The Buffalo Sabres fired general manager Kevyn Adams on Monday in a move made 2 1/2 months into his sixth season, with the team sitting at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings and already in jeopardy of extending its NHL-record playoff drought to a 15th year.
The decision was made by team owner Terry Pegula and announced in a news release.
Adams’s replacement was already with the team in Jarmo Kekalainen. The former Columbus Blue Jackets GM was hired by Adams in June to serve as a senior adviser. The 59-year-old Kekalainen is from Finland and was the NHL’s first European-born GM in spending 11 years in Columbus before being fired in February 2024.
“We are not where we need to be as an organization, and we are moving forward with new leadership within our hockey operations department,” Pegula said. “We are dedicated to building an organization that is competitive year after year, and we have fallen short of that expectation.”
The decision to fire Adams comes despite the Sabres enjoying their first three-game winning streak of the season, following a 3-1 victory at Seattle on Sunday night. Buffalo returned home after splitting a six-game road trip and is now off until hosting the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday.
Adams has been criticized for mismanaging the team’s assets, inability to secure a franchise goalie, and failure to address a leadership void that continues to linger on a team that’s finished last in the overall standings four times and no better than 19th during its playoff drought.
Under Kekalainen, the Blue Jackets reached the playoffs five times and set a franchise record with 50 wins and 108 points in 2016-17. He previously held executive roles with the St. Louis Blues and Ottawa Senators. Kekalainen also spent three years as general manager of Jokerit in Finland’s top professional league and worked with the Finnish national team program.
“It is a great honour to be named general manager of the Buffalo Sabres,” said Kekalainen. “I am humbled to be the steward of this team and look forward to experiencing the passion that Sabres fans bring to every game.”
Kekalainen’s promotion comes a day after his father, Kari, died after a lengthy illness at the age of 82. Kekalainen posted a message on his Instagram account, referring to his father as his coach and idol, translated from his native Finnish.
Adams’s missteps also include second-guessing himself for failing to make a roster move to help spark the team during an 0-10-3 skid last season that essentially knocked the Sabres out of contention before Christmas.
Adams entered this season on the hottest of NHL seats and with reportedly two years left on his contract.
He long ago fell out of favour with Sabres fans, who began chanting “Fire Adams” so often the team elected to not introduce the GM as traditionally happens during Buffalo’s season opener in October. Last year, fans brought blow-up palm trees to games in response after Adams lamented the difficulty he had attracting talent to Buffalo because the city has high taxes and no palm trees.
Adams took over in June 2020 and following a last-place finish launched a major rebuilding plan that led to the team trading its top players, highlighted by the deals that sent Jack Eichel to Vegas and Sam Reinhart to Florida. After showing signs of development, and Adams proclaiming the Sabres competitive window opening, the Sabres have instead regressed the past two seasons.
Buffalo went from finishing with 91 points and one win from ending its playoff drought in 2022-23 to 84 points the next season and 79 last year.
This season, the Sabres (14-14-4) are once again struggling with consistency in the first half of their second season under head coach Lindy Ruff, who is back for a second stint in Buffalo. The Sabres have spent much of the season hovering at .500, have been competitive at home (9-5-2) but have struggled on the road with two of their five wins coming in regulation.
This wasn’t the plan Adams laid out in closing last season by saying everything was on the table to turn the Sabres into competitors.
He opened this season with: “We need to win. And I’m fully aware of that.”
Adams, with input from Ruff, spent the summer adding grit at the expense of offence by trading two-time 20-goal-scorer JJ Peterka to Utah to acquire forward Josh Doan and hulking defenceman Michael Kesselring. The deal has had middling results. While Doan ranks second on the team with 10 goals and third with 23 points, Kesselring has been limited to playing just nine games due to injuries.
Another trade that has yet to pan out involved Buffalo and Ottawa swapping top-line centres, with the Sabres acquiring talented but injury prone Josh Norris for Dylan Cozens in March. Norris appeared in just three games before aggravating an oblique injury last year and is limited to just six games this season.
Adams has mismanaged Buffalo’s goaltending position, starting with losing Linus Ullmark to free agency in the summer of 2021 after saying he was assured by the goalie he’d re-sign with the team in March. The Sabres have had 11 goalies start at least one game since.
The Sabres are now on their fifth GM since Darcy Regier was fired a month into the 2013-14 season.
Adams is from Buffalo, and a former NHL forward, who won a Stanley Cup title in 2006 with Carolina over his 10-season career.
He had no front-office experience and held a business role with the Sabres when replacing Jason Botterill in June 2020. Botterill’s firing was deemed a cost-cutting move, with Adams purging much of the team’s hockey infrastructure as the NHL dealt with the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic.
