As the Sabres spiral into their familiar abyss at the bottom of the NHL standings, the hour is getting very late for General Manager Kevyn Adams.

It was clear before the season started that this would be a make-or-break year with Adams entering the final year left on his contract, even if Terry Pegula has given his hockey protégé an enormous amount of leeway in the past. And indeed it now looks like the addition of Jarmo Kekäläinen, hired as senior advisor over the summer to help guide Adams, will not be enough to save Adams’s job.

The Sabres are now dead last in their division, dead last in the conference and two points ahead of Calgary for dead last in the league. They are the only team in the NHL that hasn’t won a road game this year (0-4-1) and their five wins tie them for last in the league in that department as well.

Kekäläinen was never going to have a big enough impact to alter the course of the franchise in the short time he has worked with Adams, and his addition was frankly odd considering the circumstances: Terry Pegula or Adams himself decided that a general manager with five years on the job needed a former GM to guide Adams’s decision making process. To be clear, hiring Kekäläinen was not the problem. The problem is that Adams should have been fired and Kekäläinen hired as GM in his place.

Whether Pegula retained Adams because it was cheaper do so, or because he has a special affinity for Adams with whom Pegula has worked in some capacity since 2011 when Terry and Kim bought the Sabres, or whether Pegula thought the team was genuinely headed in the right direction is immaterial at this point.

In a different year, in different circumstances, perhaps this year could be written off as a strange, injury-riddled outlier. Several things outside of Adams’s control have contributed to the team’s failure: Captain Rasmus Dahlin is on a leave of absence to be with his fiancée in Sweden as she recovers from a heart transplant, Jason Zucker has been sidelined with some sort of virus that has left him unable to eat solid food for nine days, and Jiri Kulich has been diagnosed with blood clots. None of those things could have been foreseen.

Adams, however, gets no such pass for the injury to Josh Norris which was always a good possibility. Norris has only played over 60 games once in the past six seasons and season seven will be no different. And speaking of Norris, Adams foolishly gave the Ottawa Senators his 2026 second-round draft pick as part of the deal that sent Dylan Cozens north of the border. That pick looks like it will be somewhere between 33 and 40 in a draft that has been described by many as a deep one.

Adams’s response to the Sabres injuries and misfortune this year has been largely the same response he’s had to his previous self-inflicted crises: do nothing and hope for the best. To be fair, fans probably prefer Adams not create any more chaos via trade prior to his inevitable departure, which leads to an obvious question:

If his dismissal is inevitable, why is he still employed?

With his contract expiring, it really makes no sense to have him make any decisions about the team’s future considering he will not be the one to write the next chapter. The simplest solution is to fire him now (or yesterday, or last off-season, or the off-season before that when he was allowed to make Don Granato the scapegoat for his own failures) and name Kekäläinen as interim general manager.

The team, if they are so inclined, can and should lead a thorough search for the next GM once this year ends, but in the meantime, Kekäläinen has the previous managerial experience to navigate the trade deadline which will involve making some very serious decisions.

It increasingly looks like Alex Tuch will be one of the premier trade chips at the deadline as the Sabres will enter another rebuild cycle. Maximizing his trade value is something better left to Kekäläinen than Adams. Likewise, the team will no doubt be fielding calls on Bo Byram and Tage Thompson among others, and while no decisions need to be made on them any time soon, if a good offer does come along, having Kekäläinen in that seat to pull the trigger if something good came up.

There is precedent for an interim GM going on a heroic run.

In 2006, Jeff Gorton, now President of Hockey Operations for the Montreal Canadiens, was named interim GM of the Boston Bruins. He oversaw a draft that netted them Phil Kessel in the first round, Milan Lucic in the second and Brad Marchand in the third. He also signed Zdeno Chara in free agency. Gorton was demoted back to assistant General Manager upon the hiring of Peter Chiarelli.

It’s worth trying to see if the Sabres can find something similar with Kekäläinen. The Adams era is over. Terry Pegula just hasn’t admitted it yet.