Buffalo Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams went into the offseason with a focus on adding physicality, compete, and veteran leadership to round out the Sabres roster.
The Sabres made additions to that end on Monday, adding forwards Jason Zucker, Sam Lafferty, and Nicolas Aube-Kubel along with defenseman Dennis Gilbert to open free agency after acquiring physical winger Beck Malenstyn from Washington on Saturday.
“We had goals coming into this offseason [that] we were trying to achieve, and I think we're a much better team today than we were a couple days ago,” Adams said.
“When you look at the offseason, kind of what we were looking to accomplish, we wanted to be harder to play against, we wanted to bring in more physicality, more identity kind of into that bottom six. We wanted to be a team that wears teams out, that can be relentless on the forecheck and hard, and we want to be a team that's more responsible defensively.”
Malenstyn (241), Lafferty (192), and Aube-Kubel (159) each would have led Sabres forwards in hits last season, which Adams said will bring that physical element to the team’s game.
Gilbert, who has 12 fights in 82 career NHL games, also fit with the type of player that the team was looking to bring in at the start of free agency.
“He knows what he needs to do to play in this league,” Adams said. “He's a big, strong kid who's very, very competitive and continues to work on his game to get better. Not afraid to fight, he's done that a number of times. He competes hard so, again, another guy that you're bringing in some size, physicality. We don't have a lot of that on our back end.”
Zucker, who has 370 points (196+174) in 697 career regular-season games and 18 points (9+9) in 52 playoff games, will bring versatility and experience to a young and skilled Sabres team, which ranked third in the league in goals per game during the 2022-23 season.
Adams also believes the additions will give coach Lindy Ruff and his staff the opportunity to mix and match lines to put together winning combinations.
“When I look at our group now, we have a lot of skill, we have a lot of talent,” he said. “I think we've proven in this league over the last couple of years that we have guys that can be as talented as anyone and make plays. We needed to round the group out, we needed to get harder, we needed to just have a little more of a presence where we can go after teams and roll over and over and just become that tougher team to play against. The skill is exciting and great, but we just needed to kind of get the mix a little bit better and that was why we were so focused on that.”
