Robviously

I definitely don't take the Hockey's Future talent scale and grades all that seriously anymore. They pretty much just make everyone between 6 and 7.5 and then hedge their bets with B and C probabilities to succeed.

Yeah, I didn't understand what was so upsetting about what Miller tweeted.

Because it's about culture and language and not about race. Anywhere I've ever been where there was a large international presence (be it a university or workplace), people tended to gravitate towards others who shared their background. Because they're bad? No, because it's easier. If I was in an office in Moscow with one other American, I'd probably mostly talk to that one other American. There's a pretty good chance we like the same things (i.e. grew up watching the same TV shows and watching the same sports.) The risk with a group of Russians (or a group from any country) is that they'll be a clique and not feel like they're part of the rest of the team and the risk with a single Russian (or one guy from any country) is that he'll feel alone and isolated from the rest of the team. That's just reality. I hope it's something the Sabres think about when they try to bring these young kids over here, and I expect that they do have ways to ease that transition.

I'm trying to be happy about this. Basically all the fans got beat up for months and now we're supposed to do backflips because the beatings are over and we're getting a dwarf season. Wow, thanks. I'll enjoy the NHL again when there's an actual game on TV but I'm not celebrating the news that these idiots finally found a way to divide their gigantic pile of money.

When we drafted Grigorenko, the thought was that they shouldn't bring in another Russian because you don't want to form "cliques." If Grigorenko is our franchise center, we'd want him to integrate with the rest of the team (and North America) as quickly and thoroughly as possible. I guess that sounds a little silly, but I used to work in an office with a group of Russians and they did (mostly) keep to themselves and each other. FWIW. Actually, we should probably just get him to marry a girl from Cheektowaga for the whole integration thing.

We can hope.

You have a good memory. I was curious about the board's reaction to when we drafted him so I did a search and found that original thread: http://forums.sabrespace.com/topic/21280-round-two-pick-44-jake-mccabe/?do=findComment&comment=398079 There are a couple other good links in that thread.

I suspect these two posts are related. [Makarov FTW.]

Damn, Jake McCabe's stock just about doubled this morning. I liked the teeny tiny bit I read about him last spring when we drafted him, but he really got lost in the excitement over Grigorenko and Girgensons.

T.J. Brennan went into Beast Mode tonight: 2 goals and 3 assists in a 7-6 Amerks win. Foligno won a fight and scored the winner in OT. Next stop: First Niagara Center on Friday.

Per Kris Baker at SabresProspects, Jake McCabe has been named captain of Team USA's WJC team. He was our 2nd round pick last year.

Brennan was off the hook tonight. Made me feel pretty good about basically demanding that the Sabres make room for him this summer (back when I was young and naive and thought there'd be an NHL season).

A good showing of below-average former Sabres there.

I love that every union, no matter the situation, always has some element of "You'd better fall in line or you're going to get hurt physically." Seems totally legit.

Ironically, the same hyper-competitive personality traits that help these guys be successful as athletes are probably what's hurting them in this situation (and preventing them from, you know, being athletes). I think this comes back to "winning" the lockout versus figuring out what's going to mean the most to them when they're looking back on this 10 years from now. (I figured others have made this point already but I was late to this thread and haven't read the whole thing.)

I just assume they aren't going to start one at all. "Winning" seems to be more important to both sides than actually finding a solution, so I assume they'll both "win" by not giving in (and lose overall in doing so). Mike Modano's comments on the last lost season are what I keep coming back to: http://www.cbssports...a-waste-of-time He says he lost over $7M by missing that season, but the key part is when he says "You're only in the game for so long." Mike Modano would probably pay $7M to have another season in the NHL in his prime right now. That's the part that really hurts. Yes, playing in the NHL is a job but for most of these players, playing for the Stanley Cup is their dream. And they only get so many years to do it. That's what they'll be thinking about years from now when the 2012-2013 season is just a blank spot in the record books: losing a year of their hockey career. And for what?

This is a spectacularly bad article. Yeah, that World Series we lost in 1994 did wonders for baseball. Thank goodness for that. Fehr is a magician for helping turn the most popular sport in the United States into the second most popular sport in the United States (at best). Thanks, Donald! Wow, now here is a salient point. Players should get paid because Britney Spears. Britney Spears. This is kinda like the Chewbacca defense from South Park except I think this guy is serious. Revenues are not profits. Accounting -- how does that work? (Probably not a coincidence that this writer is based out of Montreal, one of the three most profitable teams in the league along with Toronto and NY. Revenues, profits, whatever!)

