Rochester coach Seth Appert, left, and Don Granato, right, chat behind the bench during the first period at KeyBank Center, Thursday, March 18, 2021.
Derek Gee
Across his first two weeks as interim coach of the Buffalo Sabres, Don Granato held extensive individual and team meetings to install the various changes he made to the team’s struggling 5-on-5 game.
The conversation with his colleague in Rochester did not have to be as long.
Many of the subtleties we’re seeing from the Sabres under Granato were used by Rochester Americans coach Seth Appert during his time with the USA Hockey National Team Development Program. That’s not a coincidence.
Granato was head coach at NTDP from 2011-16, and his longtime assistant there, Nick Fohr, worked alongside Appert at the program from 2017-20. Appert and Fohr implemented many of the same concepts Granato used to coach various star players that came through the facility at Plymouth, Mich., including Sabres captain Jack Eichel and Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews.
This allowed Appert to quickly make changes in Rochester to have the Amerks’ system more closely resemble that being used by Granato in Buffalo.
“Well, the interesting component there is Seth runs a lot of what I run anyways by default,” said Granato, who left NTDP for the University of Wisconsin ahead of the 2016-17 season. “He followed me at the National Team Program and he inherited the assistant coach that I had for five years and used him extensively when he went into that. So, I know that for a fact, because we communicated a lot while he was coaching there on intricacies and details to it and practice reps. So, he has the entire drill book that we have that we put together over the years.”