BUFFALO — The last time the Buffalo Sabres played a playoff game, Owen Power was eight years old. He had not yet taken hockey seriously, grown to 6-foot-5, or become the first overall pick in the 2021 NHL Draft—the defenseman analysts called the most complete offensive blueliner in his class.
He was a child in Ontario while Buffalo endured what is now the NHL’s longest active playoff drought.
Tonight, the Sabres can offer him eight years to help end it.
The collective bargaining agreement permits same-team extensions of up to eight years, but only before September 15, 2026. After tonight, the maximum falls to seven. For a team that has spent 15 years assembling pieces that seemed destined to fit eventually, one year of term is not an abstraction. It is one year of a defenseman’s prime that Buffalo can secure—or surrender to the open market when Power’s current contract expires.
The case the Sabres can make tonight is more concrete than it has been at any point during the drought. Rasmus Dahlin, who arrived as the first-overall pick in 2018, is signed long-term and playing at the level that made him a consensus top-five defenseman in the league. Tage Thompson, who scored 47 goals in 2024-25, is signed. Dylan Cozens, the center anchoring the franchise’s second line, is signed. JJ Peterka, whose shot and speed made him a 40-goal scorer last season, is signed. The Sabres have, in measurable terms, a core.
Power is the last significant piece.
He is 23. An eight-year deal signed tonight ties him to Buffalo through his age-31 season. The Sabres’ case is that by the time Power is 27 or 28, the team surrounding him will be one of the better ones in the Eastern Conference. His camp’s question is the same one all young franchise players ask when a team’s rebuild is visible but still incomplete: what if the timeline slips again?
Buffalo’s history makes that question impossible to fully suppress. The franchise had promising cores before. The Jack Eichel era produced draft picks and optimism and eventually a trade demand from the franchise player they built around. The years before Eichel produced draft picks and turnover. The front office that assembled the current group is not the same one that failed with Eichel, and Dahlin is a categorically different kind of cornerstone than anything the organization had in the previous decade. But the Sabres’ reputation for squandering moments of genuine promise does not disappear because the faces in the building have changed.
Power knows this. His camp is not operating on nostalgia for a team they want to believe in. They are operating on numbers and structure and what kind of deal reflects the actual risk of where this franchise is heading. Eight years is an enormous commitment for either side. For Power, it requires believing that the Sabres’ good pieces will translate into playoff rounds, which they have not yet done. For Adams, it requires structuring a number that acknowledges Power’s ceiling without overpaying for promises the team has not yet kept.
Sources close to the talks have described the two sides as engaged without giving any indication of how close they are. Power has not made public statements about wanting to leave. He has also not made public statements about wanting to stay. What exists is a deadline and a franchise that has spent fifteen years waiting for a night like this to matter.
Other players across the league navigated versions of this question earlier in this deadline period. Mason McTavish in Anaheim and Cole Caufield in Montreal faced the same framework: a franchise that has built something real, asking a young star to believe the last part of the bet. Each answer reflects how the next generation of NHL players thinks about the trade-off between term and market, between loyalty and leverage.
Power’s answer may arrive before midnight or not at all. The NHL’s collective bargaining agreement gives Adams until the clock runs out to make the case that eight years with this version of the Sabres is not a leap of faith but a calculated bet on a franchise that has finally assembled what it takes.
Fifteen years is a long time to wait. Tonight, for Buffalo, is about whether it’s long enough.
