BuffOrange

OK I admit even I ran for the bus rather than watch that game That was his first 100 yard game in quite a while, no?

Oh that's right, McGahee's enthusiastic performance carried the coaching staff in Cincinatti

Is it legal to "decline" a penalty in hockey? Our power play is dreadful. Also, these announcers suck. I'm sure Ottawa fans don't want a penalty "every time a home team player goes down".

It'd be nice if he didn't quit at the end of the year this time.

Schopp & Bulldog today almost made me vomit: "Ottawa's not interested, the look in their eyes they just didn't want it last night"...did they watch the game last night or did they not tie the game with a minute left? Anyway, I still feel like Emery is shakey even on his saves; just have to get more pucks on net.

I don't dispute that there is some correlation between the defense affecting what the offense does but I think most of you guys overestimate this relationship. We've had good defense paired with lousy offense plenty of times, and vice versa in 2002. Look at the Bucs game, the Saints game, the Panthers game, and the first Pats game where the defense was solid for the most part -- the offense still sucked. I am not saying the defense didn't suck last year, but I do think it's lame to blame them for so many of the offensive problems last year. The key to the offense (and the team in general IMO) will be QB play and how well we protect that QB. I mean honestly, the "defense wins championships" cliches and all that are nice, but has nobody else noticed that offensive production and wins/losses have been very closely related with this franchise since say, 1990? We had good defense in '97 and '03 and we went 7-9 & 6-10 those years. 2002 we managed to win 8 games by actually scoring points and we probably would've won ~11 if Bledsoe didn't tank the 2nd half of the season.

Just curious: Did all you guys think King was the worst person/reporter ever when he was picking the Bills to go to the Super Bowl in 2003, or the playoffs last year?

Oh my

WTF he still had a good year didn't he? Marv get er done.

yes arrogance...go back and read your post - you're the only one who has the ability to think for himself. Vague general statements equivalent to "JP has no time".....yawn. I did hear Riter on WGR (who admitted he's a Suns fan in the process) say something about that. He was also responding to Cowherd of ESPN and Jim Rome - two national hosts - who did nothing but back Kobe and slam Bell all day long.

I like Lebron but I say sweep. From what I saw they were lucky to win 2-3 of their games vs. Washington.

John, you are severely misguided, obviously biased with an arrogance that is totally unjustified to boot. For one thing, who are all these people on ESPN that were slamming Kobe after the Game 5 incident?

That was my first reaction too Oh well, cool story.

Yep, get ready for a "Fire Fairchild" campaign by Week 2.

Which games specifically do you recall this being a problem? I seem to remember the Atlanta game being especially bad in that department; but otherwise I don't recall the defense being especially worse on 3rd down than any other down. Of course I was fortunate enough to miss the game in Miami.

smokin, I'm not sure I agree with the popular notion that the Sabres ever fell asleep last round. I was actually pleasantly surprised that they played as hard as they did in Game 3 in Philly, they just got a couple of freak bounces go against them. Game 4 Forsberg put the team on his back which great players do sometimes, and Miller gave up a couple soft goals. I didn't really interperate that as a lack of effort. As I said last series, 2-1 is as close as a series can be after 3 games so they cannot let up. I'm not convinced coming home up 2-0 is a better situation than hitting the road up 2-0 because if you drop Game 3, there's a lot more pressure to win Game 4 at home as opposed to being up 2-1 on the road.

Joe, I have Directv in Philly as well, which of course sucked last round. For some reason the Yahoo! feed was blacked out for me last night but Comcast MSG worked great.

Hmm, nice idea but in the words GW just poor execution. The last one looks good the rest are very bleh.

Honestly Mike Schopp made me feel a lot better going into this game. For how amazing Game 1 was coming from behind 5 times on the road, they really got zero credit for it even though Ottawa did make their share of mistakes. I thought they'd be angry. Also Ruff's teams have a history of not mailing it in after winning the 1st game on the road - Philly in '01, Ottawa in '99, even Dallas in '99 even though they didn't win the game. Anyway, looked like we stole another one but take it and move on; the series isn't over, I've seen the road team win the first 4 games of a series too many times in hockey.

That's blacked out for me

WTF CHANNEL IS THE GOD DAMN GAME ON?

F the ACC - Go Big East!

I feel the exact same way. Haven't watched a single NBA game from start to finish this year - 10 years ago as a kid I used to watch it on NBC every weekend afternoon. Partially because the players now are all prima donnas, partially because the officiating blows, partially because it's so predictable. The degree to which ESPN hypes up all these other meaningles series' because they air the games is kinda pathetic. I work in an office full of sports fans and I've yet to hear anybody say "Hey did you see the Mavericks/Heat/Pistons/Spurs game last night?"

This was posted on another board; thought it was interesting.

To be fair, they did win 55 games in the only full season MJ wasn't there and came within a bogus foul call away from likely losing to Houston in the finals. I always thought that was pretty good evidence that Pippen was and still is enormously underrated given how weak the supporting cast was. I'm not referring to you but anybody who has ever said Scottie was nothing without MJ is retarded IMO.