30-year-old forward was part of the Jack Eichel deal in 2021.
Buffalo Sabres GM Jarmo Kekalainen held court at Highmark Stadium on Wednesday, following the trade of defenseman Bowen Byram and Jordan Greenway to Chicago, and provided details on the deal, and updates on talks with pending unrestricted free agents Alex Tuch, Beck Malenstyn, and restricted free agent Zach Benson.
What were the reasons for the trade with the Blackhawks?
You get into these situations that you've seen around the league, now that players have the right to becoming a UFA.... In this case, a year from now, and like Bowen Byram a lot, wanted to re-sign, and that wasn't going to happen, so we had to make a decision. (We had) a couple deals in front of us, so we made the trade (with Chicago), now we have some draft capital that we can use to improve our team, whether it's in the near future through a trade or by making a pick, but to weigh all those options until the draft time.
You made an offer to Byram and he turned it down?
He didn't want to negotiate, he wasn't going to sign with us. So he didn't you leave us an option to do anything else with this.
How far back were the trade talks?
We tried to Bo to stay, and that was the first priority....I was working on that during the whole year, because I thought his role was big on the team. He played 23 minutes, including power play time. The difference between Rasmus Dahlin, who had the most ice time on the team, but he wanted to get a chance to be a #1 defenseman, I respect that. He has a year left before he gets to free agency. That's where the players have a lot of power, and now you see that sometimes, even two years left in the contract, where they sort of make a power move and make it well known that they're not signing an extension, and the more turn that you have left, the better value you can get for a player. In this case, we have one more year left before his free agency, and we feel we got very good value.
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Did you allow Byram’s agent Darren Ferris to speak to other clubs?
Yeah, that always comes with the territory that they want to know if they'd get (the player) re-signed. If that didn't happen, they would have been in the same situation that we were, so that would have affected the trade. Every team that we talked basically wanted to know if he was going to re-sign. I'll leave that to Chicago to talk about.
Are you open to trading the #4 pick?
I've told all the teams that have inquired about the #4 pick, that we're just going to listen for now, take notes, and see what they think is the value of #4. We value that very highly ourselves. We know there's a great prospect available there, that's going to be two, three years away, or maybe even more, before they can make an impact on our team. We want to keep getting better as a team. We had an exciting year, but still disappointing at the end, but we'll gather that information around the league and see what the values, and if we don't think it's as much as making the pick, then we'll make the pick.
Is there still a chance to reach an agreement with Alex Tuch?
I don't think at this point that we've come to any point in our talks that would indicate he will sign with us. I think he's moving on and getting into free agency, and now there are options, whether it's a sign-and-trade....We used him as a rental for our own team. We made it clear to him that we wanted to sign him.
There's risk involved. If you want to go max term of eight years. Then there's the money, and we're tight on cap this summer because of the Skinner buyout counting $6.5 (million) against the cap this year, that will (be) a lot better situation a year from now, but AAV counts all eight years, and so that's something that we needed to consider. If we sign him to a certain number, does this now mean that we have to take two or three, maybe four players off our roster to make it work cap wise, and so that was a balancing act with our take on things.
How will you replace Byram?
That's something that we're working on. It's definitely a focus right now. We have the fourth pick, we have 20th pick, so we have a lot of ammunition to explore. So there's another trade that we can make. Defensemen are not easy to fine, but we've got some productive talks, and we'll see where that goes.
How are negotiations going with Benson?
We've had great productive talks with him, so we're very optimistic that we'll get something done soon.
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