Adams, Granato address Sabres leadership roles

The Buffalo Sabres will start training camp without a captain.
General manager Kevyn Adams announced Thursday morning that center Jack Eichel is no longer the captain of the team and that they will let the players on the roster learn and grow together before a new captain is named.

"I spoke to Jack two days ago. I spoke to the team yesterday and addressed this. Jack Eichel is no longer the captain of the Buffalo Sabres," Adams said. "From our perspective and my perspective, I feel the captain is the heartbeat of your team. And we're in a situation from where we were in the past and where we are now that we felt we needed to address that and make that decision."
Eichel, who has been unable to play since sustaining a neck injury on March 7, did not pass his physical on Wednesday and will be placed on injured reserve. He will continue his rehab as he and the team work toward a resolution.

"If there was an easy solution, we would have acted on it," Adams said. "So, we're going to have to continue to look at this on a daily basis. As of now, we are in a situation where we have a player that is resistant to what our experts are saying, and we are going to continue to trust what our medical doctors tell us, which is in the best interest of Jack as a human being and as a hockey player."
Adams cited Kyle Okposo, Zemgus Girgensons and Craig Anderson as veteran players who can step up in leadership roles, and Rasmus Dahlin, Dylan Cozens and Casey Mittelstadt as younger players who have made great strides both on and off the ice over the last year.
Much of the growth of those younger players came under the watch of Don Granato, who was named Buffalo's interim head coach on March 17 and was promoted to the role full-time this summer.
"These guys have qualities of taking initiatives and being determined," Granato said. "Those are really strong attributes that are signs of capacity to be leaders or become leaders - not afraid to take initiative and in the face of mishaps, determined. Get right back up and go right back at it.
"Those are really strong leadership point so I don't see any need to appoint anybody to that position. We're an evolving team and we have a lot of evolving players, but those components are very exciting to me."

The Sabres will take the ice for the first time during training camp Thursday morning at KeyBank Center. Their first preseason game is Tuesday in Columbus with the regular-season home opener slated for October 14 against Montreal.
"I wake up every day thinking about how do we get better today, how do we move this franchise forward, how do we make our fans proud, how do we earn the respect from [the media], from our fans, from the league. I don't live in the past," Adams said.
"I think you can learn from the past, but I'm not interested in living in the past, so for me, that's helpful. But what we will do is we will do things the right way, we will stick to our plan and we're not going to cave or back down because of pressure or because people are saying you have to do this.
"We will do what we believe is right and my job is to take all the information and do what we believe is right for this franchise and that's what we're going to do."