The Buffalo Sabres have acquired the 20th overall pick in next week’s NHL draft from the San Jose Sharks in exchange for the 27th pick and defenseman Michael Kesselring, the team announced Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Kesselring came over from Utah last summer along with forward Josh Doan for forward JJ Peterka. He was plagued by injuries this past season, notching\u00a0two assists in 34 games.<\/p>\n
Kesselring\u00a0only played one game in the postseason, as the team had an abundance of NHL defensemen on the roster. He battled for a roster spot with Logan Stanley and Luke Schenn, both acquired at the trade deadline from Winnipeg and are set to become unrestricted free agents.<\/p>\n
The Sabres still have six defensemen under contract: Rasmus Dahlin, Owen Power, Bowen Byram, Mattias Samuelsson, Conor Timmins and Zach Metsa. Their top-four became the driving force behind the team’s success this past season, scoring the third-most points by a defense in the league.<\/p>\n
The Sabres now hold picks 20, 124, 156 and 188 in this year’s draft, which will be held in Buffalo on June 26-27.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Buffalo Sabres have acquired the 20th overall pick in next week’s NHL draft from the San Jose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[6632,65547,2064,100,1608,88,90,89,2998,127],"class_list":["post-367168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-app-sports","tag-buffalo","tag-buffalo-sabres","tag-news","tag-rochester","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-spectrum-news-staff","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}