only game that season I remember watching. So it's been realistically 8+ years since I cared about the NFL. I grew up a Steelers fan, but always had a soft spot for Buffalo since that was the "local" team. Part of the change in interest away from football, but particularly the NFL, was due to factors outside the league and I'll be the first to admit that. I was always a Nittany Lions college football fan first and I was extremely disappointed with the Penn State child abuse affair--disappointed enough I started rooting for Ohio State out of spite. Plus I just got older and realized I had other things I wanted to do with my time. That being said, a big part I stopped watching was simple: the games are just too slow and the pace of play was affecting the on-field product. Add to that there is a limit to the level of commercialization I am willing to endure and the NFL has exceeded it. Anyway, I can't say I watched this game in full as I had to do some farm chores at sunset, but it was close enough to count. I watched the first half, missed half time and the third quarter, and came back for the start of the fourth. So, based on the part of the game I missed, Buffalo actually lost 7-3. Therefore, I'm taking full credit for the absolute hammering of a win and you are all welcome. As a gesture of goodwill, I'm willing to auction off my viewership skills for playoffs and critical games to whichever team is willing to pay me the most. I should add, the last time I attended a football game was 2008 where I went to 3 Steelers home games and the Divisional round game at Heinz Field. The Steelers won the Super Bowl that season. In game attendance can be negotiated separate from viewing. For what it's worth from a relatively outside-the-football-sphere perspective, the sport is still painfully slow to watch and I didn't really enjoy it, but I didn't hate it either. I mean, I can absolutely find watching a team dominate another team in any sport entertaining even if I don't like the sport itself (let me tell you about Curling during the Olympics). That's what this was, but even that still failed to deliver to some capacity. I know people love football and I did as well at one point, but the quality of the broadcasts has really gone downhill. For a MNF broadcast, it was underwhelming and the color commentary as well as the play-by-play was just bad. Maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I don't remember watching MNF 12 years ago and thinking, "it sounds like they know less about what's going on right now on the field than I do watching at home." Hell, when I got up at the start of the half time show, they were literally discussing whether Josh Allen is "underrated" and then all agreeing that he's "underrated." That's when I called it quits and went outside to close up. Even the MNF crew can't grasp the difference between "underappreciated" and "underrated" when they're the ones who tell people what to think. If you really believe Josh Allen is 'underrated' Mr. MNF guy, maybe you should look at who rates him? I can hand you a mirror if you need. Do you just ignore all the stats put up during the broadcast showing just how dominant he is? Or is this just a talking line because you've literally got nothing better to talk about? But it just goes to show the level of commercialization. Players from smaller markets--or markets where teammates aren't dating famous pop stars--are always going to be underappreciated by MNF and the NFL because they don't drive revenue the same way as the Dak Prescotts and Patrick Mahomes of the league. And, now to come full circle, the last college football game I watched was the Sugar Bowl on New Years Day 2021 between Ohio State and Clemson. I was home for the holidays and my folks put the game on. Having been an Ohio State years earlier--even if only out of spite--I figured I would sit down and watch. Plus it was COVID so it wasn't like I was going anywhere. All I really remember from the game's commentary was the seemingly endless discussion about Trevor Lawrence being this future NFL star QB and how he was going to be a franchise-changing guy. All I remember from the game itself was a QB with some seriously questionable football IQ, but all the college football talent in the world. Glad to see that still appears to be an accurate profile.

The shot differential is atrocious, but there is truth to shot quality. Buffalo has given up a lot of the unscreened kind of perimeter low-probability shots. They haven’t given up a ton of serious opportunities. I mean, if I were Ruff, I’d still be upset with the lackluster play by the Sabres; however, it’s not as bad as the shot total would normally indicate.

The real first and second stars.

Krebs looks like he is struggling to play at the pace of the rest of the Sabres.

Based on how the second period has gone, it’s safe to say this team still hasn’t figured out the first period.

More streaming services than teams and none of them have this game out of market apparently. I’m really over how the NHL handles streaming. It’s getting to the point it’s easier to pirate streams now.

I feel like Byram had culture shock leaving Colorado and coming to Buffalo. I know people have beat the dead horse about the coaching change in Buffalo, but I never really thought about his potential influence on Byram. This might be a good fit for him.

I played 15 years of hockey and by the time I was a teenager being told to do an on-ice push up was humiliating. It wasn’t the push up itself that sucked. It’s the fact the whole world knew you were getting punished. At least taking a lap wouldn’t be obvious to anyone not seriously following practice. Doing a push up? Nope, everyone knows.

I assume Kulich was rotating in on wing and not center? Probably Benson's spot(?).

