The Buffalo Bills welcomed Toronto Maple Leafs players Mitch Marner and Morgan Rielly on Sunday and Sabres fans were upset.
The Buffalo Bills welcomed Toronto Maple Leafs players Mitch Marner and Morgan Rielly on Sunday and Sabres fans were upset.
Toronto isn’t Buffalo and Buffalo certainly isn’t Toronto. They are very different cities that are connected by the Queen Elizabeth Way and separated by an international border.
So when the Buffalo Bills posted a photo of Toronto Maple Leafs players Mitch Marner and Morgan Rielly taking in the game against the Las Vegas Raiders at Orchard Park on Sunday, it sparked a lot of negative reaction from Bills fans and Buffalo Sabres forward Dylan Cozens, who put up a facepalm emoji.
On the surface, I get it. It's easy to for a Buffalo sports fan to get upset about this. They are a passionate bunch who love their teams and that includes the Sabres, who are constantly feeling the invasion of the Maple Leafs and their fans when they invade KeyBank Center annually for their divisional matchup. So much that the Sabres are reportedly looking at limiting ticket sales via zip codes.
But the NFL is a different beast. While Bills fans don’t care, many of them live in Toronto or surrounding areas, mainly because there is no NFL team in Canada. NFL Canada constantly promotes Canadian fan bases of border teams (Author’s note: I’m a Detroit Lions fan, and this is promoted heavily, along with the other border teams Seattle Seahawks and Minnesota Vikings).
But perhaps the real angst stems back to 2008. That’s when the Bills, who were owned by Ralph Wilson at the time, entered into an agreement with Ted Rogers of Rogers Communications and Larry Tanenbaum of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to host five regular season games and two pre-season games until 2012? There’s also the fact that MLSE put in a bid to buy the Bill after Wilson had passed away. Sabres owner Terry Pegula came out with the winning bid in 2014.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9VKegiS1jM[/embed]
While ticket sales for the games in Toronto went poorly, the Bills cited an increase fanbase increase to 20 percent from Ontario as Souther Ontario became a big part of Buffalo’s regionalization marketing.Guess what? That’s probably how Mitch Marner, who is from Toronto, became a fan of the Bills in the first place.
It’s a social media post. The Bills seemed measured by not even mentioning that the fans in the photo were Maple Leafs. There’s really nothing wrong with this given the relationship of Bills fans from Toronto given the history here.
If there were an NFL team in Toronto, the outrage would be justified here. But perhaps any sniff of Toronto is enough to make any Buffalo sports fan feel uneasy these days.
The Sabres haven’t made the playoffs in the last 12 seasons. They have a promising young core that includes Cozens who can help them bust through for a breakout season in 2023-24.
Until that happens, perhaps things will remain tense for Sabres fans. The Bills are good team. I’m not surprised Bills fans, no matter where they play, want to show their support.
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