BUFFALO — Thinking back on Kevyn Adams’ time with the Buffalo Sabres and the whole of his history as the general manager of the team makes the observations of the past and the questions that arose when he was hired stand out so glaringly.
The decision the Pegulas, Terry and Kim, made in hiring Adams in 2020 while the league and the world was shut down because of COVID-19 was such a stark, out-of-nowhere hiring that was inspired by fear. The Pegulas feared they were going to lose a lot of money while the NHL and the world shut down during the pandemic.
Those fears weren’t unique because virtually everyone had the same ones, only the fear of the unknown and being aware that death was very much a possibility through all of it made those whole seemingly endless moments in time so frightening. But when it came to business and realizing in that moment that perhaps the finances of the billionaire owners and the hockey team they run were perhaps a bit more fraught than anyone would believe.
After all, billionaires don’t want to waste money and making more of it is easier for them to do than regular folks. But the thought that the cap-strapped Buffalo Sabres who were now on hiatus with the rest of the league and unable to make money could cost them even more money created a situation in which ownership overreacted.
The Pegulas wanted to save money by asking then general manager Jason Botterill to cut his staff, mostly scouts, starkly. With the league and the world shut down, why should they pay scouts that aren’t working, right? Botterill, to his credit, refused to do that and was added to the list of those being let go because of it.
The person who handed out the pink slips just happened to be the guy who had recently been seen around the team more that season and was on the road learning the ropes of what it means to be involved in NHL management. That person was Adams, of course, and his first set of tasks after accepting the Sabres general manager job was to fire everyone ownership wanted Botterill to fire and then some.
For someone that had never been in NHL management and only previously had been an assistant coach under Lindy Ruff, being the bag man could not have been a great feeling, but it was the job Adams jumped at to take and needing to fire nearly all of the scouts, the former GMs assistants, and the AHL coaching staff was part of wanting to take a dream job during a worldwide nightmare.
Adams’ reward for all of that was getting to have one of the premier jobs in sports, but with the catch being the situation he inherited. The Sabres’ star player, Jack Eichel, was about to work with his third general manager all while he was in the middle of playing for his third different head coach in five seasons. Upon Botterill’s firing, Eichel saw enough and wanted out and who can blame him? All that turnover in his first five seasons and not a sniff of the playoffs to show for it.
On top of that, the organization was at its end with one-time star defenseman Rasmus Ristolainen and were looking for a way to get out of his contract and lackluster play. Then there was underappreciated star forward Sam Reinhart who, when his entry-level contract ended the same summer as Eichel’s, also wanted to sign a long-term deal but Eichel’s contract was the Sabres’ first priority. While he got an eight-year, $80 million extension, Reinhart missed the first few days of training camp while his agent and Botterill haggled over Reinhart’s desire for a long-term deal and Botterill not wanting to max out all of his young stars before they’ve even taken the next steps in their careers.
Reinhart settled for a two-year, $7.3 million bridge deal that ended while the world shutdown in 2020. With Adams in charge and eager to build the future for the Sabres, Reinhart as an RFA once again agreed to a one-year extension and with no desire to go longer knowing how close he was to unrestricted free agency. After how poorly the Sabres performed coming out of the pandemic shutdown and the firing of Ralph Krueger and appointment of Don Granato as interim coach during an 18-game losing streak, Reinhart’s future was never going to be in Buffalo.
Adams took on the unenviable task to be the bagman during a pandemic and then had to be the guy who traded away the players the organization purposefully sank to the bottom of the standings to land in the draft not five years earlier. As terrible as it was for Adams to be put in that situation, it’s not as if it was a surprise to him. He signed up for all of it despite never having done it before in his career. Courageous, foolish, arrogant, ignorant or bold enough to not give a shit what the circumstances were, it was the job he dreamed of and wanted more than anything. In the end, you could call him any one of those things and be right but mostly he’ll be remembered as someone who couldn’t step away from himself in the most heated moments and the most precise situations to grow both his own skill set as a manager and talent evaluator and a leader of an organization.
As thoughtful and eager to listen as Adams could be when calculating the moves to come, he was capable of being shortsighted and too proud to make adjustments when called for.
