Sabres add physicality and experience on first day of free agency

Buffalo Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams entered the offseason with a focus on adding physicality, competition and veteran leadership to round out the Sabres’ roster.

The Sabres made additions in that regard Monday, adding forwards Jason Zucker, Sam Lafferty and Nicolas Aube-Kubel and defenseman Dennis Gilbert to open free agency after acquiring physical winger Beck Malenstyn from Washington on Saturday.

“We had goals coming into this offseason that we were trying to accomplish, and I think we’re a much better team today than we were a few days ago,” Adams said.

“When you look back at the offseason, what we were looking to accomplish was become tougher to play against, bring more physicality, more identity to that bottom six. We wanted to be a team that wears others down, that can be relentless in the check and tough, and we want to be a more responsible team defensively.”

Malenstyn (241), Lafferty (192) and Aube-Kubel (159) each would have led Sabres forwards in hits last season, which Adams said will bring that physical element to the team’s game.

Gilbert, who has 12 fights in 82 career NHL games, also fit the type of player the team was looking to sign early in free agency.

“He knows what he has to do to play in this league,” Adams said. “He’s a big, strong kid who’s very, very competitive and continues to work on his game to get better. He’s not afraid to fight, he’s done it many times. He’s very competitive, so, again, he’s another guy that brings size and physicality. We don’t have a lot of that on the back end.”

Zucker, who has 370 points (196+174) in 697 career regular-season games and 18 points (9+9) in 52 playoff games, will bring versatility and experience to a young and talented Sabres team that ranked third in the league in goals per game during the 2022-23 season.

Adams also believes these additions will give coach Lindy Ruff and his staff the ability to mix and match lines to create winning combinations.

“When I look at our group now, we’ve got a lot of talent, we’ve got a lot of talent,” he said. “I think we’ve proven in this league over the last couple of years that we’ve got guys that can be as talented as anybody and make plays. We had to round out the group, we had to get tougher, we just had to have a little bit more presence to go after teams and play them over and over and become that tougher team to play against. Talent is exciting and great, but we just had to improve the mix a little bit and that’s why we were so focused on that.”