Sabres select Rudolph, Morozov to close out busy week at NHL Draft

BUFFALO -- It had already been a busy week for the Buffalo Sabres, and on Friday it got a little busier.

Less than 12 hours before the start of the 2026 Upper Deck NHL Draft at KeyBank Center, the Sabres welcomed prospect Daxon Rudolph to their offices at the arena.

It was their first pre-draft interview with the defenseman, whom they hadn’t met with during the NHL Scouting Combine three weeks earlier because at the time, the Sabres were picking at No. 27 while Rudolph was projected to go in the top 10.

He ended up being the first defenseman off the board when the Sabres took him with the No. 4 pick they had acquired from the Chicago Blackhawks just three days earlier.

“I kind of realized it could be a possibility that I'd be selected,” said Rudolph, who was third among Western Hockey League defensemen with 78 points (28 goals, 50 assists) in 68 games with Prince Albert this season. “The defense in this draft is very elite and talented guys. I'm buddies with a lot of them, so to be selected it's a good feeling, and yeah, something I'll never forget.”

Though the front office staff only met Rudolph earlier in the day, it was merely a formality. What the Sabres scouting staff had seen from him through the season put him high on their list.

“His instincts are great,” Sabres general manager Jarmo Kekalainen said. “I think that’s the biggest thing that we like about him is it’s not just his physical ability, it’s his hockey IQ. His instincts are great and adds another really good defenseman to our future.”

Things got moving for the Sabres on Tuesday, when Kekalainen acquired the No. 4 pick, a second-round pick (No. 45) and 25-year-old defenseman Louis Crevier from the Chicago Blackhawks for defenseman Bowen Byram.

Less than 24 hours later, he traded forward Alex Tuch to the Washington Capitals for a 2027 third-round pick and pending unrestricted free agent forward David Kampf, sending out Tuch in a sign-and-trade deal after the two sides were not able to find common ground on a new contract.

On Friday afternoon, Kekalainen added defenseman Olen Zellweger to his roster in a trade from the Anaheim Ducks for forward prospect Anton Wahlberg and the second-round pick the Sabres received from Chicago.

With just hours to go until the draft began, Kekalainen was still open for business. He had already moved up from No. 27 to No. 20 when he traded defenseman Michael Kesselring to the San Jose Sharks on June 17, with the two teams swapping their first-round draft positions.

Kekalainen said he let all the other NHL teams know that he’d be open to moving either of the two first-round picks he held, but none of the offers were “attractive enough” to part with them.

“I think we thought this morning that it looked like we were picking at four and then we explored a lot of different ideas of maybe moving up from 20 to the teens to make sure that we got one of the guys that we had high on our list,” Kekalainen said. “We ended up getting one at 20. And if all of them were gone, we were exploring the options of going from 20 to 24, 25, maybe move back a little bit.”

They held tight at No. 20 instead of moving down because Ilia Morozov was still available there. The top center at Miami University (Ohio) had 20 points (eight goals, 12 assists) after beginning the season as the second-youngest player in NCAA men’s hockey.

“I think he’s a good two-way forward,” Kekalainen said. “It’s pretty hard to score a lot in college at the age of 17. … He got off to a really hot start in college hockey then he cooled off a little bit. But I got to talk to the head coach there and he couldn’t stop talking about the character of Ilia Morozov. It’s a pretty impressive story that he come from Russia and hardly spoke any English and now he’s an A student. Works on his game. They have to kick him out of the rink and gym before he leaves. We’re watching the testing, it’s pretty impressive. The results are there for the work that he’s done so far and he’s just getting started. We’re really, really excited about him too.”