When will Jarmo Kekalainen make his first move with the Sabres?
The Buffalo Sabres have been stuck in another season that looks like it is heading to an end without the playoffs for the 15th straight year, lasting making the postseason in 2010-11.
Yet, ownership made its latest move this week, naming Jarmo Kekäläinen as the club’s new general manager and parting ways with Kevyn Adams, who failed to produce significant improvement through his five years at the helm.
On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton were joined by David Pagnotta of The Fourth Period to look at Kekäläinen’s potential first moves.
Hutton: With the Buffalo Sabres and Jarmo Kekäläinen, he’s been around enough to get a feel for who these players are and what he has. So, how long until we see him make his first move in Buffalo here as he takes over and what could it be?
Pagnotta: That’s a great point, because this isn’t a guy coming in fresh. He came in in the summer, he’s already been acclimated and he’s well educated with the organization, the roster, the prospect pool, and everything they’ve got in the system, as well as the staff off the ice. So this isn’t a matter of him coming in and now having to spend the next few weeks to evaluate his team. He’s already done that. He’s been on the ground floor and he’s been across the league. I’ve seen him in Toronto a bunch of games, he’s been across different parts of of the Eastern Conference, trying to get a good hands on approach to how the rest of the teams out there are looking, not just from a from a scouting perspective per se, but also just to see what options may be available to him later.
It sounds like priority number one is Alex Tuch, and figuring out exactly what that runway looks like. Is there a pathway to a deal? My indication was that he’s looking at eight figures on an AAV. So somewhere in that $10-$11 million range, is Buffalo comfortable doing that? It didn’t sound like they were when Kevyn Adams was leading those negotiations, so has anything shifted?
Once that’s determined, then it’s on to the other kind of boxes that he’s going to have to check. He mentioned in his introductory press conference, goaltending, he wants to get down to two once Colten Ellis is healthy, so they’ve got to figure that out.
Are there other areas of his team that some teams that had conversations with Adams prior, with respect to guys like Bowen Byram, Owen Power, other players on the team, are going to now be reignited in a different manner with Jarmo leading those negotiations? There’s certainly a lot to handle here, but based on what he said, he wants to kind of get things going in short order. First is figuring out Alex Tuch and then kind of going from there and checking some of those other boxes, but this is expected to be an aggressive approach.
You can catch the rest of the segment and Thursday’s full episode here…