As far as the contract goes, I'm fine with it. I think it's a bit much considering his body of work to his point, but we're not using the cap space for anything anyway and it's not my money. Worst case, he's a $400K buried cap hit. This is only a good comparison on that small bit of paper. Nick Robertson was coming off an ELC where he played a total of 56 games last season, 15 games the year prior, and total of 16 before that. Add in his 10 playoff games and that's 97 total NHL games. Krebs is now at 215 NHL games and that's an established NHL player whether this board agrees with it or not. It doesn't help Robertson's case that he went scoreless in 6 playoff games this season and was benched in the final game. More importantly, Nick Robertson took what cap space the Leafs had left to make a massive bet on himself--technically he took extra since the Leafs are currently over on salary cap. He had zero arbitration rights. His QO was $813K. He got a $60K pay raise off of his QO. More importantly, he secured a one year deal where, when it expires, he will have arbitration rights. Arbiters are not allowed to consider a team's salary cap situation. This is going to be the same offseason that Marner and Tavares are off the books and will be a relatively pivotal moment for the Matthews-era Leafs. I can't fault Robertson for trying to maximize his own value given the extenuating circumstances. Yes, I'd rather have Robertson than Krebs in my lineup and, yes, Krebs is overpaid, but it's still not a good comparable.

Alternative way to look at the numbers: it's a $400,000 cap hit if he gets waived and sent to Rochester. Malestyn is $300k, Kubel is $450K, and Lafferty is $995K.

I don’t see him hitting the 40g mark this season. I’d guess he’s not far off though. 34 +/- 2 is my guess. I would be surprised if he hit 40, but I wouldn’t be shocked. I’m not sure how many others would really be shocked either. Maybe I’m being pedantic and splitting hairs, but I feel like you’re exaggerating just how unexpected it will be for Quinn to net 40. I think most of us have pretty high expectations for Quinn and while a 40g season is a bit beyond them, it’s not so far past our expectations that we’re going to be shocked the same way we would be if Greenway scored 40.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I stopped following football years ago, but I woke up this morning to a pretty misleading headline “Miami’s Tua out with concussion after monster hit by Bills’ Hamlin.” I pulled up a video expecting to see a big and questionable hit. The only thing questionable about that play is what Tua was trying to accomplish since I wouldn’t even call it a hit. The crazy bit is watching the collision in real time from the field view camera makes it look like Tua was targeting Hamlin’s knees. Because it’s hard to justify why he didn’t slide otherwise. Got to love AI generated clickbait headlines. That wasn’t a hit. I also wish Tua the best and I hope the Dolphins’ medical staff handle this concussion in a serious manner. I hope Hamlin, given his history, doesn’t feel guilty and that this incident didn’t bring back too many terrible memories. This was quite clearly not his fault.

Unfortunate consequence of playing outside North America and only made worse by the international politics with Russia.

I agree, but I’m also not worried. The Blue Jackets are one of the organizations in the league I expect to do right by his family. The ownership group seems vested in the organization. Not sure what they’ll do. It might be jersey proceeds going to the family or one of the charities Johnny Hockey supported. I also expect them to retire his number.

In a sense that’s already how it would be done. You would train your model using the top tier goaltenders. This would be the “model” goalie used to evaluate others. As far as detecting subtle nuances to gameplay, a computer with sufficiently detailed video and a large enough data set is almost certainly going to reveal patterns of goalie behavior that we didn’t expect. It’s unlikely the level of model training that you’re suggesting or trying to accomplish is technically feasible at present. But a rudimentary implementation is certainly doable.

