The Vancouver Canucks have requested and been granted permission to interview former Buffalo Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams for their vacant GM position, according to a league source. The source was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the Canucks\u2019 search.<\/p>\n
A Canucks team source declined to confirm whether the club had requested permission to discuss its general manager vacancy with Adams, but did not deny it, citing an organizational preference for running this interview process quietly and privately.<\/p>\n
The Canucks needed permission to interview Adams because he still had time left on his contract when the Sabres fired him in December.<\/p>\n
Adams spent five and a half seasons as the Sabres\u2019 general manager before the team fired him midseason and replaced him with Jarmo Kek\u00e4l\u00e4inen, who was a senior adviser under Adams. On the day the Sabres fired Adams, the team was 14-14-4 and tied for last place in the Eastern Conference. Buffalo then went 36-9-5 the rest of the season to win the Atlantic Division and snap a league-record, 14-season playoff drought<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Sabres\u2019 torrid run after Adams\u2019 firing shed a different light on the job he did putting Buffalo\u2019s roster together. He inherited the Sabres\u2019 two best players, Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin, but also brought in effective support players for those stars like Jason Zucker, Ryan McLeod and Bowen Byram.<\/p>\n Adams, who played 11 years in the NHL for six different teams, was hired as Buffalo\u2019s GM in 2020 without much prior experience in hockey operations<\/a>. The Sabres did not conduct a general manager search before hiring Adams. He had spent time as the team\u2019s senior vice president of business administration for one season and had spent time running Harborcenter, the Pegulas\u2019 multi-use hotel and hockey complex. In that role, he was also running the Academy of Hockey, a youth hockey development program in Buffalo that was housed at Harborcenter. He also served as an assistant coach under Lindy Ruff during Ruff\u2019s first stint as the Sabres\u2019 coach. During his time on Ruff\u2019s staff, he first served in a hybrid role working with the coaching staff and front office.<\/p>\n Sabres owners Terry and Kim Pegula made a surprising decision to fire general manager Jason Botterill in June 2020, a few months after the pandemic put a stop to the NHL season. They replaced him with Adams. During his first day on the job, Adams was tasked with firing more than 20 people in the organization, including scouts, long-time executives and AHL coaches.<\/p>\n That left Adams as a first-time general manager without much previous experience in hockey operations, trying to navigate the job without any experienced assistants on his staff. The Sabres did not set him up to succeed, and within a year, Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart wanted to be traded, launching the team into its latest rebuild.<\/p>\n Adams\u2019 draft record in Buffalo was solid. Owen Power, Zach Benson and Jack Quinn are contributing to the Sabres\u2019 success. And JJ Peterka and Matt Savoie, two other high picks who were traded, are producing well for their respective teams. His trade record<\/a> wasn\u2019t perfect, but the recent deals he made for McLeod, Byram and Josh Doan have aged well.<\/p>\n Adams also struggled with the public relations and leadership aspects of being a general manager. When the pressure on the Sabres increased, Adams felt that. At a news conference in December 2024<\/a>, he uttered a now-infamous line about Buffalo\u2019s high taxes and lack of palm trees<\/a> when asked about attracting talent to play for the Sabres. He became an unpopular figure in Buffalo with fans repeatedly chanting for him to be fired during the 2024-25 season and early in the 2025-26 season<\/a>.<\/p>\n Given his inexperience when he became Sabres GM, Adams would likely be better prepared for whatever job comes next. Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford was a mentor of Adams, who played for the Hurricanes when Rutherford was their president and general manager. But Adams would need to do a better job of handling the public relations and leadership aspects of the job to succeed in Vancouver, one of the league\u2019s most intense hockey markets.<\/p>\n Beyond Adams, the Sabres have a pair of additional executives who might factor into this process: Sam Ventura, the VP of hockey strategy and research who has ties with Rutherford dating back to their time with the Penguins, and Marc Bergevin, the Sabres\u2019 associate general manager.<\/p>\n The league source told The Athletic that, at the time of publication, the Canucks had not requested permission to speak with either candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Vancouver Canucks have requested and been granted permission to interview former Buffalo Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[1809,385,99,1320],"class_list":{"0":"post-599236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-buffalo-sabres","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-vancouver-canucks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}