There are a lot of Sabres fans who if you told them right after Mattias Samuelsson was drafted in the second round of the 2018 NHL Draft that he would be a top-pairing defenseman, they’d probably ask what in the world happened to make it so. Sometimes first impressions are the worst ones.
At 22 years old, Samuelsson checks in at No. 8 in the Top 25 Under 25 and the growth he’s made since his draft season out of the USNTDP then on to Western Michigan to Rochester and now Buffalo is immense. The worries back then were about how a player of his size would be able to keep up at the next level.