May Day 10

Im not going to absolve the Sabres organization. They are the worst in sports. Eichel is certainly complicit in this and didnt help. That goes for the other guys too and from what I hear, Dahlin is/was also buying into the Eichel clique. They infected those guys with Evander Kane and Bogosian on day 1 which was a deadly mistake. Expecting Taylor Hall to come in and strap on a hardhat to get to work? haha. He has a negative stigma hanging over his head as well. They can all have each other. If its my team, I have a PC today and introduce the new structure with the new President of Hockey ops (Davidson, Lombardi, Luce, Dudley, whoever)... and explain they have full autonomy and will be given the resources and budget to restore this franchise. I would expect the new president and GM to cull any player over the age of 23 from the organization. Its needed. Cant build/rebuild with Eichel moping either way.

Ive said it before, but Eichel is an entitled s***. Awful teammate, and a disaster to name as your captain. How long have the Sabres been dancing around this brat? Sending Bylsma packing for a 'coach who talks to players' or staging that meeting over Espresso with Eichel and Krueger, or getting players who suit Eichel, and always worrying about your majesty. Eichel has done nothing but mope publicly. he never takes bullets for this team publicly (OReilly did every single night, got pooped on for it, and he had enough of watching his other 'captain' avoid it). Eichel wanted the title Captaincy but hasnt done anything to earn it. Him demonstratively showing up his teammates when he throws his body back, loafs to the bench when he is sad which has left his team out to dry defensively at times, etc. He has had opportunities in recent years to put all the 'unhappy' talk to bed and act and speak like a motivated leader who radiates a positive and supporting attitude. Instead all you have is his immature shifting around in his seat and how he has 'thinking to do' and all that. Usually with some sort of rediculous looking hat on his moppy head. It will suck watching him produce elsewhere. He will be poison to any team without established veteran leadership to put him in his place. Things literally cannot be worse than they have in the seasons since Eichel was drafted here. I would love for a happy and mature Eichel to score 100 points for the Sabres year to year as they make the playoffs every year, but that is fiction. Eichel pulled a shot yesterday that was calculated and unprofessional. He threw the Sabres under the bus and put them in a position they really cant come back from. I highly doubt they are going to get into a public PR battle about a players' health recovery plan. He grenaded his trade value. He alienated himself from management as well as teammates. Its been clear this wasnt going to end well. The Sabres should have traded him long ago. Like everything else, they are reactionary and waited too long. They are run as a clown show. It wouldnt hurt to get a real general manager hired in good faith.

Its crazy to think about how much the sports broadcasting landscape has changed. Honestly, Im not sure what ESPN could have done differently to be in a better place they are in now. When I was a kid/high school student and even college from like the mid 80s to about 2000... ESPN was the one stop shop. If I wanted to see the hockey highlights or baseball highlights, I would need to watch Sportcenter... and I would watch it multiple times on the loop (and still recall certain bits vividly). NFL Game Day and NFL Prime Time were THE hubs for NFL coverage. It was the only game in town other than the pregame shows on Network. What they said about your team really mattered. The had other shows like NHL 2 Nite and such which were unprecedented NHL access and coverage. Regional sports networks started popping up in the mid-late 90s but really didnt hold a ton of original programming clout yet. Then we got the sports packages that were very accessible. Then we got competitors like OLN/Versus/NBC, Fox Sports, CBS Sports.... then the sports got their own networks! Not to mention the miniaturizing of everything and the ability to have a supercomputer in your pocket that tethers you to any sports related content with a press of a touchscreen. You have behemoths like Amazon getting into the rights game now. ESPN still does live sports better than anybody IMO. Their College football coverage is great. They do a great job with hoops and always did well with MLB. Excited to see NHL hockey on there again.

The Sabres need to get a real NHL exec to run the organization. Until then, it will be continued clown-shoes.

Its terrible all around. Not a fan of Eichel either TBH.

what an absolute cluster mess this organization is.

absolutely yes to all this.

The Sabres should absolutely talk to Davidson and make him the highest ranking executive. Will they? Not a chance.

