Change at the NHL level can bring with it an AHL shake-up as well.

That upheaval for the Buffalo Sabres came Dec. 15 when they fired general manager Kevyn Adams and replaced him with senior advisor Jarmo Kekäläinen. The Sabres have gone on a roll this month with a nine-game winning streak that began six days before Kekäläinen’s promotion.

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For the Rochester Americans, Buffalo’s long-time AHL affiliate, those ripple effects reached them six days later. That is when Kekäläinen dismissed associate general manager Jason Karmanos. Rochester had figured heavily into the file that Karmanos held for parts of six seasons in the Buffalo organization, including doubling as Rochester’s general manager.

A day after dismissing Karmanos, the Sabres named Marc Bergevin their new associate general manager and Josh Flynn as assistant general manager. Bergevin, the long-time general manager of the Montreal Canadiens, had been with the Los Angeles Kings while Flynn came over from the Columbus Blue Jackets, where he had worked for Kekäläinen earlier.

“I think it’s a great fit for us,” Kekäläinen told the Buffalo media last week.

So who is running the Amerks now?

“We’ll get to that in short order here,” Kekäläinen continued. “We've already talked amongst the staff that everybody's going to have a role. Everybody's going to have an important role and the responsibilities are going to be spread [around]. We're going to be working on this together as a team just like the guys on the ice, and sometimes you're going to have to grind.”

As the Amerks approach this season’s halfway point, they are just three points out of the North Division lead with a 16-10-3-1 record.

But that kind of front-office maneuvering can happen even when the AHL affiliate has largely been successful on both the development and winning fronts. Since coming to the Buffalo front office in April 2021, Karmanos had overseen the Amerks reaching the Calder Cup Playoffs four consecutive seasons. The high mark came in 2023 when the team reached the Eastern Conference Finals.

That type of success had put life back into an AHL operation that had needed it badly. When Karmanos arrived, the Amerks had not won a Calder Cup Playoff series since 2005. An affiliation that had been as solid as any in the AHL and dated back to 1979, the Amerks had won three Calder Cup championships as a Sabres affiliate. But that relationship began to unravel. The Florida Panthers came aboard as a dual affiliate for the Amerks in 2005. Three years later, the Sabres and Amerks split entirely. Amerks legend and AHL Hall of Fame member Jody Gage was replaced as Rochester’s general manager. It was not until 2011, when Sabres owner Terry Pegula purchased the Amerks, that one of the AHL’s most iconic affiliations was revived.

Of course, the return of the Buffalo-Rochester union came just as the Sabres had gone into a downfall that has seen them miss the Stanley Cup Playoffs 14 consecutive times. And soon enough, the Amerks felt the effects of a struggling NHL parent team and front-office changes. The Amerks went through four head coaches in the first six seasons of the revived affiliation and missed the postseason three times.

Chris Taylor, another iconic Amerk, arrived in 2017 as Rochester’s latest head coach and brought some stability back to the operation. But Adams taking over as Buffalo’s general manager in June 2020 meant more change. Taylor was let go two months later.

Buffalo also went public with a mandate that player development would take a much more significant role in Rochester early in the Adams era. That effort started with an Amerks head-coaching change. Seth Appert’s first spin as a pro head coach following a lengthy NCAA career largely went well both developmentally and in the win-loss column. Michael Leone took over in 2024 when Appert was promoted to the Buffalo coaching staff and quickly has become a well-regarded head coach in AHL circles. The Amerks pushed the regular-season champion Laval Rocket to the deciding game of the North Division Finals last May before finally falling.

Developmentally, first-round selections Jiří Kulich, Noah Ostlund, and Jack Quinn all have gone through Rochester and on to Buffalo. Peyton Krebs, a first-round pick by the Vegas Golden Knights who came to the Sabres in a Nov. 2021 deal, had a stint in Rochester before moving on to the Sabres. Forward J.J. Peterka made the Rochester-to-Buffalo jump as well before eventually being traded to the Utah Mammoth last summer. Isak Rosén, a 2021 first-rounder, is still trying to become a Buffalo regular after considerable success in Rochester.  Defenseman Mattias Samuelsson is in Buffalo after apprenticing with Rochester. So is goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. They have also had some unheralded hits like forward Tyson Kozak, a 2021 seventh-round pick who has found a full-time role in Buffalo. After four pro seasons in the Columbus organization that yielded just 14 NHL appearances for forward Josh Dunne, one season in Rochester set him up to stick with the Sabres this season.

Development and winning went together in that model. Buffalo got to have its top prospects go through the demands of playoff hockey and some lengthy runs.

That’s the Buffalo vantage point. For Rochester fans, winning matters. Kekäläinen is inheriting a well-run program in Rochester and knows the ins and outs that come with overseeing an AHL affiliate. He took over as the Columbus general manager during the 2012-13 season and stayed in that role until Feb. 2024. In that span, his AHL affiliates reached the Calder Cup Playoffs in four of a possible nine seasons (the AHL did not stage a postseason twice in that span due to the pandemic). He brought the affiliation closer to home in 2015 when Blue Jackets prospects went to Cleveland and won the Calder Cup in that first year there.

He and his front office also should have the resources to keep the Amerks developing prospects and winning games. Konsta Helenius, Ryan Johnson, Topias Leinonen, Devon Levi, and Anton Wahlberg are among the key prospects that the Sabres need to develop successfully in Rochester.

“[Pegula has] given me full autonomy to run the hockey department,” Kekäläinen said in his introductory press conference Dec. 16. “We can spend to the cap. We can have every resource available for us that we need to make this team better, make it more attractive for the guys to stay or attract free agents.

“So, that's all I can ask for as a general manager.”

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