Kevyn Adams hopes that some of the Buffalo Bills’ good fortunes rub off on the Buffalo Sabres this week, as he and his hockey staff prepare for the NHL draft.
The Sabres have moved their draft-week operations to the Bills’ training facility in Orchard Park. Adams, who enters his sixth year as Sabres general manager, doesn’t know of any other team that is working out of an NFL facility as it gets ready for the draft.
Sabres Draft (copy)
Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams speaks to reporters during a press conference at the Buffalo Bills' training facility n Tuesday. Joed Viera/Buffalo News
“The advantage is that we’re at One Bills Drive,” Adams said. “We’re pretty fortunate that Terry and Laura (Pegula) and Brandon (Beane, Bills general manager) and Sean (McDermott, Bills head coach) offered this up. When they called and asked me, I jumped at it.”
The draft kicks off at 7 p.m. Friday with the first round in Los Angeles, and continues at noon Saturday with Rounds 2-7. A few dozen prospects, including projected No. 1 pick Matthew Schaefer, were in Southern California, but most members of NHL front offices weren't. The Sabres have two team representatives in Los Angeles, one from communications and another from hockey operations.
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This year, the decentralized format is much like the format used for the NFL and NBA drafts. Management and hockey operations staffs for each of the 32 teams are operating remotely as they select players.
The change in format for this year stems from the 2023 draft in Nashville, an event that became a tipping point, of sorts, for its immediate future.
Nashville isn’t cheap, which teams found out when they toted their entire hockey operations staffs to Tennessee. Additionally, according to Sports Business Journal, storms across the Southeast created travel issues, which delayed team personnel staffs from returning to their home cities to prepare for free agency.
Later that year, 26 of the NHL’s 32 general managers voted to move to a decentralized draft format for 2025. The Sphere in Las Vegas hosted the 2024 NHL draft.
Now, teams are working from home.
This is the NHL’s third decentralized draft since 2020; teams drafted remotely in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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So this is the first year of a draft that is decentralized and not precipitated by a pandemic. NHL general managers weighed the positives and negatives of not being among the 32 teams in one facility or within arm’s reach of other executives for trade discussions.
“It’s not like you can’t call or text, so you’re not going to not do a deal because you’re not together,” Adams said Tuesday.
“But there’s something about the draft, everybody’s sitting together, where you make eye contact, give them a nod, ‘Let’s chat real quick.’ That’s something that’ll be a little different for all of us.”
Philadelphia Flyers GM Daniel Briere likes the face-to-face interaction of the draft, but told reporters in Philadelphia earlier this month that he sees the benefit of operating in a bubble of sorts.
“You’re not worrying about computers or lists being wide open, available to everybody because we have so many picks (11, including three first-round picks). That's going to be an advantage this year for us,” said Briere, who played for the Sabres from 2002-07. “It makes it a little easier.
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“But I'm going to miss being on the floor with everybody and the energy it creates, having everybody down there.”
New York Islanders general manager Mathieu Darche is a little more than five weeks on the job – his first as an NHL GM – and considered both sides of the centralization/decentralization equation.
Like Briere, he values the real-time interaction.
“But other sports do it like this, so I’m comfortable this way,” Darche told reporters on a video conference this week. “With me starting (as Islanders GM), it’s nice to have everybody here and focused. During draft week, you usually have meetings … but I’m comfortable with both situations.
“I won’t lie, but whatever the league decides, I’ll be doing my job.”
But how is this year’s draft akin to 2020 and 2021? Don Boyd, the Ottawa Senators head scout, saw only one similarity: being physically separated by other teams inside one central location.
“Fortunately, with this draft, we’ve been able to see the players live all year and many times over,” Boyd told reporters this week in Ottawa. “We weren’t able to do that in Covid, so we were doing everything off Zoom, or what you remembered from the year before as underage players. A lot of difference. I don’t think it’s the same, at all.”
Prior to the start of the Stanley Cup Final on June 4, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told reporters in Edmonton that the teams wanted a decentralized draft.
DailyFaceoff.com reported Wednesday that the NHL’s Board of Governors decided it will poll NHL teams this summer about continuing to decentralize the draft or returning to the traditional format of hosting it in one city.
“If after this experience, the clubs say, ‘You know what? On second thought, let’s go back to the old format,’ we’ll do that,” Bettman said. “What we do will be totally in response to what the clubs tell us they want.”
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