Crowe looking forward to new role as Sabres Director of Scouting

When Kevyn Adams took on the role of general manager of the Buffalo Sabres last week, he emphasized the need for innovation and collaboration. A pair of personnel moves on Friday will help shape the future of the hockey department and hopefully move the organization closer to the goal of becoming a Stanley Cup champion.

Adams announced Friday that pro scout Jeremiah Crowe has been promoted to Director of Scouting and current Director of Analytics Jason Nightingale will add the duties of Assistant Director of Scouting to his role.

"As we build our scouting department, [we want to] sync up our scouting and analytics to become seamless and work together," Adams said. "There's a process that we want to go through in our scouting - both from the amateur and the professional side - of how we measure players, where we see value, what certain traits are we measuring, and at what level. That, from the analytics and the scouting, will be combined into how we ultimately move forward."

Crowe, 34, has been with the team for the past three seasons as a pro scout and will oversee both the team's amateur and pro scouts and shape the department in new and innovative ways.

"This is a unique opportunity knowing what's been laid out by Kevyn's vision," he said. "We've talked about it at length obviously between us, but it's been put out there, as you know, with the buzzwords being analytics, video, and scouting.

"In most hockey circles, they're brought up just like that: as separate entities or separate departments. But I think there's an opportunity to create a more solid marriage as it pertains to your approach when it comes to evaluating players at all levels. There's an enormous opportunity with that and I think that's where the game's heading."

Adams originally hired Crowe in 2014 to be on the inital staff of LECOM Harborcenter's Academy of Hockey and he's looking forward to seeing how Crowe will grow in this new role.

"He's one of these types of people who's willing to think differently. He's progressive and the process that he's put together for measuring players and how he thinks the game is extremely high end," Adams said. "I'm excited that he's going to bring that to our organization."

Crowe's ties to the Sabres and Western New York stretch back even further than the past three years. He grew up a Sabres fan in Kenmore and Grand Island, and his early love for the game was shaped by the days of the "Hardest Working Team In Hockey," which blended skilled and grit.

"Most of my memories of hockey early on and the passion that burns inside me was all driven out of following the Sabres and this organization," he said. "A lot of the good times coming up and all the ups and downs and emotions that are all tied with it helped shape my feelings around the game and my desire to pursue a career in it."

He went on to play four years at Clarkson University and in that time, his scouting career began with a professional scouting internship with the Sabres in 2008. Following his graduation, he received a phone call from Nick Carriere, who was coaching Buffalo State's Division-III hockey team.

Carriere, the son of Sabres alumnus Larry Carriere, was looking for an assistant coach and had Crowe in mind based on previous interactions dating back to when he tried to recruit Crowe to play for him.

Crowe would spend three seasons at Buff State on Carriere's staff.

"Everything we did, he went really hard at - at scouting, developing our defensive corps and helping our coaching staff put everything together," Carriere said. "He was a good spark of energy and a different perspective that helped a lot of our student-athletes and helped our program grow."

What has impressed Carriere about Crowe is his serious approach to his work and his drive.

"He's an extremely hard worker. That's what makes a good scout," Carriere said. "There isn't any magic pill you can take that can make your eye really good at evaluating talent. It's working and watching a lot of video, watching a lot of games, talking to coaches, talking to people involved with organizations to get as much information as possible. He was always a guy that was very detail orientated, was organized and just put a lot of the work in."

After stints with the Dubuque Fighting Saints and the Academy of Hockey, he spent two seasons with USA Hockey's National Team Development Program, where he served as assistant director of player personnel in 2015-16 before being promoted to director of player personnel for the 2016-17 season.

Seventeen players that Crowe helped recruit and develop at the USNTDP were selected in the 2019 NHL Draft, a record number for the program. Eight players were drafted in the first round.

"He's kind of the one who picked out our team and watched us develop," John Beecher, who was drafted 30th overall by the Boston Bruins in 2019 said at last year's NHL Scouting Combine. "He obviously did a wonderful job at picking our team. … Props to him. He's an unbelievable scout and a great guy."

Crowe then joined the Sabres as a pro scout, giving him experience watching players at a different stage of their development. He feels that the culmination of these experiences has helped him prepare for this new role.

As the Sabres begin to reshape the hockey department, Adams is confident in Crowe's leadership abilities.

"He's innovative. He's very collaborative. He's very bright. He's very determined and he's also one of these people that's willing to listen and learn," Adams said. "There's no ego. He just wants to be great and the team to be great and the organization to be great. When you surround yourself with talented people like that who are all in it for the right reasons, that's how you build something special.

"It's an exciting day for our organization and it's a step in the direction that we're headed philosophically, of how we're moving forward doing things."

Nightingale, 42, served as the Sabres director of analytics in 2018-19 and 2019-20 after spending the previous five seasons with the team's analytics department. When his playing career with Lake Superior State University and Des Moines of the USHL ended, he went on to earn a joint Ph.D. in Mathematics and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2013.

"We're going to work side by side," Crowe said. "His knowledge is incredible.

"When you have resources out watching games and evaluating players, there's a lot of experience that goes behind that and a lot of value and a lot of context in terms of how games are going that are relevant in evaluating the individual player. But when you marry it with the statistics, you're uncovering things, and things are lining up or they're not so you can dissect them further.

"That's where you connect it with video - where you're out on the road, you're watching games, but now you have an opportunity to dissect something or watch something, one or two things you're looking for on video that allow for the whole picture to come into focus."

"It makes all the sense in the world. It's a little bit late I think int terms of being implemented in all of hockey and I'm excited to have it all under one umbrella and embraced by everyone in the scouting department.

Knowing how important it is to evaluate talent both at the amateur levels and in the pros, Adams is looking forward to how Nightingale's work will directly help the scouts at both the amateur and pro levels.

"He fits very well into the scouting department based on the work he's been doing over the last number of years he's been in the organization and the amount of video he's watched and the measuring of players. Everything he's been doing lines up well into our scouting department," Adams said.

"It's a natural fit. They'll work very well together. They'll challenge each other to be better and that's ultimately how we're going to have success."