Sabres' Cody Franson: Difficulty in free agency 'aggravated me'

Cody Franson didn't plan on extending his free agency into September, but now that it's over, the Buffalo Sabres defenseman says he has something to prove.

“You have to be able to roll with the punches and stand back up and prove people wrong,” Franson told Josh Cooper of Yahoo Sports' Puck Daddy.

“That’s the attitude I’m taking towards this. It was something that aggravated me. I want to go out there and prove a lot of people wrong and put my best foot forward and help this team win.”

Franson struggled to produce offensively with the Nashville Predators after a midseason trade from the Toronto Maple Leafs, scoring one goal and adding three assists in 23 games, then contributing two assists in five playoff contests.

The Sabres signed him to a two-year contract reportedly worth $6.6 million Thursday. He spent the last three seasons on one-year contracts with the Leafs, and wasn't prepared to sign a fourth.

"We’ve gone through some pretty grueling processes as far as contract negotiations and three one-year deals with Toronto," Franson said.

"None of those were easy negotiations,” he continued. “I had a pretty successful season until the trade to Nashville and I thought I put myself in a pretty good position to go in and really find a home and find a place where I could get some term and really call it home. But that’s just the way it goes sometimes.”

The 28-year-old believes a number of factors affected his chances of signing a contract.

“The whole free agency experience went very different than we had planned. With the cap not going up and a lot of the teams that were very interested in us, they didn’t have a lot of options,” Franson said.

“(Teams) were pretty tight against the cap as-was. There were some trades that were made that ended up taking away some of our suitors. I think this was a year where everything kind of changed really.”

Franson joins a revamped Sabres club that is similarly looking to prove doubters wrong after finishing dead last in the league last season.