‘He’s playing a big-boy game’: How Sabres defenseman Mattias Samuelsson has grown into his most productive NHL season
Buffalo Sabres defenseman Mattias Samuelsson is having his best NHL season to date. He's the Sabres' second-leading scorer among defenseman and isn't afraid to make plays or break up an opponent's plays.
Nick Fohr became an associate coach with USA Hockey’s National Team Development program’s Under-18 squad in the fall of 2017, and he immediately noticed Mattias Samuelsson’s presence.
The 6-foot-4 defenseman from the Philadelphia area was physical and mobile, with a very real future in college and professional hockey. At 195 pounds, he had to put on weight, and he had to refine his aggressiveness to reach those levels.
That got difficult for Samuelsson, now a defenseman with the Buffalo Sabres. He was bigger and stronger than some of the NTDP’s opponents in the United States Hockey League, and at times, Fohr saw Samuelsson trying to rein himself in on the ice as he went into contact play.
Sabres defenseman Mattias Samuelsson, left, scores on a shot against the Flyers on Jan. 14. Samuelsson has scored a career-high 11 goals thus far this season.
Harry Scull Jr., Buffalo News
At times, it didn’t go Samuelsson’s way. One time at a tournament in Pittsburgh in September 2017, Samuelsson fought for a puck against an opponent and was penalized and then suspended for the play, which Fohr called “a hockey play.”
It made Samuelsson momentarily question his strengths and limitations.
“I can’t touch anyone anymore, can I?” Fohr recalled Samuelsson telling him, in worry.
Fohr quelled his concerns. Samuelsson listened.
“I told him, ‘You have to play a certain way,’ ” said Fohr, who is now in his fourth season as the NTDP’s Under-18 team’s head coach. “‘When you make it to the NHL, you have to play that hard against that guy.’ I remember that moment because Mattias was so frustrated. He was so big and strong. He couldn’t do the things he needed to do, and he felt like he couldn’t do that without getting suspended.
“He had to learn that so he could stay within the game. He was a little more careful with how he went at people, and he learned to manage his momentum.”
That conversation became a turning point for Samuelsson. He learned how to control his body, and he learned to embrace growth by working through adversity, including injuries and criticism, a step of maturity in his path to becoming an NHL player.
Now in his fifth full season with the Sabres, Samuelsson is playing his most complete hockey as a 6-4, 229-pound defenseman who can generate offense or use his body to block a shot or stop opponents from creating plays.
The fact that Samuelsson has been healthy has only built his confidence and aided his productivity.
“Confidence, offensively, has been a big one for me,” Samuelsson said. “Everybody deals with little injuries and stuff, but being healthy enough to play every night, even if you aren’t feeling great, it’s just finding ways to be efficient and help the team night in and night out.”
Growing up in hockey
Samuelsson is a second-generation NHL player. His father, Kjell, played for the New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers, Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning from 1985-99. A 6-7 defenseman from Tingsryd, Sweden, he helped the Penguins win the Stanley Cup in 1992, was an assistant coach with Philadelphia’s American Hockey League affiliate in Lehigh Valley, Pa., and worked in the Flyers’ front office in player development.Samuelsson and his wife, Vicki, have four children: sons Lukas and Mattias and daughters Alexandra and Gabriella.
Mattias Samuelsson was born less than a year after his father retired from the NHL. He began skating and playing hockey when he was four, but as he grew up, his father gave him some advice: “Don’t do this just because I did it.”
As he got older, Mattias started to ask his father for hockey advice.
“When he was younger, I sat back and let him play,” Kjell said. “That’s what a regular parent does. When he started getting better, and started getting serious, I wasn’t really forcing anything. If he asked questions, I tried to get my knowledge and teach him what I thought was right. I can’t say I was putting down the law or saying, ‘You have to do it this way.’ He tried to develop by himself. He analyzed games and opponents, but sure, he asked a lot of questions and I gave him my opinions.”
Samuelsson played hockey, baseball, lacrosse and soccer in the Philadelphia area, but grew serious about hockey when he was 13 years old. He followed his older brother, Lukas, to Northwood School, a boarding school in Lake Placid, a decision that impacted his hockey and personal future.
“With boarding school, those kids are forced to mature quicker,” said Fohr. “He’s at Northwood around 18-year-olds when he was 15. You learn your spot in the world. You learn to listen and pay attention, and that’s how you mature, doing that and going through that process.”
Samuelsson joined the National Team Development program in the fall of 2016, and Fohr and noticed the defenseman’s laid-back disposition off the ice. He remembers a conversation with Kjell Samuelsson, who had some concern about his son’s casual nature away from the ice and how it would impact his style of play.
Fohr, instead, saw Mattias Samuelsson’s personality as a plus. He likely wouldn’t get frazzled or frustrated. If he did, he’d analyze a situation and figure out how to maximize it.
Mattias Samuelsson was announced as the 32nd pick of the NHL Draft and first of the second round.
Buffalo News file photo
The Sabres selected Samuelsson at No. 32 in the second round of the 2018 NHL draft after Samuelsson’s second year with the NTDP’s Under-18 team, in which he scored 11 goals with 20 assists in 58 games.
