JohnC

The standings with some games in progress. https://www.nhl.com/standings/2018/wildcard

I thought that Tampa was the more dominant team in this game because they controlled the puck much more and had a lot more threatening shots on net. The obvious difference was Hutton. However, I'm not complaining---a win is a win. For us there weren't many quality offensive chances. It just seemed that Tampa was much more aggressive and we were just holding on. Botterill brought in both Skinner and Hutton in the offseason. They are two of the main reasons why this team has taken a quantum leap forward. The Sabres won against a team that is a serious contender for the cup. For the past number of games the Sabres are accumulating points. Hopefully, this is a good sign that we will be in the playoff hunt for the whole season. The fans deserve it.

Now I understand why some of your recent postings have been a tad bit erratic! When you get the shakes pop a cold one to settle yourself down. When asked by a family member why you started drinking again after promising to abstain just say the imbibing was done for medicinal reasons. ?

The organization should have consulted with JeffisMagic. The moral of the story is that zealots can be stupendously right. Or another take away is that Andy Reid knows qbs.

Most people are saying this is a DL rich class. Whether we are drafting near the top of the board or 7-12 I see McDermott more inclined to take a defensive lineman. That's where his leanings are. That is not to say that the emphasis for this offseason won't be focused on the offense. The Bills have a full complement of picks and a grand amount of cap space. My preference would be would be to trade down a little and add another second or third round pick. I would love to get OK's Brown at wideout. He reminds me a little of Antonio Brown because of his dynamism and ability to make big plays. The reason why I believe he would be available with a trade down is because of his small and lean stature. I'm not bothered by his small stature. He has played in a big program against big time opposition and has demonstrated that he is a playmaker.

I like Brown a lot as a dynamic receiving prospect. But if the Bills were intent on drafting him I wouldn't draft him where our probable first round pick would be. I would trade down and get him and then address some other issues, especially on the OL.

They gave him an opportunity to play right away. It didn't work out. He was quickly dispatched. I'm not sure if he will be picked up by a team this season or the future seasons.

The Bills tried him out and quickly got rid of him. Whether the Bills have a good qb situation or not why bother with this player who has shown little as a receiver with the teams he has been with? Adding McKenzie and sticking with the young guys was the better way to go.

Why was he on the team in the first place?

I don't see him being cut. He was starting to play well when the lingering injuries curtailed his ability to play. What he needs to do is to change the way he trains in the offseason. Mostly focusing on power lifting and weights may not be the best approach to prepare for the upcoming season. He needs to include more stretching and flexibility routines to his repertoire and also make some diet adjustments. Tom Brady has been a pioneer in altering the training regimen for football players. Murph needs to give Tom a call or a text and ask for some different advice. Murphy is not an elite player but he is a good player. However, unless he changes how he trains he is going to go by the wayside.

The Sheary-Mittelstadt-Okposo line is an interesting combination. I like that the young center is given an opportunity to play with players that can shoot. Although I believe that Tage is maybe a year or two away from physically filling out you can see his offensive talents in his limited playing time. He can skate and has a wicked shot. In a year or two that ROR deal will prove to be even a better deal in that it allowed Mittelstadt to quickly move up the ranks and it addedThompson who I believe will be a good player for us. Because of his quick hard shot I can see him on the secondary power play unit.

Your post encapsulates the great debate whether it is better to balance out your top two lines or emphasize putting together the best top line you can. Pomminstein was playing well but there was a little bit of a slow down from his torrid pace. I doubt that he will maintain his level of play with the second line. It seems to me that the altering of the top line is about rewarding Reinhart and also trying to make Jack more of a goal scorer from Reinhart's passes. I also think that he wants to put Reinhart in a better position to score goals. And that is more probable with the top line with Jack and Skinner. As you noted before Okposo has been playing well. I'm wondering if he will be moved to the second line or being added to another jumbled line? Housley is a tinkerer who likes to scramble the lines and defensive pairings. Is that a good thing? If it works it works if it doesn't then re-juggle the juggled lines.

There are plenty of programs that play early cupcake games to burnish their record. Georgetown is a classic example of that. My core point in my prior post is that playing good teams before you get into your conference schedule helps your team to get better whether you win or lose those challenging games. Whether UB would have won or lost it would have benefited the experience because it demonstrates that they can play competitively with anyone. I'm a Canisius grad, as is Kirby who is very in tuned with the program, and am very happy with the direction the program is moving. The Witherspoon hire was a terrific hire. It is evident that this program is steadily getting better. When all is said and done it's about recruiting talent. He's done a good job in that area. My main disappointment with the program is that the students haven't embraced the program to the extent that they should.

