shrader

This stuff is driving me mad. People will gladly look at a team's recent performance and ignore the season as a whole (ie. the crappy 80 games the Sabres have had) if that view leads towards doom and gloom for Buffalo. But if the recent performance leads to a more positive view for the Sabres (ie. Columbus is red hot right now going 10-0-1, with the only loss coming against the Rags), they ignore it completely. There is no massive hockey gods anti-Buffalo conspiracy out there and people need to drop the woe is me act. And it's not meant to be directed at you eball. It is the fanbase in general, or at least what I see online. The inferiority complex drives me mad.

Thank you? If my wife ever hears about this she'll be buying all of those lesson plans.

Great move by them. I'm surprised though that they have to do this in order to get him access to their health insurance though, since it happened as a part of one of their games.

They do get some money and it can be shady at times. The NCAA views them as professional players though, so one single game their and they're ineligible.

The whole thing is skewed by the fact that kids can play in major junior much earlier than they can in college. The elite like McDavid are allowed to start at 15 while the rest can start at 16. Once they play a single game there, they're ineligible for the NCAA. I'd love to see that rule dropped some day. You get these 20 year old kids who have burned up their junior illegibility and aren't good enough for the next step. The NCAA games would get even more competitive if some of these kids were instead allowed to go that way.

I still can't believe we actually have 3 different threads ongoing on this topic. It's actually kind of impressive.

I was going to say that if we're all lucky, maybe someday he'll stop making these threads. You have that to strive for, fellow Bills fans.

Don't waste your time. The process isn't exactly television friendly. Just wait for the show where they announce the results instead.

It hurt feelings over on sabrespace, so I'll just state this one very quickly. Previous lottery results have zero impact on future lottery results.

There's two big factors in play on that one though. First, they still need to get Lundqvist into game shape. Second, if Ottawa gets in, they most likely play the Rags, so I don't think NY will mess around too much with them.

It got a lot of talk in the college hockey circles. Their was a serious shot at two college kids going 1-2 with Turris and JVR. Instead we got Americans going 1 and 2 (Turris went to Wisconsin but is Canadian).

I was all ready to shoot down this one, but then I looked at the schedules. It's not very likely, but I could see it happening. The only real tough one is that it requires an Ottawa win over the Rags. They'll find a way to squeak their way into the playoffs though, probably with a 3 point game.

I was hoping for a "thank you Sabres" chant. It would have been hilarious.

I wonder how many people don't have a clue what their first game was. I know I'm one of them. My aunt had season tickets and the extra seat would rotate around my two brothers and me. My first game would had to have been right before the superbowl years. I also couldn't tell you my first Sabres or Bisons game. For whatever reason, those details have never stuck out to me.

The main difference between all of those players you mentioned though is that Crosby was hyped for a few years ahead of his draft. Tavares was close, but the others you didn't really hear much about until the year of their draft. With the Russians that makes sense since people wouldn't have seen them too much. Kane was definitely not hyped anywhere near the level of these other guys going into his draft. He wasn't even expected to go first overall up until the very end. Kyle Turris was up there most of the year. McDavid is the only one who belongs in the same sentence with Crosby. They're the ones where the hype started the second they came out of the womb.

And the other guy who was killed by the little kid drug dealer.

I've got two pieces of paper on my wall that say BU on them, but I'm still not crazy enough to want Eichel over McDavid. I've just been taking the realistic look at this all season. That's so much easier when the consolation prize is this big. We get something damn good, but have that slight chance of something even better.

10 wins all year. They brought in a very strong class, so it's not all him, but he's a huge part of it.

I'd love something so minor as Jimmy driving by the carwash while Walter is out there drying off a car or something. Cranston seems to have the kind of sense of humor where he would sign up to be in the distant background of a shot like that. It could be like when Conan O'Brien was an extra in an episode of How I Met Your Mother. Other than that, I don't want Cranston anywhere near this series until the very end.

The age thing is definitely overplayed when these conversations come up. Most of the time it means very little, but it is kind of interesting here since the NCAA essentially never sees a freshman at this level. To watch this kid who is the 4th youngest player in all of D1 (I can't verify that stat, but I've heard is stated several times) and to see the way he takes over games, you can't help but wonder how much better he can get. The real appeal for him I think will be that he has taken what was a truly awful BU team last year and turned them into one of the top 4 in the country. He makes the people around him better. The team's second leading scorer had 60 points total over his first 3 seasons. This year he has 61 points. That's the Eichel effect. Hopefully whoever we get can have that same kind of impact.

Once it's done, my wife will finally want to catch up on the season. I can binge watch it all over again. That's a nice positive to this.

No one is going to move a lottery pick.

The house next door to us has been abandoned since we moved in back in August. Yesterday I was working from home and went outside at around noon. There was a pickup truck in the driveway and two guys were clearing out everything in the house. The iffy part of it was that they had smashed in the garage door to get inside. It looked really bad, like they had crashed the truck through it. Other neighbors didn't seem to care, but I called the police department to check on it. They did stop by, but never let me know what the deal was.

To be fair, Gary's an ass.

Why do they deserve a standing ovation? You can say what you want about it being a bad team, but many if not most of these guys have underperformed this year. The idea of a standing ovation kind of feels like a participation trophy to me.