It’s the 2023 trade deadline and the Sabres are four points behind the second wild card spot. They’re the third highest scoring team in the league but have allowed the 10th most goals. The playoff drought was already 11 years long and they’re trying to avoid it going to 12. Goalies Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen and Eric Comrie are both fighting it and the defense is young and prone to mistakes and although their forwards score tons of goals, they’re not exactly helping slow down opposing offenses either.
The situation is crying out for help and although Devon Levi would arrive after his season at Northeastern was over and he turned pro in time to rally the Sabres in goal late in the year, the only moves Adams made leading up to and at the deadline were to add Riley Stillman and Jordan Greenway. The Sabres had four players score 30-or-more goals and Tage Thompson led them all with a career-high 47.
The lack of help at the deadline deflated the team and highlighted the lack of feeling Adams had for the situation. A very young Sabres team was breaking out but had some obvious holes to address and the lone addition was someone Granato knew well from his time at the U.S. program in Greenway. Even though he is a solid defensive forward, he was just one guy and the Sabres were not one guy away from being a playoff team. It was more than apparent in that moment and when the Sabres went 5-6-3 in the remainder of March after the deadline, they went from being four out of the wild card to being five back and were jumped by the Florida Panthers in the process.
That March 31 game that gave them one more win that month happened to be Levi’s debut against the Rangers that kicked off his nearly miraculous run to rescue the Sabres season as he went 5-2-0 down the stretch and helped get the Sabres as close to making the postseason than they’ve ever been since they last made it in 2011. At that time it felt like the Sabres were a team that was coming out of the darkness and were about to be a young force in the East, similar to what we’d seen other teams do in previous years.
The dots connected elsewhere, why not in Buffalo? The fact still remained that it was a missed opportunity to make the playoffs had something been done about goaltending sooner or more was done before or at the trade deadline to get the Sabres into a better position to compete for and earn a playoff spot. When John Wawrow of the Associated Press asked Adams about this at the end-of-season press conference, he showed his hand in that he believed this was the first step to an awakening for the team and its young players and that the sky was the limit. He also unfortunately answered this with the kind of arrogance that proved to be part of his undoing over the coming years.
The big seasons the Sabres got from their young players in 2022-2023 weren’t replicated the following year as they tried to correct their fun-and-gun ways to a more mature, disciplined defensive kind of hockey. Although it helped goaltending out a little bit, the offense cratered and the team lost faith in Granato to pull the right strings and ultimately fired him after the season. Some of the old reasons why change was needed were cited, accountability and the like, and Adams made no bones about who he wanted to have as the next coach when he described all the traits Lindy Ruff possessed without actually saying his name. When Ruff was hired a week later, no one was surprised although it had to be asked if Ruff’s style of play and temperament would be a fit for the roster that was in place.
Adams tried to retrofit the roster to better fit what Ruff is looking for and with them still being such a young team albeit with a lot of experience, Adams still found ways to upset the balance Ruff desires.
Over each of the last three seasons, Adams has saddled the coaches with three goalies for extended periods. Luukkonen, Comrie, and Levi all battled for time in the previous two years and this season has had Luukkonen, Alex Lyon and Colten Ellis fighting for starts all while Levi gets his games and minutes played in Rochester, although for a while this season the Americans had three goalies to sort through thanks to Alexandar Georgiev’s brief stay there before his contract was mutually terminated.
Luukkonen’s injury in preseason spooked Adams into outright signing Georgiev and when Georgiev struggled in camp and during the preseason, he jumped at the chance to claim Ellis off waivers from St. Louis to further crowd the net.
Early on in Adams’ time as GM, the Sabres had a goalie apocalypse thanks to injuries, but that came in a lost season after the Covid re-start in 2021. Dealing with that and having to call guys up from the ECHL to ride the bench just in case almost seemed to plant it in Adams’ head that having as many goalies as possible is not a bad thing.
Instead, it created a cliché-like situation where “if you’ve got three goalies, you don’t have one.” They may have one in Lyon who’s played very well, but Luukkonen signed a five-year, $23.75 million RFA deal in July 2024 that comes with a $4.75 million cap hit and with that kind of money, he’s got to both play and get himself back on track health-wise and in the net. Ellis shows a lot of promise and given he’s essentially the same age as Levi. They don’t want to lose him either. They’re stuck and that fell solely on Adams’ shoulders.
