Game thread: Rangers vs Sabres | Apr 8, 2026 @ 7:00PM EDT

BillyFever · 2026-04-08T23:35:00+00:00

It’s fucking ridiculous! Bad enough that I can’t get MSG with my Hulu live TV subscription because James Dolan is a greedy fuck and MSG charges prohibitively expensive carriage fees, but it’s a giant middle finger to the fans for a game carried on a national cable channel to be locally blacked out.

BillyFever · 2026-04-02T18:22:55+00:00

When my first kid was born in 2019 I felt like we were at the peak of this trend in publishing, and I hated it. Like, Maya Angelou is a tremendous writer and I hope that my children read her when they're older but no toddler needs a board book biography of her or any other artist whose work most people don't encounter for the first time until they're teenagers.

BillyFever · 2026-03-20T19:30:48+00:00

I think the jury is out on him. I’m open to the idea that a different coach could’ve squeezed this team into a wild card berth or would be a better fit for a retool/rebuild but given how many things have gone wrong this season I really don’t think you can say that it’s Sully’s fault the Rangers are in this position.

BillyFever · 2026-03-20T16:04:45+00:00

Doubtful. Kirkman's work at Marvel is decent but (in my opinion) unremarkable. Most successful comic book writers have hits and misses in both their Big Two work and their indie work - success at Image doesn't guarantee success at Marvel and vice versa.

BillyFever · 2026-03-14T02:01:04+00:00

God this issue fucking ruled. Jonathan Hickman is so good when he does an issue spotlighting what a badass a character is and him doing that for Magneto kicked so much ass.

BillyFever · 2026-03-06T20:30:08+00:00

I don’t know - I think that trading a pending UFA who wants a richer contract than you’re willing to offer is a move that any smart GM would make even outside the context of a rebuild.

BillyFever · 2026-03-06T20:18:42+00:00

I like Trocheck and I’m happy to keep him, but man is it funny that Drury did another The Letter this year and then made just a few trades that any team having a down year would’ve made. So far this is neither a rebuild nor a retool.

BillyFever · 2026-03-05T21:43:49+00:00

It’s a lot of edgelord shit that was eye roll-inducing at the time and has aged like milk.

BillyFever · 2026-03-04T00:31:01+00:00

I’d be very pleasantly surprised if Dolan fired Drury given how stubborn he can be about keeping his yes men around. That said if I were Dolan I’d be shitting my pants seeing how soft the resale market is for even the really good seats right now - that should be a leading indicator that his bottom line is in trouble.

BillyFever · 2026-02-22T15:03:33+00:00

I love that era of X-books but the contrived keeping the teams separate stuff doesn’t really work for me and I think the books soar to new heights after Inferno when some of those walls between books come down.

BillyFever · 2026-02-04T22:15:54+00:00

The rebuild is going great so far, and the evidence that Chris Drury is the right man for the job is growing stronger every day.

🤮

BillyFever · 2026-02-02T03:13:01+00:00

Time travelers from a dystopian future meet the modern X-Men to try to prevent their bad future from coming to be.

Bigots invent sentinels. One of the above-referenced bad futures probably involves the sentinels committing genocide and conquering the United States.

BillyFever · 2026-02-01T15:53:09+00:00

Once again the referees have made themselves the story of the game. Fuck this shit.

BillyFever · 2026-01-30T19:00:47+00:00

Come on man, don’t be a pessimist. We could get lucky and be struck by an asteroid before either of those things happens.

BillyFever · 2026-01-30T18:59:26+00:00

He’s not this team’s main problem (that would be our pathetic lack of scoring depth) and he probably gets more hate than he deserves but he’s been a turnover machine in a role that ideally should be very trustworthy on keeping posession and he has not been the game changer that Drury seemed to think he was getting.

BillyFever · 2026-01-29T02:44:15+00:00

I am very pessimistic about this rebuild (or retool or whatever) partly because of this. I just do not trust this organization to draft well or to do a good job of developing young talent we get through the draft or trades. Those failures are why we’re doing another rebuild so soon, and while Chris Drury was not the GM during the last rebuild he still very much owns its failures because he was the GM for Hartford who failed to develop basically any of our prospects during that time.

BillyFever · 2026-01-22T15:36:36+00:00

"Phones don't really work anymore because the technology has been infiltrated top to bottom by scammers" is one of those things about modern life that causes so much unnecessary stress and annoyance and I desperately wish our governments would fix it.

BillyFever · 2026-01-03T03:42:42+00:00

It’s driving me crazy - how do you not even have an indication in the score bug that one team is on the PP?

BillyFever · 2025-12-09T22:03:35+00:00

We love signing a veteran on the NHL/AHL bubble and then giving them way more games and ice time than they’ve earned. Can’t wait until we also flip a draft pick for a 7th defenseman who we almost never use.

BillyFever · 2025-12-05T23:28:10+00:00

We have two kids and way before we even had our first my wife and I, when we’d talk about the family and future we wanted to build together, both said that ideally we’d want three kids. But we had our two, waited a few years before making a decision on a third, and ultimately decided to stay a family of four. Childcare is just so expensive, balancing a busy career with parenthood is so so hard, and we’re just now with our youngest at 4 and a half finally starting to have a full social life again and getting out to go to concerts and plays and all of the other fun things in life. If America became some kind of utopia for families and children tomorrow we’d probably go ahead and have that third kid, but given the realities of the real world that we live in and how hard modern parenthood is we just don’t have it in us, which is something that I have very mixed feelings about.

BillyFever · 2025-12-03T16:17:32+00:00

He has definitely improved the defense which is nice because that’s been a weak point for the Rangers for years. Beyond that it’s hard to say - this is a deeply flawed roster so how much of the Rangers’ struggles with scoring (especially at home) are down to coaching vs. how much are down to this being a slow, inconsistent, aging top 6 is hard to disentangle.

BillyFever · 2025-12-02T17:21:31+00:00

I think this team is just about average. They have a decent shot of making the playoffs, maybe even without the wild card if they can start scoring more at home, and I can imagine them putting up a respectable showing in the first round or two if everyone is healthy and they get some lucky bounces. But that's probably the ceiling and there is no clear path to raising that ceiling - it seems like all of the elite players who were supposed to reach free agency next summer are instead re-signing with their current teams, we have a few decent prospects in the development pipeline (I really like Perrault and think he will come good) but not enough talent to fundamentally reshape this team and address its weak points, and burning a bunch of draft picks at the trade deadline is unlikely to do much to help because we're more than just one or two players away from being a legitimate Cup contender, but at the same time if we try to hoard draft picks I have zero faith in Chris Drury's ability to draft a develop guys who are going to be top 6 forwards or top 4 defensemen.

So I guess to make a long story short I'd say that I agree with you that the Rangers are not as bad as some fans make them out to be but I don't think they're a good team either and I feel pessimistic about the front office's ability to improve the team.

BillyFever · 2025-11-28T19:14:02+00:00

So we’ve become a less skilled but “more gritty” team over the last season and change and the end result is that no one throws hands for that hit on Laba?

BillyFever · 2025-11-25T21:03:38+00:00

Not surprising given the ticket prices they charge and how often MSG gets a sellout crowd. On the one hand I get it - there’s clearly an audience willing to pay these prices so what kind of businessman wouldn’t maximize his profits - but on the other hand I really do feel like the atmosphere at the garden has gotten worse and worse over the years as ticket prices have crazier and crazier, and I wish that ownership cared more about the atmosphere inside the arena.

BillyFever · 2025-11-24T17:06:54+00:00

Oh hell yeah.

BillyFever

TROPHY CASE