A passionate fanbase, season ticket investors and easy workarounds are why these stunts simply don’t work.

The Buffalo Sabres are looking at limiting the pre-sale of their regular season tickets in an effort to get more of their fans at certain games, according to a recent report in the Buffalo News.

“Obviously last year, there were a handful of games where we saw the wrong colour blue or the wrong colour red coming into the building, depending on the jersey we were wearing,” Frank Batres-Landaeta, the team’s vice-president of sales and service, told the Buffalo-based newspaper. “It’s something that we’ve been talking about and discussing and trying to figure out: How do we get tickets in the hands of Buffalo fans?”

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A_fYhf1Jks[/embed]

Leafs fans weren't explicitly pointed to as the reason for this but they are indeed the No. 1 culprit here. With Buffalo sitting right on the Ontario-New York State border, it's an easy trek for Maple Leafs fans to experience their team on the road and make a day of it. Go to stores not available in Canada, etc...

But will the measure put forth by the Sabres would work? Definitely not.

Look no further than this past May when the Florida Panthers attempted to keep Leafs fans out of their building in Round 2 of the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs. 

Initially, the Panthers required a zip code method for weeding out non-Panthers fans. Did it work?

Not even close. In fact, a poll out on X (formerly Twitter) showed many Maple Leafs more determined to fly out for games as a response. Hours after the initial event disclaimer went public, the Panthers added a sentence to show that the restriction ended up being temporary.

While there is a case to be made that this was a playoffs series, Toronto's first second-round series in 19 years, and there was more of an ambition to make to fly down to Florida, this particular restriction in Buffalo is different.

For years, the Sabres have had to contend with Maple Leafs fans taking over their building when the team came to town. Not too long ago, the ownership of the Sabres stopped fighting it and introduced premium pricing for high-demand games like the Maple Leafs charging top dollar for those contests. 

Forget the hypocrisy for a minute of leaning into a league-wide revenue generator of the Maple Leafs and let's jump into the position of a Sabres fan.

The Sabres have the longest active playoff drought at 12 years running, but they appear to be a team on the rise again. The Sabres have routinely leaned on Canadian fans across the border who have become Buffalo fans simply due to geographic proximity. The Sabres are the only American team in the NHL that plays both the Canadian and U.S. national anthems regardless of the teams playing, a nod to Buffalo's extended fanbase.

Limiting tickets sold to zip or postal code simply doesn't work.

Outside of pissing off Sabres fans from Ontario or elsewhere, there's also the risk of alienating a fanbase that buys season tickets and sells off the high-demand games so they can afford their ticket package.

But perhaps the main reason not to impose restrictions is because there are several workarounds.

I, personally, have a US-based credit card with a Western New York zip code, which can easily be set up through any of Canada's five major banks' cross-border banking partnerships. Also, Buffalo, being a border city, is littered with so many places for you to get a mailbox address for pennies.

The only reason to do this is to get people talking about their team and then drive demand up for tickets. If that was the intent, then it is bravo to the Sabres' marketing department, riling up the fanbases of the opposing teams to buy tickets and prove a point.

Maple Leafs games in Buffalo are always fun experiences for both the players and fans of the team. There's a simple way to get more Sabres fans at those games. They simply need to be a better team.

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