When dealing with the Buffalo Sabres, I did not want to jump the gun and preemptively anoint them as one of the top teams in the NHL on the verge of ending a playoff drought that goes back to April 26 of 2011.

However, returning from the 2026 Olympic break, the Sabres have not missed a beat since going nuclear after relieving Kevyn Adams of his general manager duties for Jarmo Kekalainen. Under the new guide of Kekalainen, there has been an obvious culture shift and the roster that was largely built by Adams is poised to end the longest current playoff drought in professional sports and a fifth straight win on Thursday night against Pittsburgh pulled the Sabres level with Tampa Bay atop the Atlantic Division with 80 points over 62 games.

At the beginning of December another talented Sabres roster was not living up to its expectations and then a 4-3 overtime win at Edmonton on Dec. 9 started a 10-game winning streak that changed the tune of the season.

After the third game into that win streak, Buffalo made the change from Adams to Kekalainen at general manager, but it was the only big move the Sabres have made since going from a team looking at the top of the draft again into a team that is being labeled a contender, not just a team squeaking in.

As the Sabres success has continued, the opinion around Adams has shifted thanks to the team he built finally playing up to its potential.

Despite Buffalo being a team mainly built by Adams, Kekalainen deserves just as much credit even if he has not constructed the roster. Once the well-respected Finnish executive took over the club he made it known that each player was expendable and that culture shift deserves just as much credit as putting the team together.

Kekalainen will reap the rewards of an excellently put together team through trades and drafting, but he should not be alone as teams need to keep tabs on Adams for future openings around the league thanks to his impressive eye for talent evaluation.

While Adams inherited the best pieces of the current Sabres with Rasmus Dahlin and Tage Thompson, he is directly responsible for bringing in most of the lineup through savvy trades and a simple, but effective draft strategy of taking the best player available.

When Adams took over from Jason Botterill in spring of 2020, there was a shift internally when it came to drafting and the amateur scouting department thrived under his new leadership. In that first draft, Adams did not have much to work with on a quick turnaround taking over as general manager, but he still managed to hit on the first two of five selections that year with Jack Quinn at No. 8 and then a second-round steal in JJ Peterka at No. 34.

Quinn has been a piece of frustration for many, but he has still been an effective forward in the middle-six for the Sabres this season and is on pace for 50 points.

Then Peterka finished second in scoring for the club last year, setting the table for one of Adams’ best trades in his tenure, acquiring both defenseman Michael Kesselring and pleasant surprise Josh Doan who has swung the trade in favor of Buffalo as the winners.

The following season, Adams officially set the tone as general manager with Buffalo bottoming out a final time and moving on from key pieces of the tank era, Jack Eichel, Sam Reinhart and Rasmus Ristolainen.

As the worst team in the league, Buffalo earned the top selection for an underwhelming draft class in 2021, but Adams kept it simple and made the defense the focal point of his roster by selecting Owen Power at No. 1.

It can be debated whether or not Power has been worthy of a top selection, but with Dahlin ahead of him in the lineup it is difficult to truly judge his career from a pure numbers perspective. However, there is no doubt that Power has solidified the notion Buffalo has one of the best Top 4 defensive groups in the NHL.

In trading Ristolainen, the Sabres were somehow able to get back from the Flyers a first-round pick which became Isak Rosen, a depth defenseman in Robert Hagg and a second-round pick two years later that became Anton Wahlberg who is a nice piece in the current prospect cupboard.

Then became the debatable trades of Reinhart and Eichel, but with the state of the Sabres in 2021 they were inevitable and with their talent it is no surprise they both went on to have success in Florida and Vegas, respectively.

Sending Reinhart to division foe Florida is likely the one to look more like a loss as the Panthers captured back-to-back Stanley Cups with the former Buffalo No. 2 pick as a key piece. However, Adams was able to pull away from Florida the then highly touted Devon Levi for a future in goaltending and managed a first-round pick the following season that ended up being Jiri Kulich who still could be a solid piece in Buffalo’s future success.

Even if both of those players do not work out for Buffalo, in a trade that likely had to happen he was able to turn around and acquire two pieces that have good value today.

The trade of former captain Jack Eichel is when the true tone shift in the organization came, removing a piece that was not capable of leading the Sabres to success and bringing in guys that showed they wanted to be in Buffalo with Baldwinsville native Alex Tuch being the focal point of the move.

Buffalo received quite the haul for Eichel, landing Tuch who is on pace to eclipse the 30 goal mark for a third time with the Sabres. Then Swiss Army knife forward Peyton Krebs who is currently having a career year while playing in every role and eventual first-round pick Noah Ostlund who is proving himself as a capable rookie in a two-way role on the third line on pace for 31 points.

