After five and a half years as general manager of the Buffalo Sabres with no playoff appearances to show for it, Sabres owner Terry Pegula has fired Kevyn Adams and replaced him with senior advisor Jarmo Kekäläinen.
Adams was hired in June of 2020 with the mandate to slash the hockey operations department amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite being a first-time general manager, Adams was given little support in the early days of his tenure and was tasked with facilitating a Jack Eichel trade which he completed three months after taking over from Jason Botterill.
Adams will most likely be remembered in meme form for his comments about the lack of palm trees in Buffalo as the reason his job was so hard. As for his legacy of roster building, his tenure was marked by a chronic inability or unwillingness to make impact additions, often choosing instead to add depth pieces instead of impact players. The most notable example of this came following the 2022-23 season, a season in which the Sabres, under head coach Don Granato, missed the playoffs by just one point.
Rather than seizing that opportunity to make meaningful additions to the roster to push the team forward, Adams’s big additions that offseason were Connor Clifton and an aging Erik Johnson. A dismal season followed and Granato was fired while Adams was retained despite being the architect of the team Granato was handed.
Things have not improved with Lindy Ruff now in his second season; the team finished with 79 points last year and is on pace for 82 points this season and Terry Pegula had seemingly (finally) seen enough.
In a statement, Pegula said in part: “We are not where we need to be as an organization, and we are moving forward with new leadership within our hockey operations department. We are dedicated to building an organization that is competitive year after year, and we have fallen short of that expectation.”
In fairness to Adams, he was handed a very difficult job with little-to-no help in his early days and the lack of resources must have made his job harder than it needed to be. However, he was never qualified to do the job having had zero front office experience prior to his hiring. It was an abysmal idea by Pegula and it’s frankly ridiculous that it took Pegula nearly six years to rectify this mistake.
Adams was consistently afraid of his own shadow when it came to bringing in big talent and his hesitancy cost the Sabres time-and-time again. He also became increasingly standoffish and, frankly, arrogant sounding during the end of tenure despite having accomplished exactly nothing while on the job.
In Kekäläinen, the Sabres are getting an experienced general manager who helmed the Columbus Blue Jackets from 2013 until 2024 which is a far departure from the last three general managers Pegula hired – none of whom had prior experience as general manager.
Kekäläinen is expected to meet with the media on Tuesday. He had been out of town following the death of his father over the weekend.