How do you solve a problem like the Buffalo Sabres? If you just looked at a list of the guys who've played for them over the past decade—Jack Eichel, Ryan O'Reilly, Jeff Skinner, Sam Reinhart, Tage Thompson, Rasmus Dahlin, JJ Peterka—you'd probably think, "Well, surely this team had a good enough run at some point or another to make the playoffs." But no. They haven't. The Sabres have not featured in the NHL postseason since 2011, which was just a few months after Terry Pegula bought the club. They haven't actually won a series since 2007, when—and this is difficult to wrap your head around—they were the very best team in the entire regular season. These days, they're the NHL's most consistent losers, and after five years under GM Kevyn Adams that only saw the situation get worse, Pegula has put a new man in his chair: Jarmo Kekalainen.
Adams didn't seem especially qualified for the GM job when he was promoted from "Senior Vice President of Business Administration" in mid-2020, and he never proved himself in the role. While ultimate responsibility for the Sabres' failures falls to Pegula, Adams will forever be associated with the fumbling of Reinhart before he became a 57-goal scorer and back-to-back Stanley Cup champ for the Panthers. Or, well, Adams would be, if he wasn't also the guy who made would-be franchise savior Jack Eichel a Stanley Cup champ with the Golden Knights. Adams's tenure was epitomized by his inability to get a good enough return on those names to end the playoff drought, and after trading away those star players, he demeaned himself by whining that it was too hard to attract star players to Buffalo.
"We don't have palm trees, we have taxes in New York and these are things you deal with. I'm in conversations every day, and there's a lot of players that we're on their [no-trade] list," he said almost exactly one year ago.
The Sabres are technically within striking distance of a playoff spot, but they're last in their division and own the second-worst goal differential in the East. The forwards are somewhat OK—Tage is still all the rage, Josh Doan is doing his best to fill Peterka's skates, and pending free agent Alex Tuch might be the next Sabre to make contributions to an actual contender. But a core of young defensemen led by a trio of top-four draft picks (including two No. 1s in Dahlin and Owen Power) isn't hitting its high projections yet, and the goalie situation is jumbled yet again. You could put a little bit of blame on injuries, but in Buffalo that just sounds like another excuse in an era that has featured an awful lot of excuses.
Kekalainen is an intriguing hire, though, because he should understand the situation better than most GMs would. He joined Buffalo as an advisor this past offseason—kind of a looming grim reaper for Adams, in retrospect—and his big NHL job before this was his 11-year tenure as GM of the Columbus Blue Jackets. Leading a franchise that had never won a playoff series in its history—one that didn't have any edge when it came to acquiring free agents, and seemed to employ a whole bunch of players who already had one skate out the door—Kekalainen squeezed four straight postseasons out of an unstable but talented roster and had a defining moment when the Jackets upset the Lightning with a first-round sweep in 2019. It came tumbling down in the seasons since, culminating in Kekalainen's firing in February 2024. But, come on, Buffalo would kill for even a taste of playoff hockey right now, so the bar is on the floor—or, at least, in the exact middle of the Eastern Conference.
For whatever it turns out to be worth, I think Kekalainen will bring to the job a hefty dose of optimism. If Jarmo was characterized by anything in Columbus, it was the belief that even a historically unsuccessful franchise in an unappealing city could have its day in the sun, too. Even if they didn't have any palm trees.
