It’s wild to look at the Buffalo Sabres front office heading into the last offseason to where it is now in year two under Kevyn Adams. Last year, the hockey operations department was gutted under Terry Pegula’s efficiency model of running his hockey club.

Adams had no experience around him, a limited scouting staff, and those that were around him lacked a lot of experience in the roles they were asked to fill. Not to mention, the last offseason was run mostly by former head coach Ralph Krueger.

Coming back to the present day, the front office has experience and well-respected names as the key people in the Sabres hockey operations department. Jason Karmanos was the first shoe to drop a few months ago when he was brought on as the associate general manager. Then Adams solidified his team even further with the hire of Sam Ventura as vice president of hockey strategy and research.

Data Driven Analysis

When Adams was hired as the new general manager a little over a year ago he spoke a lot about the importance of analytics in making decisions. During his introductory media availabilities, he talked about the importance of analytics and having information at his disposal.

We’ve heard this all before from a handful of coaches and general managers before Adams took over. It was an I’ll believe it when I see it type thing for me. We saw some early signs that he was sticking to his word with his first front office moves in June of last year. Jason Nightingale added assistant director of amateur scouting to his current job title of director of analytics. Jeremiah Crowe was also elevated to the director of scouting in that scouting staff shakeup.

Adams told Sabres.com that, “as we build out scouting department, we want to sync up our scouting and analytics to become seamless and work together.” This was promising and then came the offseason of a few head-scratching moves that went against the numbers, such as signing Cody Eakin to a two-year deal.

Well, it turns out after some evaluation of his analytics department, Adams wanted to make some changes. He has had a desire to bolster that department and was finally given the green light to do so recently.

Bringing in Karmanos was the first step. He spent his career in the Carolina Hurricanes and Pittsburgh Penguins organization building up their analytics department. When he was brought on board, one of his job duties was to oversee the analytics department.

Sam Ventura

The real sign of Adams following through on his word came yesterday with the hiring of Ventura. He’s one of the most well-respected analytics people in the league. Bringing him on is a sign that they’re going to start making data-driven decisions. Ventura will be one of the key players in making decisions on the roster and drafting process moving forward.

I spent the last 24 hours talking to a few people in the analytics community and they all had great things to say about Ventura. The sentiment was that the Sabres hired one of the smartest front office people in the league and good things could be on the horizon for the Sabres with his input.

Ventura has a PhD from in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. If you remember one of the early analytics websites War On Ice, he was one of the founders of that site with Andrew Thomas and Alexandra Mandrycky. He has been with the Penguins organization since 2015 and has accumulated two Stanley Cup rings in that front office. The 33-year-old. Ventura began to rise up the ranks in the Penguins front office, which included a promotion to director of hockey operations and hockey research under Jim Rutherford.

However, with the front office changes in Pittsburgh, he was free to seek another opportunity elsewhere.

Bringing him in now at a moment for the franchise is perfect timing by Adams. We believe that this organization is heading into a rebuild of sorts. They have big decisions to make on two players, in particular, Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart.

Having as many people in the building that can contribute thoughtful analysis and adding information to facilitate smart decisions is a surefire way to decrease your odds of making a mistake. It’s encouraging to see that Adams is following through on his word from when he was hired last year. It should also give you some belief that Adams has had a plan all along and after some organizational evaluation; he’s executing his plan.

Now, we wait and see if it works.

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