To your point, you are also able find information a lot easier using a search engine if you know how to craft a query. It's why the best members of the IT Department tend to be those who know how to write a better search query. For the overwhelming majority of users, "AI" is simply a search engine evolved. That's not a surprise either. It's what consumers want. The majority of AI products the public has access to (and would be interested in anyway) are basically search aggregates that use NLP to formulate summaries of the top results. It's the NLP portion that people find impressive and that is why most people simply don't understand as since they believe all the model is doing is interpreting a written question, looking at the top search results, and generating a human-readable response. Which, funny enough, is pretty much exactly what it is doing. We know ChatGPT used Google's ranking algorithm to determine priority for neighboring relationships. It's why the answers are terrible because, as it turns out, if you use Quora as a source of truth, you've poisoned the well. Not to mention StackOverflow. Even when we shift the conversation to generative AI, it's the NLP/NLG aspects that most people care about and are impressed by. In part, that's because modern public AI models are, frankly, awful at anything else. Once again, this is driven by the consumer. The niche case of the person using generative AI to to analyze proteins and develop new drugs is exceedingly niche. On the other hand, the person who wants help writing a thank you note or generating a background for a birthday party invitation is anything but niche. Who do you tailor your model to? I understand you are bullish on AI, but what you are discussing (thousands of sensors on an athlete's body, for example) is still very far away from being even considered for implementation. There's insufficient computing power to make it a cost effective venture. Especially when we're consuming resources so I can generate a video of a turtle doing the macarena. It's probable that eventually it replaces the eye test. To answer your point, yes, AI can be used to analyze a video for any number of things. If we're considering how scouts evaluate a player with the "eye test" (namely positioning) this is a pretty trivial application and I would be surprised if teams aren't already employing it. A simple understanding of a simple application for video replacing scouting would be to think of it this way. The team creates the ideal, "model" player for a position or role. This model would be used as a reference for on-ice positioning. You then compare the location of the player you are interested in evaluating on each video frame to determine how far the player is deviating from the model. This would allow you to score players. You can establish zones as well so each player is assigned a zone. This is basically what scouts already do during player evaluation. However, now I can process every single shift of every single CHL game for a prospect in less time than a scout can sit through a single game to scout a single player. The simplest use case would likely be a goaltender. The hurdle here is it requires a video that shows the goalie's positioning before the play/puck arrives to him. A lot of the lower level leagues don't have the greatest camera work so it's doubtful you'd be able to seriously apply it, but this would almost certainly work at the NHL level. I think part of this is due to the the league swinging too far into the analytics as teams were searching for any edge in order to win and data analytics being somewhat of a snake oil industry at times. The NHL is an incredibly small sample size group. Even the best analytics fail at times. When you start narrowing your data sets to search for even the slightest edge, your decreasing the sample size further, and the likelihood of an "analytic failure" increases. Look at Eric Comrie's numbers before he came to Buffalo. No "fancy stat" exists that can account for "what if this goalie plays more than 20 games?" and no "fancy stat" exists for "is this goalie able to handle the mental struggles that accompany an injury?" It's quite possible--maybe even likely--that, given a 1,000,000 Eric Comries across 1,000,000 NHLs, the majority of them turn into top NHL goalies (as his stats the year before he arrived in Buffalo would suggest). The issue is when you have a single Eric in a single NHL and he gets injured and never recovers. "Has this coding problem or approach been thoroughly solved and repeated by a human?" -> If Yes, AI is more likely to generate workable code. -> If No, AI is more likely generate work for the programmer. The latter is honestly helpful on occasions where you aren't sure where to get started or how to approach the task. But when it's unhelpful, it's really unhelpful.

Most of the public AI products are glorified search engines with some rudimentary predictive analytics baked in. I can’t fault people for thinking this.

I don't particularly like his videos, but I'll admit I watched a bunch during COVID when I ran out of things to do. He talked about his collection in one of them and I remember him saying a lot were gifts/donations from people, but he'd also been collecting for decades and that it was just his very expensive alternative to stamp collecting. I'm jealous of his collection. I've only got two jerseys: an Eichel jersey I bought a few months before the injury that led to his departure and a Bergeron jersey. The latter is because Bergeron remains my favorite post-lockout player. I don't want to talk about the former.

I like to dream the last decade has been a dream and we’re all going to wake up soon. Does that count?

Jeff Skinner could be a reclamation project for the top 6. 🙃

I didn't realize Thomas Harley was still unsigned. Talk about one of the best "under the radar" guys from the last season.

Rosen was a stretch pick that still doesn't make a ton of sense to me. As for Leinonen, he was a stretch pick too, but, situationally, it was a little different. Buffalo drafted based on position and not BPA in that case. It was clear they wanted to draft a goalie given the net situation in Buffalo. Leinonen was the #1 or #2 goalie in the draft depending on which public list you looked at, and he was the consensus #1 goalie on draft night during the broadcast (Brennan being the #2). Neither goalie do I see making a serious impact in the NHL at any point. Buffalo must have projected him to go somewhere in the 2nd round before they made their 3rd round pick. I don't agree with that at all, but we'll never know. Depending on the public draft board, it's not an unreasonable take. Seattle shocked everyone by drafting Kokko after Buffalo drafted Leinonen. Kokko wasn't even on some of the top 25 lists for goalies. At no point did the Athletic even profile him. Meanwhile, Milic went undrafted to the surprise of many. Funny enough, Kokko is looking like he might have what it takes. Brennan was the third goalie picked and he went early in the 4th round. A total of 20 goalies were drafted across the 7 rounds. Of those, apart from the aforementioned Kokko, Ivanov (CBJ, Rnd 5 #138) and Whitehead (VGK, Rnd 4, #128) are the most promising of unsigned goalies. Murashov (PIT, Rnd 4, #118) will play in the AHL starting this season and Hildeby (TOR, Rnd 4, #122) played very well last season for the Marlies. The values in goalie were part of the goalie "run" that was kicked off by Brennan's selection. Leinonen was a reach at pick #42. He was projected to go in the 3rd on public lists. I'm guessing Buffalo thought he was going to go before #74. At least, that's what I hope. It was a terrible pick nonetheless. You don't reach up a round+ for a position pick. You move your picks around. Someone in the Org made a mistake on this one.