The Buffalo Sabres have been busy making changes this week, moving out forwards Taylor Hall, Curtis Lazar, and defenseman Brandon Montour prior to the NHL Trade Deadline and on Wednesday announcing the hiring of Jason Karmanos as the club’s Associate General Manager.
Karmanos, 46, is the son of former Carolina Hurricanes owner Peter Karmanos and has known Sabres GM Kevyn Adams since playing together for Team USA in the 1994 World Junior Championships. Both were a part of the Hurricanes 2006 Stanley Cup winning squad, with Adams as an associate captain and Karmanos as the club’s assistant GM under Jim Rutherford.
Both Rutherford and Karmanos were dismissed by the Canes and moved on to Pittsburgh, where they won consecutive Cup Championships with the Penguins in 2016 and 2017, but Karmanos was dismissed in a managerial shakeup last October prior to Rutherford resigning for personal reasons in January.
According to the club’s press release, Karmanos will serve as the general manager of the AHL’s Rochester Americans and will oversee the Sabres scouting, player development and analytics departments. This season Adams had no assistants, which was in contrast to last year when former GM Jason Botterill had experienced assistants in Randy Sexton and Steve Greeley.
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The club also announced on Wednesday that team captain Jack Eichel has been shut down for the remainder of the season due to a herniated disc in his neck. The 24-year-old Eichel was hampered by injuries since the beginning of training camp and struggled during the regular season, with 18 points (2 goals, 16 assists) in 21 games.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman indicated that the Sabres star center will undergo surgery to address the injury and that the expectation is that Eichel will be ready for training camp in September, but there continues to be speculation about his future in Buffalo with a club bound for another last-place finish and a playoff drought that has lasted a decade.