I was really into trading up for Watkins even leading up to that draft. I loved Joey Harrington. Also wanted the Bills to go after Colt Brennan with their first round pick.

And does anyone think that Leopold is any kind of lightning rod who can turn that kind of program around and out-recruit Texas and Oklahoma, ok state, etc...

hopefully he walks past the mummified remains of Turner Gill and that awful fat man who actually got them to win a few games.

Ugh. Terrible. Why would he go to that boneyard scrap heap?

Mac Jones is nothing

Happy that Lance won't get near the patriots

I trust them. They would really have to smear feces all over themselves with trades/value for me to want to criticize whatever they do tonight. It also helps that they are at #30 so I do not hold strong opinions on anybody.

If you want to make everything perfect and fair from a players' standpoint... sure. Scrap the CBA and make every player an independent contractor. Every decent player will have a guaranteed contract and everybody will be a UFA whenever their contract is up. No draft, no trades, no salary cap, no franchise tags, etc. We will probably see a huge stratification of the league and teams like the Bills will not be able to compete on any sort of consistent basis (if they ever could). While not perfect, the system now overall is fair and it promotes league growth. The players get a % of the revenue and it is facilitated between a cap roof and cap floor.

If you still had a cap, it would be a bit unfair to the veteran players who earned their way through service term, as every dollar that gets added to the typical ELCs would come out of their potential pay. You would probably see quite a bit more early retirement and shorter career spans. Because of this, players in the NFLPA and their leadership would probably have abolishing the draft as an extremely low priority in their CBA negotiation wish-list. They actually bargained the ELC structure down for incoming players in more recent years. It was bad before, i cant imagine if incoming players had all the leverage a UFA enjoys, if not more because you are bidding on potential and speculation.

It could probably be negotiated out of a CBA. Im sure it would be a hill owners certainly die on as competing with contracts for upcoming draft picks would be a disaster and a cap would be unsustainable without ELCs. Ive never seen it as something players' associations have ever have gone after or even brought to the table. It is probably a thrilling process for many players. Overall it would be bad for the parity of the league and it would grow weaker and turn into haves and have-nots financially and the Bills, Browns, Steelers, Lions, Packers, etc would be sent into oblivion.

I dislike the finale. In fact, I didnt even like the last 3-4 seasons so much. I realize that isnt a popular opinion. I mean, it had its moments and we loved some of the characters, but really it was a lot that went nowhere, and a lot of plot lines just fizzled. The main reason I hung on until the end was to see how it ended. Then, they really didnt end it, at least in any conventional way. I think Tony got shot, based on the forensic frame by frame analysis we have seen online for years. Thank god for people who can break down a screen by screen forensic analysis of who is shown from what point of view in sequential order in order to figure out what in the hell happened.... as opposed to actually showing it on the show.

I have only been watching the box scores. The box scores look better

I dont believe they have any interest in doing that. That AA league was really aligning themselves with this, practically begging. The NFL has a farm league right now that is fully funded. The players dont get paid.

best way to make a ton of money is to merge with whatever XFL exists at the time

Terrible. Sux having a gm who has no business sitting in that position

Its going to be a hot ticket I think

Its tough. I didnt 'dislike' many Bills that come to mind. The top one I guess is Trent Edwards. Once things were going south he really came across as a baby in his interviews and such and he became such a soft, low-compete player as a QB. The one who I underappreciated the most, or never really had a positive opinion of, despite his place in the history of the team stat-wise was Aaron Schoebel. The guy got like 80 sacks and had 14 one season, and I can't say I can recall any particular play or highlight of his. I really didnt like Rian Lindell either. Nothing against the guy...but the NFL had evolved into the league where nearly every kicker can boot 50+ yarders pretty regularly and Lindell was still a decent 1990s kicker. That carried over a bit with Carpenter although he had a little more of a leg, but they still burned a roster spot on a kicker who can get touchbacks Oh. I hated Brad Smith. Again, not the guy, just his roster spot waste. They would bring him out for a wild cat. The entire stadium knew the play, and he would be tackled for a loss. yay