Josh Norris was the big addition for the Sabres on deadline day and Kevyn Adams did a fair bit of work moving out Dylan Cozens and Henri Jokiharju and extending Jason Zucker. This episode is a quick rundown of Friday’s work by Adams, offering a brief breakdown of the Norris acquisition. In addition, this episode takes a look at a busy deadline around the league, highlighting the most notable deals made at the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline.
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Kevyn Adams had a productive deadline, pulling one of the more significant trades of the window for the second year in a row. Friday’s fireworks means that Buffalo’s swap won’t grab as many headlines as last year’s Casey Mittelstadt for Bowen Byram trade, but swapping Dylan Cozens, Dennis Gilbert and a second round pick for Josh Norris and Jacob Bernard-Docker is a significant shake up of the team’s core.
Similar to 2024, Adams struck for a hockey trade to help reshape his roster. Cozens was a notable piece of Buffalo’s core, locked up long term and wore an A this season. Trading him is a significant decision that almost certainly is meant to strike a chord in the room in a massively disappointing season. On the ice, Norris will step right into Cozen’s role as the team’s second center. He’s a quality contributor on the power play and should be a big upgrade over Cozens with the man advantage. Norris’ 12 power play points outpace Cozens’ 4 points of power play production this year. For their careers, Norris has 60 points (33+27) with the man advantage compared to 42 (12+30) for Cozens. For a team that struggles on the power play, that’s a helpful addition.
Norris’ injury history is the concern here. He has missed significant time with shoulder issues the last few years, though he is on pace for the highest games played total of his career this season. If the Sabres can keep him on the ice, they’ll be in good shape.
Just a week remains until the trade deadline and the Sabres have won six of seven games. This episode shares a few Buffalo Sabres players I’m keeping an eye on ahead of the deadline before diving in to a few listener questions that touch on the potential downtown soccer stadium, Alex Ovechkin’s record pursuit, Devon Levi and Buffalo’s blueline.
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Over Thought is a semi-regular series that takes a look at some of the more interesting and notable tidbits shared by Elliotte Friedman in his weekly 32 Thoughts column. Each edition will feature some unique thoughts on the state of the Sabres or league as a whole before digging in on some of the notes from Freidman’s weekly column.
The Sabres will probably welcome this 4 Nations break with open arms after spending the weeks in the crosshairs of the NHL’s water cooler. The fallout from the Tage Thompson hit will probably linger beyond the 4 Nations Face Off as well, but I doubt it will be quite as focused as it was for the last few days.
Buffalo wasn’t part of the trade flurry ahead of the 4 Nations Face Off, not that they had to be, but there has been an awful lot of chatter about who is and isn’t available lately, setting the table for a very interesting week leading up to the March 7 trade deadline.
What sort of long term effect this saga has on the Sabres will be fascinating to follow. Darcy Regier allowed the Milan Lucic hit completely reshape how he was building his roster. Buffalo put an onus on getting tougher after that incident and two years later they were in a tear down rebuild. This iteration of the Sabres doesn’t have any recent success to look back on, so any sort of retooling wouldn’t have quite the same impact as it did in 2011. Additionally, Kevyn Adams was very outspoken about his desire to shift Buffalo’s identity and bring in players who would make them harder to play against last summer. The result was a remade fourth line and the addition of Dennis Gilbert on the blueline. On Sunday, only one of the three newcomers to the fourth line was in uniform (one was in Rochester) and Gilbert didn’t see the ice in the third period.
The Sabres have plenty of items on their to-do list to get back to the playoffs, and I’d worry if toughness suddenly trumped some of the other, more pressing matters. I maintain that the solution to these issues is only going to be found if the group comes around to the realization of how they have to play. You can add tough guys left and right, but if there isn’t a desire in the room to have the fortitude and accountability to stand up in these situations, almost any acquisition will fall flat. In addition, any player the Sabres do pursue in the name of toughness needs to be able to play. Sam Bennett, for example, is the sort of guy who embodies the attitude the Sabres need to carry. He’s also a capable forward in this league. Compare him to Sam Lafferty, who is watching the Sabres from the press box. That’s the sort of calculus that will be needed if the Sabres once again try and address their toughness and identity this offseason.
In a year when virtually everything had to go right for the Sabres, it feels like it’s all gone wrong.
As the Sabres prepared to open training camp for the 2024-25 season, the club was banking on a lot of things to go right in order to break their playoff drought. There weren’t too many constants to lean on from the prior campaign while improvement from the young core and better health were among key talking points for a team desperate to break their playoff drought. In a way, it felt like this was a season of “What if?” Or “If ____, then ____.” At the halfway point of a year that has been defined by a 13-game losing streak, it’s hard to say that anything Kevyn Adams and the Sabres had gambled on have paid off. In some respects, it was fair to be optimistic about certain aspects of the club. While other decisions seemed questionable at best. Little has worked for the Sabres this year, including some of the key tent poles from a pivotal summer.
Thursday’s action dealt a devastating blow to Buffalo’s late surge for a playoff spot. Between a horrific third period and Detroit’s win over the Islanders, the Sabres likely need to run the table over their final 11 games to even have a shot at breaking their drought.
That sets us up for another summer of retooling and roster prognostication. That was front and center with the collection of questions for this latest edition of Two in the Mailbox.
Dylan Cozens has signed long-term with the Sabres, inking a seven-year deal on Tuesday. We talk about the deal and how the structure helps the Sabres and how it posiitons Cozens with other recently signed centers around the league. Before that we talk about Jessica Pegula’s article in The Player’s Tribune which gives an encouraging update over her mom’s health, along with some other notable peices of information as it pertains to the Bills and Sabres.
We turn the calendar to 2023 and offer up the resolutions we have for the Sabres in the New Year. The Sabres find themselves creeping up on the playoff race in the Eastern Conference and are enjoying impressive seasons from a number of key contributors. With their impressive improvements in mind, we dig into a few areas we hope to see the team focus on in 2023.
Tage Thompson is on fire, racking up nine points over two games this past week and helping the Sabres further their winning record. We talk about Thompson’s breakout and another Sabres center who has been terrific this season: Dylan Cozens. After we discuss the team’s top two centers we serve up a few treats at the end of the show in discussing the Arizona Coyotes arena and the new Adidas Might Ducks sneaker and jersey line.
The spotlight on Hockey Canada has only gotten brighter in recent days as the investigation into how the organization has handled sexual assault claims continues to reveal deeper and darker issues with their operations. We discuss the nature of the claims against Hockey Canada and how recent revelations and announcements have raised new questions about what’s next for Hockey Canada and whether or not they’re capable of the introspection needed to enact tangible change.
We wrap up the show by digging into the lines the Sabres look set to enter the season with. We touch on the strengths of the lineup and some of the areas where issues may arise. We look at how the roster make up could affect the long and short term roster management through recalls and changes with line combinations.
Two in the Box 