List of Buffalo Sabres draft picks

The Buffalo Sabres are a professional hockey team that came into existence in 1970 and have participated in 42 National Hockey League Entry Drafts. The Sabres also made selections in six NHL Supplemental Drafts.

This list features every player drafted by the Sabres and his regular season stats for his career. All stats are current as of the 2013 NHL Draft. Players whose names appear in bold are on the current Sabres roster.

Buffalo's first draft pick was Gilbert Perreault, taken 1st overall in the 1970 NHL Entry Draft. Buffalo has selected first overall two times. Their second 1st overall pick was Pierre Turgeon in 1987. Ten picks have gone on to play over 1,000 NHL games: Dave Andreychuk, Phil Housley, Pierre Turgeon, Gilbert Perreault, Calle Johansson, Mike Ramsey, Craig Ramsay, Keith Carney, Brad May and Sean O'Donnell. One player, Gilbert Perreault, has been elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Key

       Stanley Cup winner and NHL All-Star
      (₪) NHL All-Star
      (Ω) Stanley Cup winner
       Appeared in at least one NHL game
(†) Hockey Hall of Famer
(‡) Jersey retired

Draft (sports)

A draft is a process used to allocate certain players to sports teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players. When a team selects a player, the team receives exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract, and no other team in the league may sign the player.

The best-known type of draft is the entry draft, which is used to allocate players who have recently become eligible to play in a league. Depending on the sport, the players may come from college, high school or junior teams or teams in other countries.

An entry draft prevents expensive bidding wars for young talent and ensures that no one team can sign contracts with all of the best young players and make the league uncompetitive. To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a "lottery" factor to discourage teams from purposely losing.

Other types of drafts include the expansion draft, in which a new team selects players from other teams in the league; and the dispersal draft, in which a league's surviving teams select players from the roster of a newly defunct franchise.