"In the first week I saw him, I knew the Sabres got the steal of the draft," former Western Michigan coach Andy Murray told The Buffalo News in 2019. "He’s mature beyond his years mentally. He was a freshman last year, yet he commanded the respect of our seniors. He’s a complete player, competes hard, plays hard.
"At Western, we don’t want to be difficult to play against, we want to be miserable to play against. ... He’s that kind of competitor."
The NHL years
The early years of Samuelsson’s professional career weren’t easy. He joined the Sabres in March 2020 after two seasons at Western Michigan and he split the 2021-22 season between the Sabres and Rochester of the American Hockey League.Identified by the Sabres as a long-term investment, he signed a seven-year, $30 million contract extension with the Sabres in October 2022 and played in 55 games in 2022-23, but missed 27 with various injuries.
The next season, he played in 41 of the first 47 games before sustaining a season-ending injury to his right shoulder at the start of February 2024. The injury required surgery.
The 2024-25 season was especially challenging. While he scored four goals with 10 assists and was plus-3 in 62 games, he played with a broken bone in his left foot at one point in the season. Earlier in the season, he missed 12 games with a lower-body injury after he was slew-footed by Montreal’s Juraj Slafkovsky in October 2024.
Samuelsson faced the prospect of being labeled an underachiever, a label that, given his injury history, would have been unfair. Ahead of the 2025 NHL draft in June, former Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams shot down any chatter of the Sabres possibly buying out Samuelsson’s contract.
When asked what he thought his son learned from last season, Kjell Samuelsson took a deep breath, almost as if he was about to choose his words.
“I told him the usual answers,” he said. “You’ve got to stay positive, work hard, do your own job, and don’t worry about the other players. He had a tough time last year, and even the year before that, with all the injuries he had. He couldn’t stay healthy.
“Every time you get injured, you get pushed back and you have to work harder to get back. It’s a long haul, and it takes longer for some players to get back to their normal standard.”
The condition to setting himself up for success in 2025-26: Mattias Samuelsson went into the 2025 offseason healthy.
Sabres defenseman Mattias Samuelsson, left, tips a puck away from Penguins center Sidney Crosby in 2022.
Samuelsson isn't afraid to use his physical presence to create plays or prevent opponents from creating plays. Harry Scull Jr., Buffalo News
‘Swag and confidence’
Rather than spending part the offseason recovering from injury or rehabilitating from surgery, both of which take time away from training for the next season, Samuelsson had an entire offseason to prepare for this season.“I only got to train, full-on, for like a month or so,” Samuelsson said of 2024. “Last summer, just being healthy, the whole summer was big.”
Early in the season, Samuelsson began to show the form that made the Sabres invest in him in the fall of 2022.
There was some initial collective breath-holding, almost if some wondered when the bubble was going to burst on Samuelsson.
It definitely hasn’t. Samuelsson has become one of the Sabres’ most impactful defensemen.
“The last 30 games, I thought he was our best defenseman last year,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “I told him that. And I told him, at the end of the year, I expected that just to carry on.”
Ahead of the game Saturday at Tampa Bay, Samuelsson has a career-high 11 goals and 23 assists in 57 games. He’s the Sabres’ second-leading scorer among defensemen behind Rasmus Dahlin (11 goals, 37 assists).
Samuelsson is averaging 23 minutes, 5 seconds of ice time per game, the most in his NHL career in a season, including 2 minutes, 50 seconds of penalty-kill ice time per game. He’s a team-best plus-29. He’s not afraid to use his physical presence to create plays or prevent opponents from creating plays. He leads the Sabres in blocked shots (115) and he is third on the team in hits (101), behind Beck Malenstyn (202) and Peyton Krebs (134).
“He was one of the best D-men for the U.S., growing up, so I always knew who he was, and he has always been a great player,” Sabres defenseman Michael Kesselring said of Samuelsson. “It’s really fun to see someone have success. I heard he had a tougher year last year, and it’s really fun to see someone come back and have a lot of swag and confidence. He’s playing a big-boy game.”
Samuelsson has been nearly injury free this season, too, missing only two games in October due to an undisclosed injury. He took a puck to the face in the third period of a 5-4 loss Jan. 17 against Minnesota but returned to the ice to play in overtime.
He has two two-goal games this season, and isn’t afraid to take shots, as evidenced earlier this week, when New Jersey goalie Jake Allen made a glove save of Samuelsson’s blast from the left circle in the final seconds of the first period of the Sabres’ 2-1 win Wednesday in Newark, N.J.
Dahlin may be the Sabres’ clear-cut Norris Trophy candidate as the NHL’s top defenseman, but Samuelsson is both complementing his partner on the Sabres’ top defensive pairing and holding his own as a well-rounded defenseman.
He learned the work that he needed to put in to achieve consistency. And the difficulty of building and repeating habits.
“You have to understand the preparation of every single day and what goes into being on your game, or at least helping the team, positively, every single night,” Samuelsson said.
There's been no hesitancy, no worry, no concern about trying to change his style to fit a certain mold. He's found the keys to his consistency this year: Taking care of his body. Getting involved offensively in games, and exercising more self-assurance with the puck and in making plays.
“When you’re in and out of the lineup for months, at times, like I have been in years past, it’s just hard to find your game, or any type of confidence,” Samuelsson said. “Just being healthy enough to play every night has been the biggest thing for me.”