The Sabres also used a second-round pick from the Eichel trade to bring in Jordan Greenway.

Both of those trades are dimmed with the immediate success of Eichel and Reinhart winning Stanley Cups, but in the near future each move could look more like the Ryan O’Reilly trade that brought in Thompson who will go down as one of the best players in franchise history.

Instead of getting antsy and firing Adams for not finding quick success, the Sabres allowed him to settle in and use five full drafts to build one of the best prospect pools in the NHL and bolster an already talented NHL lineup.

In 2022, the Sabres had three first round picks and each one is proving effective, beginning with No. 9 pick Matthew Savoie who was eventually flipped for center Ryan McLeod who is fourth on the team in scoring with 44 points in 62 games this year. Ostlund taken at No. 16 has already proven a strong 200-foot player as a rookie, earning the trust of Head Coach Lindy Ruff. Then at No. 28, Kulich, who is out for the season due to a blood clot, is expected to be a bright part of the offense in the future with his lethal shot.

The next two years, Buffalo stepped away from the basement of the league and flirted with the playoffs. Adams used restraint not to push too early for the playoffs at the expense of much needed assets and kept first-round picks that turned into Zach Benson in 2023 and Konsta Helenius in 2024.

In both drafts, Adams and the Sabres happily let two players fall into their laps who should have easily been top 10 picks with Benson at No. 13 and Helenius at No. 14.

Benson brings a snarl to his game that a young Brad Marchand did and has the same offensive upside that is just waiting to be used in more ice time as he matures. Then Helenius has quickly become the top prospect for the team with an impressive AHL All-Star season and showed at just 19 he can already score at the NHL level with 4 points in his first three games with the Sabres.

With his final first-round pick in 2025, Adams added another piece to the prospect pool taking best available Radim Mrtka who is an attractive asset as a domineering 6-foot-6 right-handed defenseman who was almost traded for Colton Parayko on Wednesday night.

Also between the years of drafting Benson and Helenius, Adams traded Casey Mittelstadt to the Avalanche for Bowen Byram, solidifying Buffalo as one of the best defensive corps in the league with Dahlin, Power and Samuelsson.

The last bit of culture cleaning came a year ago when Buffalo traded former No. 7 pick Dylan Cozens to Ottawa for Josh Norris. With Cozens needing a new opportunity and Norris being the equal talent, each side has been able to walk away happy with playoff rosters.

The biggest complaint of the Adams-era is the handling of goaltender Linus Ullmark. The Sabres have long struggled to find its next great goalie since Ryan Miller and Ullmark was never believed to reach those heights, but the still effective goaltender left the Sabres as a free agent under Adams and went on to win the Vezina Trophy.

That wrong has been righted this offseason with the signing of Alex Lyon, another up year by Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen and claiming Colten Ellis off waivers from St. Louis. The trio has been more than good for the Sabres between the pipes, giving them a level of stability much needed in the years Buffalo just missed the playoffs.

Those major moves brought the Sabres to this year where they were once again projected by the analytics community to be a lock for the playoffs, but expected by the sports world to fall short of those goals.

The Adams’ constructed roster since December has been one of the best teams in the entire league and with just 20 games left on the schedule the Sabres have no sign of slowing down.

Coming into Friday’s deadline it was expected for Kekalainen to make his mark on the roster, officially attaching his name to the success that he already deserves.

After Blues defenseman Colton Parayko nixed a trade to come to Buffalo, Kekalainen pivoted to bring more size and physicality to a playoff-bound roster by acquiring 6-foot-6 left-handed defenseman Logan Stanley and 6-foot-2 right-handed defenseman Luke Schenn from Winnipeg in exchange for Rosen, Jacob Bryson and a future second-round pick.

Analytically, Buffalo likely is the loser of that trade, but for a team heading to the playoffs adding size and strength in strictly a depth role never hurts, especially when giving up pieces there was no room for anyways.

The real deal of the day was bringing in fourth-line center Sam Carrick from the Rangers for a pair of later picks. He is a great defensive forward that wins a lot of faceoffs, playing a role similar to Jay Beagle who helped the Capitals hoist the Cup in 2018.

While those trades cleared in the early morning on Friday, Buffalo snuck under the 3 p.m. deadline another nifty trade to bring 2014 Stanley Cup champion Tanner Pearson over from Winnipeg for a seventh-round pick.

After several years of wondering if Buffalo could finally put it all together, it is finally safe to say this team is the real deal. There is a lot of credit to go around from Adams to Kekalainen to Ruff to the players, but what’s more impressive is the fans that have stuck around through the misery. For those fans, they definitely deserve to watch the team that takes the ice this season and it is set up to be the first of several years of success.