Mike Harrington: In Bowen Byram drama, it's suddenly clear where the Sabres stand
Putting his team in this pickle is mostly Kevyn Adams' fault, and that's why his office keycard should have been deactivated months ago, Mike Harrington writes.
Buffalo Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams was channeling his inner Clint Eastwood Wednesday morning in LECOM Harborcenter. His message to his fellow NHL GMs seemed pretty clear.
Go ahead. Make my day.
If there’s anybody out there − here’s looking at you, Craig Conroy in Calgary − who thinks they are going to jam up the Sabres’ salary cap with an offer sheet for Bowen Byram, they have got another thing coming. With zero hesitation, Adams said “absolutely” when I asked him if the Sabres were going to match any such offer.
Sabres defenseman Bowen Byram moves the puck against the Edmonton Oilers at KeyBank Center in March.
Joed Viera, Buffalo News
Sounded definitive. Wish we got more directness like that. Still, the cynic in me couldn’t help but immediately get transported back to the hockey summer of our discontent.
You might remember how the Sabres fumbled negotiations with co-captains Daniel Briere and Chris Drury and lost them for nothing on July 1, 2007, in a blow the team has never truly recovered from. Then came word of an offer sheet for winger Thomas Vanek, who was 23 at the time and coming off a 43-goal, 84-point season he would never reach again.
GM Darcy Regier sounded back then just like Adams did Wednesday. With the Sabres still hoping to be a perennial playoff team and trying to absorb the PR body shot of losing Briere and Drury, Regier boldly told his cohorts hands off on Vanek or anyone else.
Edmonton’s Kevin Lowe didn’t listen. He signed Vanek to a seven-year, $50 million offer sheet that stunned the hockey world. The Sabres couldn’t lose another key player and matched it rather than take four first-round draft choices. Vanek had three more seasons of 30-plus goals before he was traded in 2013 and is fifth on the franchise’s career goal list.
(I’m not relitigating the choice whatsoever. It was the right one because they weren’t rebuilding back then.)
Regier didn’t anticipate what Lowe was going to do to him, and you hope Adams isn’t making a similar mistake but it doesn’t feel like that’s the case. All the rumors about a Byram offer sheet the last couple of days say teams are pondering a deal for one or two years.
Byram is two years away from unrestricted free agency, coming after the 2026-27 season. TSN’s free agent frenzy show was incorrectly pointing out Tuesday he was one year away, and a Buffalo match on a one-year deal would “walk him into unrestricted free agency.” Not the case.
The Sabres don’t need and don’t want draft-pick compensation, and that’s why they will match. Meanwhile, not many teams can have designs on a long-term offer sheet due to cap considerations.
The offer sheets St. Louis used to pilfer Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway from Edmonton last August were both for two years, and Buffalo would easily match those types. I’d be more worried about what we saw in 2019 from Montreal, which signed Carolina’s Sebastian Aho to a five-year, $42.3 million deal that the Canes matched.
Byram would be taking a risk, too. If he wants out, he wouldn’t want to accidentally marry himself to the Sabres by signing a deal like that. It’s why Adams used the word “strategic” to describe the Sabres’ cap moves in the event of an offer sheet.
The market on defense has gotten pretty tight and the view here remains that a one-year contract might work for all parties. Pay Byram now to play alongside Rasmus Dahlin and revisit him at the trade deadline or next summer.
A trade now could still work, too. The Sabres dealt JJ Peterka and could use another top-six winger. But if they get one for Byram, aren’t they going to need a top-pair defenseman? Not necessarily.
Adams was musing on Byram and reminding us a trade would only be to make the Sabres better. But my antenna really went up when he talked about possible returns and mentioned “a forward and a ‘D’ “ being on the list of returns.
That seems to be the Sabres’ sweet spot. Imagine getting a new forward like Owen Tippett of Philadelphia. Or St. Louis’ Jake Neighbours. Or Calgary’s Connor Zary or Joel Farabee. And they come with a defenseman, too. Byram is a top-pair guy who has won a Stanley Cup. You want him, it’s going to cost you.
Adams can wait this out some if he wants. One fallacy fans continue to inexplicably have is that free agency and roster building end on July 1. You only need to think back to last year, when the Sabres acquired Ryan McLeod from Edmonton on July 5, to see where that’s not the case. You’ll remember the Sabres acquired Jeff Skinner in a 2018 trade that was consummated in August. And the trade of the decade to date, Florida’s acquisition of Matthew Tkachuk from Calgary, didn’t come until July 22, 2022.
Roster banter now is just idle chit-chat. It matters far more when they show up for training camp in September.
Byram talk was huge Tuesday and TSN’s Craig Button tried to connect the dots between Byram and Peterka when he said, “People want to leave Buffalo because they don’t think they can win.”
Not the issue with Byram, who is looking for a different role, but not an altogether wrong point either. You could sense Adams’ frustration when I asked him about Button’s slam.
“We have to earn (respect). Nothing changes in the sense of how I’ve answered this question before,” Adams said. “We have to win hockey games. I can stand up here and I can lay out our plan. I can tell you exactly why we’ve made the decisions we’ve made. I can tell you why I think we’ve done a good job in terms of putting ourselves in a strategic position when it comes to the Byram situation. But ultimately, we just have to win games, starting in October.”\
More straight talk. I’m all for it.