Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff could be looking to shake up his coaching staff after inheriting his assistants from former head coach Don Granato. The Buffalo Sabres, at their season-ending press availability earlier this month, were all singing from the same hymn book, about having to be better and avoiding things like the catastrophic 13-game losing skid that wrecked their season. The questions that will be utmost in the minds of a frustrated fan base will be what kind of changes, and in the end, will those changes have the desired effect of ending the club’s 14-year playoff drought. The future of Kevyn Adams is up in the air, but the Sabres GM indicated in a radio interview that head coach Lindy Ruff will be back.
“Lindy will be back. I just think that he has so much experience,” Adams said on WGR 550 Radio before the end of the season. “I think it takes time for coaches just to learn personalities and what makes players tick and which buttons to push, and he’s in a good spot there with our group. I know Lindy is frustrated; he’ll have his own self-evaluation on what he thinks could have been done better, and we’ll be having a lot of those conversations.”
While Ruff’s return is certain, the same cannot be said for the coaching staff that he mostly inherited from former bench boss Don Granato. The one change was the promotion of Seth Appert to an NHL assistant, a move widely believed to be setting up the former Rochester Americans head coach to be Ruff’s heir apparent, but nothing is set in stone based on the club’s regression.
Matt Ellis has been on the coaching staff since the dismissal of Ralph Krueger in 2021, as has assistant coach Marty Wilford, and Mike Bales has been the goaltending coach since 2019. There was some chatter of former Sabre Mike Peca coming back to the organization after the Rangers fired head coach Peter Laviolette and ex-Sabres bench boss Phil Housley, but New York did not dismiss Peca, who worked with Appert in Rochester.
With Ruff holding more sway in the organization and owner Terry Pegula looking to make changes to get Buffalo to the next level, there will likely be some shakeup of the club’s coaching staff before next season.
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