In his first NHL Draft as a general manager, Kevyn Adams is pretty pleased with the outcome for the Buffalo Sabres.
With the eighth overall selection in Tuesday night's first round of the 2020 draft, Adams opted to go for some scoring on the wing with his pick of Jack Quinn from the Ottawa 67's in the Ontario Hockey League.
When Buffalo came up on the board with the eighth pick, Adams had a high-caliber players fall to him in Saginaw Spirit forward Cole Perfetti and teammate of Quinn with the 67's, forward Marco Rossi. While both players may have been ranked higher than Quinn in other people's rankings, Adams went with the best player available approach with the pick and felt that Quinn was the best player there.
"We were looking for, what we thought, was going to be the best player projecting moving forward," Adams said Tuesday night after the first round of the draft. "To me, it wasn't so much about center, wing, [defense] or goalie, it was, 'OK, at this spot when we're going to be picking, who do we project to be the best player?' That's the way we felt."
The 19-year-old Quinn came off a stellar season in the OHL last season, where he finished second in the league with 52 goals, while also racking up 37 assists for 89 points in 62 games. He became just the fourth player since the 2009-10 season in the OHL to score 50 or more goals in their draft year, while also improving 40 goals from his total in the 2018-19 season.
Adams is pleased with what Quinn brings to the table, and it's more than just his scoring prowess.
"He scores a lot of different ways, and his puck possession numbers - he has the puck a lot," Adams said. "Sitting and talking, just having that feel and asking questions and trying to gauge the determination; as you guys all know, it's great to have skill and great to have speed, but it's tough to play in this league. You have to have a lot of heart and determination, and we all felt confident after talking to him that we have a good one.
"We interviewed him and asked a lot of questions, and I had some really interesting answers to the questions that I personally asked him... He has a, what I would say, is a really good self-awareness of who he is as a player, and he also has a determination that I see him getting better and better. You see that trajectory and arc, and we're going to be excited to have our player development guys now jump in and start doing work with him. He's got a big ceiling."
When interviewing Quinn and getting to know him on and off the ice, what Adams and his staff saw were the traits and qualities that made him "a Sabre."
"I just felt like the work that our staff did preparing was really important to understand his game. Not just the goal scoring. He scored a lot of different ways; 5-on-5, on the power play, but just his overall game just kept showing through when we did the work on him," Adams said. "[He was] used in all situations, you see the ability for him to keep getting better, his athleticism is high. The metrics that we look at when we're scouting he met and then some, so this was a player that the more work we did, the more excited we got. We feel fortunate to get him."
Before Tuesday's first round of the draft, Adams was asked about whether or not the eighth pick was available for the taking. While he said he was open to any possibility to make the team better now, he did say that he did not want to put the team in a bad spot for the long-term outlook.
Adams said that while there were talks going on between the general managers, he decided to keep the pick and do what was best for the team.
"I was really open in this process to figuring out what we thought was the best strategic move for our organization, and certainly when you have this type of a decision, you're thinking, 'what is best for us and our team right now, and what is best for us in the future,'" Adams explained. "I did have many different conversations leading up to today with teams around me to frame what potential deals could look like. Then the way those type of things work is you kind of solidify what each side would be willing to do, and then it's seeing how the draft goes and if the players are there, you maybe do it or don't. Those were all conversations that we had. You just don't have much time. You can't just start having those conversations when you're on the clock. That's how the last four or five days have gone."
You can listen to the entire conference call below:
