The Buffalo Sabres hope a new experiment in the stands you might call “the hometown advantage” will give them a much better home-ice advantage in KeyBank Center.
The team is finalizing plans to limit the presale for games, likely by ZIP code, in an attempt to cut down the number of visiting-team fans in the building.
Official plans have yet to be released, but it’s clear where this is targeted: It’s about reducing the number of Canadian fans in the building for visits by Toronto and Montreal, the number of Pennsylvania fans in the house when Pittsburgh is here. Same for the number of downstate fans coming to see the New York Rangers, or Michigan fans following the Detroit Red Wings.
“Obviously last year, there were a handful of games where we saw the wrong color blue or the wrong color 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 News. “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?”