There is absolutely nothing, nothing at all, that would make anyone watching the #Sabres play hockey in any way hopeful, excited or willing to ever repeat the experience again.
If a long-dead corpse still moving due to escaping gasses were a sports franchise, this would be it.
Literally. All attempts to revive the team with new talent or new coaching approaches are akin to giving electric shocks to a rotting corpse. It shakes up the maggots, but nothing more.
The Sabres are the most depressing sight in sports. They are not even adorable losers...
They are not "so bad, it's good" or "a ragtag gang of misfits." Their badness, their sheer, utter inadequacy is simply appalling. It's revolting. It makes one question the existence of truth, morals, right and wrong. It makes one doubt that there is a limit to human depravity...
The new talent, no matter how bright, immediately turns to absolute shit the second they put on the Sabres jersey. Jack Eichel, once a bright-eyed, freckled youth, has been turned into a cardboard cutout of a frozen hobo in 5 short years...
Ryan O'Reilly, the man who bleeds lava, excretes lightning and gnaws on entrails of fallen enemies for brunch, cried softly into his jock begging to be released due to, I quote, "a loss of passion for hockey." After gaining freedom, he threw a season-long berserker rave...
Taylor Hall already looks like he should retire. Eric Staal is probably Googling "Is euthanasia right for me" right now. Rasmus Dahlin, hailed as the next great blue line talent 3 years ago, only recently having reached drinking age, is a bumbling, washed-up Swedish goth...
And the endless carousel of coaches... The interchangeable, irrelevant chorus of bagpipes without an ounce of a chance. You could reanimate Anatoli Tarasov, put him on that bench, and he will be a useless, unheeded bullhorn of "rough-it-up-in-the-corners" obsolete banalities...
The Sabres' only raison d'etre, if you can call this etre, is to serve as a living, and you can't call this living, illustration of what the losing culture looks like. They are its purest, distilled form. They are to the losing culture what Walter White was to methamphetamine...
Remember when Jeff Skinner was a personification of childish joy, a sparkling, cheeky figure-skating boy who had wondered into hockey and bent it to his will through sheer power of friendship? Buffalo has turned him into a puddle of despair you want to drown newborn kittens in.
Remember Casey Mittelstadt, a USA Junior team magician with hands like quicksilver? Remember how he turned Slovaks and Canadians literally inside out, and they didn't even mind, so captivating was the skill, so overflowing the love of the game? He is literally dead now. Dead.
And this isn't just misfortune or a confluence of circumstances. The Sabres have gotten there through a combination of stupidity, knavery and evil. They embezzled money from the fanbase for an entire season, conniving to finish last. All for the chance to shit into Eichel's soul.
And this isn't just a temporary onset of horror or even a protracted run of incompetence. This has been going on for so long, it's become a way of life (which, again, you can't call life). I have a son in middle school who has never seen the Sabres win a playoff series.
The only reason this franchise hasn't been moved to Quebec yet is because the only French word that can adequately express the feelings it will elicit there is the sound of the falling blade of the guillotine.
The time has come to pull the plug on the whole vile grotesquerie. NHL only need so many cautionary tales before its designated heel becomes a drag on the image of the enterprise. The Sabres are a disgrace to the game, a disgrace to its city, a disgrace to water in its solid form
Other than that, how was the game, Mr. Malamud?

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More from @SlavaMalamud

24 Jan
If you are not one of the 75+ million people who have seen this video on YouTube, here is Navalny's investigation into Putin's ridiculous $1 billion royal palace on the Black Sea, built on taxpayers' money.
You may need to sit down for this.
It's subtitled
Among the highlights:
- A full-size hockey arena built underground
- A full-size luxurious theater
- Handmade Italian furniture, with couches that cost $20-30K
- A hookah room with a stage for pole dancing
- A tunnel blasted through a hillside for a wine-tasting room with a view
- A private casino
- Thousands of acres of forests and vineyards
- $1000 toilet paper holders and toilet brushes
- A no-fly zone around the compound
The slush fund required to build the Venetian palazzo was started with money meant for purchase of medical equipment for hospitals
Read 4 tweets
23 Jan
#FreeNavalny protests underway all over Russia today.
Here is one brave policeman taking on a dangerous subversive agent.
Putin's hometown of Saint Petersburg. The aprly named Uprising Square.
Read 16 tweets
21 Jan
I get a lot of questions about #Navalny. I am not the world's leading expert on the man, but I can answer most of them with enough veracity.
Specifically:
"Is it true he is a neo-Nazi/homophobe/mysogynist/anti-Semite?"
"What are the charges against him?"
"Why did he return?"...
"Why is Putin afraid of him?"
"Does he pose real danger to Putin?"

OK, let's start with the first one, because it definitely contains bad news.
Yes, Navalny has in the past openly promoted views that can only be described as white nationalist and xenophobic. No doubt here at all
He has attended and has been a vocal participant in "The Russian March", an annual gathering of right-wing nationalist groups, most of whom are unambiguously anti-semitic, anti-minority and doubtlessly homophobic. He has made videos portraying Muslims as pests...
Read 15 tweets
8 Jan
To all you media types who still think we need to talk to Trump voters, understand them, hear them. Can I save you a bit of trouble? Here is a (short, I promise) thread about who they are, what they want and where they are coming from.
It's not complicated, either...
My bio says "sports writer", and this is what I used to be (and still am, occasionally), but my full time job is a public school teacher. I teach in Baltimore, in low-income areas. One of my former jobs was in a mostly white, working-class community, full of rabid Trumpers...
This was probably the worst job I ever had, which had little to do with the community or the kids and a lot to do with admin, but that's beside the point. The kids all came from very poor, very dysfunctional families, rife with drugs, abuse and violence. Many were unmanageable...
Read 15 tweets
6 Jan
The biggest danger of shrewd, unprincipled demagogues their utter lack of self-reflection and shame. And if those of them who also lack brains, like Trump, at least amplify their evil nature with poison and viciousness, crafty ones, like Cruz, will climb the high horse in a jiffy
This vile, despicable vermin has assumed the role of the chief "owner of libs" ever since was so foolishly ushered into Congress. To say that he has treated "half the country that doesn't agree" with him with contempt is to say nothing.
Yet he dares to lecture us on unity!
He has called the other side every name in the book, slandered and ridiculed everyone in the other half of the nation, cursed them for communists and baby-killers, yet he dares to lecture us on civility!
Read 6 tweets
5 Jan
The best Kazakhstani player of all time is Evgeni Nabokov. But, like Antropov, he is an ethnic Russian. The best Kazakh is Talgat Zhailauov.
The best Latvian of all time is Helmuts Balderis. This is not in dispute.
Best Lithuanian: Darius Kasparaitis
Best Belarusian: Mikhail Grabovski
Best Spaniard: Valeri Kharlamov
Best Tatar: Danis Zaripov
Best Jew: well... it pains me to say but Evgeni Malkin and Vladimir Myshkin are both quite, quite goyishe. We'll have to go with Panarin.
Panarin is at least quarter Jewish. His maternal grandfather bears the amazing name of Vladimir Ilyich Levin.
Read 8 tweets

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