They’re either paying someone a lot of money not to play as often as he needs to, not playing the guy who gives them the best chance to win and not playing the young guy (who’s currently out with a concussion) who needs games but who they’d lose instantly on waivers if they attempted to do that.
It’s one thing to not give your head coach the players he needs to win, but it’s something else entirely to create a situation thanks to your own overexuberance and mismanagement to make that happen anyways. Adams’ overeagerness to make some moves to put out potential fires and then standing idly by while others burn out of control are the marks of inexperience and despite the number of years on the job, he still possessed a lot of greenness in his management.
Although he was always eager to say he wanted to be in on every trade conversation when the league’s best players would be allegedly available, it was still apparently difficult to make trades happen. Whether that came from Adams’ inability to let go of prospects, inability to spend or add money or an inability to push to get that extra piece, too often did his smaller deals end up looking tough.
While he was able to do well enough in instantly losing trade situations like those with Eichel and Reinhart and came away well in trading Casey Mittelstadt for Bo Byram, his knack for attaching second-round picks in trades for depth players or first-round picks in trades that didn’t seemingly call for them showed a lack of appreciation or respect for those assets and that comes from inexperience. Every win was followed by not necessarily two losses, but rather more head-scratching than celebrating. Even the report the Sabres kicked around on Quinn Hughes by dangling Byram and Zach Benson (according to ESPN) speaks to a kind of desperation to be in the conversation, just not to dominate it.
With Adams gone and his lack of a deft touch in all of these areas makes the hiring of Jarmo Kekäläinen a seeming 180-degree turn. Kekäläinen has 30 years of experience in all areas in the NHL. Scouting, management, player evaluation – he’s done all of it. He most famously is known for being the general manager of the Columbus Blue Jackets for 10 years and led them to the postseason in five of those 10 seasons. His record was a bit tougher in his last few years there which creates reasons to be skeptical of his hiring.
Then again, the bar for success in Buffalo is lying on the ground and getting over it shouldn’t be so much of a challenge with the amount of talent the team has.
It’s not to say it’s a situation that’s easy, of course. Alex Tuch’s impending free agency this summer and the lack of extension for him is the most glaring issue to be addressed. While he’s been eligible for an extension since July 1, Adams was never able to get something worked out with Tuch and his agents. It hasn’t been a distraction this season mostly because there’s been more than enough of everything else to occupy the air, but with the trade deadline coming in March and now Kekäläinen running the show, he wants to get things figured out quickly one way or another.
“It always takes two parties to agree on a number that both feel that it’s reasonable, and not just for today, but moving forward, what you have to build with your team,” Kekäläinen said. “Alex [Tuch] is a really good hockey player. We appreciate him, we like him, we want to get him signed. I think that’s been clear the whole time. Now we just have to agree on a number that works for both sides.”
The difference between Adams, who had to sort of genuflect to the wishes of ownership given his inexperience and how he get the job in the first place and Kekäläinen who comes with a built-in track record, respect and a reputation of his own is the authority he commands in the role. While, yes, he was hired by the Pegulas and they sign his paychecks, if they want to get back to the playoffs and win a Stanley Cup someday, they have to let the experienced man be able to do what he can to make it happen.
For all the times Adams made it clear that for him to best do his job he needed to have players that want to be in Buffalo, Kekäläinen’s approach to how to win in a place like Buffalo isn’t dissimilar to how he had to do it in Columbus and the way to do that was straightforward.
“Winning hockey games is the most important ingredient there,” Kekäläinen said. “Everybody wants to play for a winner. You’ve got to win hockey games. And then in the background we can be very detail-oriented in making sure that we do everything that we can.
“Terry and I had a lot of conversations about this over the weekend. He’s going to give us every resource so that we eliminate all the excuses out there to make it such a great place for the players that they want to come here. But winning is the first ingredient that you have to have. So that’s one thing we’re going to need to focus on. But Terry’s given me full autonomy to run the hockey department. We can spend to the cap. We have every resource available for us that we need to make this team better, make it more attractive for the guys to stay or attract free agents. So, that’s all I can ask for as a general manager.”
Winning, what a concept.