By "celebrated", do you mean basically everyone outside of Buffalo (and a ton of people inside Buffalo) thought those contracts were completely insane? Because players have been getting signed to really expensive deals pretty much since the last CBA started. It's supply and demand. You have multiple teams bidding for very few free agents. It's not about being "smart", it's about teams outbidding each other for limited resources, driving up the prices for the best players, and then indirectly driving up prices for all the other players. This is literally the only way it could be under this system. If you're advocating collusion, please consider: 1. It's illegal and will lead to a lawsuit almost immediately. 2. It would be impossible to maintain anyway. If a team thought they were one player away, would they stand with the other teams in (illegally) holding salaries down or just go for it? And once they go for it, we're right back where we started. The only real solution is actually changing the structure of the league.

If by "exploit" you mean turn into a product that millions of people have enjoyed for multiple decades, then yeah. Which owners are making tons of money from owning their teams? Terry Pegula flat out said that owning the team wasn't about making money ("If I wanted to make money, I'd go drill an oil well" [paraphrase]) and we all celebrated that. Meanwhile, Golisano just tried to break even every year and we all called him cheap. The league is fundamentally screwed up. The Sabres sold 98.7% of their tickets in 2011 but still lost almost $6M. They sold 99.9% of their tickets last year and lost closer to $12M. See here: http://espn.go.com/nhl/attendance/_/year/2012 So I'm not really seeing how the league is a cash cow for owners, or how any of this is supposed to last. A handful of teams make a ton of profit (Toronto, New York, Montreal) and the rest, including cities like Buffalo where hockey is very popular, can't break even. So I can definitely understand why the owners want a new system in place. What I can't understand is why the players insist that they were screwed over completely by the last CBA and can't agree to any new changes. I look at Leino's contract or Paul Gaustad's last two contracts (for $9M and $13M, respectively) and it's pretty clear that you don't even have to be good to make a ton of money in the NHL now. But, again, the players have made massive sacrifices already (according to them) so I guess now was the time to teach the owners a lesson or whatever.

Being a "hawk" doesn't make you a great negotiator. Fehr has a "tough" reputation because it takes forever to get anything done with him (and, as baseball found out, sometimes you can't get anything done with him). A great negotiator is someone who gets a favorable deal done, period. Losing the whole season is a loss the players won't get back. [see Mike Modano's comments on the last lost season. Or, really, wait until these players are retired and then ask if they wish they could go back and play one more year in their primes.] Fehr's press conference Thursday night (after things blew up) about how close things were and how a deal should be imminent was amateur hour and only pushed the two sides farther apart. How did that help? And why would a supposedly amazing negotiator have a press conference that only serves to make things worse? Both sides are probably doing a terrible job finding common ground and creating value in this process, but Fehr's reputation as "the best" is hilarious considering how little he gets done. The world's "best" negotiator would win it for his side while letting the other side think they were the big winners. The legend of Donald Fehr as the world's greatest negotiator just seems to grow as the situation gets worse, making him the only winner in this debacle. Funny how that works.

Despite what everyone thought when the last CBA was signed, it turned out the players won pretty handily. The league is full of completely mediocre players making several million dollars per season. But for some reason they need to pretend they've made horrible, egregious sacrifices these last few years.

For all intents and purposes, Golisano is the guy who saved NHL hockey in Buffalo. And name one person doing more to develop downtown Buffalo than Terry Pegula and that's *before* the $10M he's apparently cool with losing every season running this team. But, yeah, those guys suck and aren't nearly as important to our city than whatever fourth liners we have playing 7 minutes a game.

Yeah, but it doesn't really matter which players. Twenty years from now, I have no idea who is going to play for the Buffalo Sabres, but I know that those will be the players I want to do well in this league. Or if I was transported to another dimension where every NHL team was the same but all the players were different, I'd still be a Buffalo Sabres fan. The players are basically irrelevant. I cheer for the uniforms, and so does everyone else. We all "hate" Milan Lucic but would all love him if the Sabres had drafted him instead of Enroth that year. If the league brought in replacement players, we'd all hate it at the announcement and then not care at all about it once the games started.

Fehr's whole life/career is built on his reputation as a tough negotiator. He has less incentive to reach a deal than anyone else involved in this. Does he get paid any differently if they have a deal or not? Why risk his reputation by giving in? Losing the season might even enhance his reputation. (Note: This reputation is why the players chose him, so they're pretty much getting what they wanted so far.) Meanwhile, no deal for the players means they all lose a year of salary (which most of them will never make back) and no deal for the owners does a ton of harm to an already unpopular league where most teams are already losing money.

Because he (and other reporters) think this is an easy and interesting story to write, so that's what they're going with. You don't think portraying Jacobs as some sort of evil billionaire puppet master makes for more interesting writing? This is modern journalism 101. Decide on a narrative and then smush the facts (or leave some out) until they kinda sorta fit.