{"id":764161,"date":"2026-06-27T06:42:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T06:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/764161\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T06:42:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T06:42:15","slug":"sabres-select-rudolph-morozov-to-close-out-busy-week-at-nhl-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/764161\/","title":{"rendered":"Sabres select Rudolph, Morozov to close out busy week at NHL Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

With just hours to go until the draft began,\u00a0Kekalainen was still open for business. He had already moved up from No. 27 to No. 20 when he traded defenseman Michael Kesselring<\/a> to the San Jose Sharks on June 17, with the two teams swapping their first-round draft positions.<\/p>\n

Kekalainen said he let all the other NHL teams know that he\u2019d be open to moving either of the two first-round picks he held, but none of the offers were \u201cattractive enough\u201d to part with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we thought this morning that it looked like we were picking at four and then we explored a lot of different ideas of maybe moving up from 20 to the teens to make sure that we got one of the guys that we had high on our list,\u201d Kekalainen said. \u201cWe ended up getting one at 20. And if all of them were gone, we were exploring the options of going from 20 to 24, 25, maybe move back a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

They held tight at No. 20 instead of moving down because Ilia Morozov<\/a> was still available there. The top center at Miami University (Ohio) had 20 points (eight goals, 12 assists) after beginning the season as the second-youngest player in NCAA men\u2019s hockey.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s a good two-way forward,\u201d Kekalainen said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard to score a lot in college at the age of 17. \u2026 He got off to a really hot start in college hockey then he cooled off a little bit. But I got to talk to the head coach there and he couldn\u2019t stop talking about the character of Ilia Morozov. It\u2019s a pretty impressive story that he come from Russia and hardly spoke any English and now he\u2019s an A student. Works on his game. They have to kick him out of the rink and gym before he leaves. We\u2019re watching the testing, it\u2019s pretty impressive. The results are there for the work that he\u2019s done so far and he\u2019s just getting started. We\u2019re really, really excited about him too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With just hours to go until the draft began,\u00a0Kekalainen was still open for business. He had already moved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":764162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-764161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/764162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}