I read that he has ADHD and takes a medication, adderal, to deal with the issue. He was also a workout warrior so his work ethic was evident. Maybe that was a factor in him sliding on the draft boards. The draft publications that I read prior to the draft had him rated as a third round prospect. So it was surprising that he slid to the fifth. Getting Milano and him in a lower round are steals for this franchise.

I idolize Forrest Gump. What we both have in common is that we both like chocolate. However, he is a better long distance runner than I am. I have a tendency to poop out quickly when I hit the track. He also is a more genuinely sweet person than I am. Posting on TBD has made me very irascible because of the necessity to ward off the slings often directed toward me.

Wagner may have been a top tier recruit but because he stayed in school for a couple or few years he developed a much more advanced game that made him a legitimate pro prospect. In an interview he stated that the coach was hard on him throughout his college years. He added that it was the best thing that happened to him with respect to his basketball career.

Sky Diver not only condemns you but hopes you rot in hell for your bias against Bama players. He thinks you are incorrigibly obtuse because you can't bring yourself to acknowledge the fact that all former Bama players are great.

I don't deserve your generous accolades because I had to take a number of torturous remedial tutorials to finally figure it out. When one is a slow but determined learner you learn how to slog on and eventually arrive at the voila moment. So in reality there is little about me that you should be impressed with.

Are you behaving like a condescending smarty pants about my spelling prowess? The honest to goodness truth is that I had to go to the dictionary to get it right because it kept coming up wrong when I typed it out. As far as the equ or grave and double dimple marks that is beyond my intellectual capacity to get right so I don't bother with it.

Are you making sport of me because of my naivete?

For a team in our situation with a lot of cap availability odds are that acquiring comp picks is very improbable. Most of us believe that this offseason the Bills are going to be aggressive buyers of players on the market. That will more than neutralize gaining comp picks from other teams acquiring our free agents. Even if a player such as Benjamin was picked up because of his play he is not going to garner much of a contract. It wouldn't be surprising that he signs a one year deal with a team that has a good passing game from which he could possibly rehabilitate his besmirched reputation as a receiver. That's the route that the former Cardinal John Brown took by signing a one year deal with the Ravens. He preferred signing a deal with a team that had a good qb in Flacco rather than sign a deal with the Bills who probably offered him more but whose qb situation was very problematic.

You were spot on when you described a Beilein coached team as a team that gets better as the season advances. That's his trademark. His program is not built on one on one stars. His teams are noted for its unselfish style of play where passing and tough defense. The longer a player sticks with the program the better they are going to get. The German kid, Wagner, started off as a scrawny kid who wasn't much of a factor to becoming a versatile big man who was drafted in the NBA. It's not surprising that big time programs sometimes get tainted in pursuit of some of the four star players. Those are not the type of players he usually pursues because they don't fit the team work model that he advocates for. John Beilein is a great coach and a credit to his profession. It's understandable why he is admired by his coaching peers. John Beilein has started at the bottom in his peripatetic profession and worked his way up the coaching ranks. Everywhere he has gone he has been successful without a sniff of controversy. And that is easy in such a cut throat business. Beilein doesn't merely coach a team but he builds a program.

It doesn't matter whether he would have come out of college sooner or later. It doesn't matter whether he was drafted in the first round or the fourth round. His arm is his arm. His performance in the pros over the past four years or so have clearly indicated what caliber of qb he actually is. Mostly because of his arm talent (or lack of) he is not a franchise caliber qb and will never be so. Without a question he played well against the Jets today. But he has been in the league for four years??. So he is a known quantity. If he was as good as you are suggesting then why hasn't he stuck with any team over the past few years? If he was as good as you think why was he out of the league when out of desperation we made a call to his California home to get him?

Why do you think he was a fourth round draft pick? Why do you think he has already been on half a dozen teams in his young career? Why do you think that he was out of the league when we called him? It certainly wasn't because of his impressive arm strength. It's true you don't have to have a rocket arm to be a starter in this league. On the other hand you do have to have a starter's arm to be a starter in this league. He has been a vagabond qb because he simply doesn't possess that caliber of arm.

I'm not going to get carried away with Barkley's good game today. As you have pointed out he has a fatal flaw of not having adequate arm strength that would allow him to be a starter in this league. In my mind he's essentially a backup qb with backup traits of being canny but not having a strong enough arm to start. But what he demonstrated in this game is that this team can reasonably compete when it has competent qb play. That's exactly what happened in this game. Because he was able to make reads and quickly know where to go with the ball he put the OL and receivers in a position to succeed. There is no dispute that Josh Allen is going to be our starter. But if Barkley can hold the fort for the short term as a starter or as a backup and give Allen more time to prepare then he will be serving a useful purpose. Is it better for Barkley to continue on as the starter or is it better for Allen to take over the reigns as a starter? I'm not sure. So whatever decision that McDermott makes on how to best handle Allen and his development is fine with me. What most of us can agree on is that the qb issue centers around Allen.