Mar 18
2025
Pegula ranked the worst owner in the NHL
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by Jim Heaney, editor of Investigative Post
The Buffalo Sabres are in fourth-to-last place in the National Hockey League standings.
They’re doing better than their owner.
The Athletic, the sports arm of The New York Times, just released its ranking of NHL owners. Led by the Tampa Bay Lightning, seven earned a grade of A, based on a combination of factors, including their team’s on-ice performance and a survey of fans.
Scientific, no. But telling.
Fifteen owners graded out at B, including Jeremy Jacobs’s Boston Bruins and the Toronto Maple Leafs, eight more at C and one at D, the Vancouver Canucks.
Terry Pegula ranked dead last with an F.
Wrote The Athletic:
The Sabres were voted dead last in every category in our survey by a large margin and 61 percent of fans said their confidence in ownership was lower than a year ago. Buffalo fans filled our survey en masse, with more entries than every franchise except Minnesota, and the hundreds of responses were filled with vitriol. Many were pleas for the owner to sell the team.
Things are about as bad as they can get in Buffalo.
That’s what happens when your team is about to miss the playoffs for a record 14th season. The Sabres are going through yet another rebuild and continue to slip in the standings.
Fans are fed up.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomHere’s how The Athletic quoted three of them:
“He [Pegula] seems averse to hiring GMs and coaches with actual NHL experience and makes abrupt hiring and firing decisions. The franchise still appears to have a haphazard plan for putting together a winning roster. Part of this is that there is no team president or other executive with NHL experience to guide these decisions.”
“His entire ownership tenure has been a disaster. He used to have competition as the worst owner in the league in Eugene Melnyk and Alex Meruelo, now he is the last one of those remaining.”
“Hockey Heaven he said. Instead, Terry Pegula’s ownership has put Buffalo in Hockey Hell.”
Here’s how The Athletic arrived at the ratings:
Several months ago, we put out a call to our NHL readers to evaluate their owners. Nearly 4,000 of you — including representatives from all 32 NHL fan bases — filled out our detailed owner survey, and the results are fascinating.
We’ve compiled your answers in four key ownership categories — willingness to spend, organizational stability, treatment of the fan base and franchise vision — into a “Fan Score” and combined that with our own ranking that factors in objective things such as team performance in the regular season and playoffs (over the past decade) as well as ownership’s general reputation and influence, according to our reporting.
The Sabres used to be good under the ownership of the Knoxes and Tom Golisano, but it’s been all downhill since Pegula bought the team in 2011.
It’s not just that the team hasn’t played well. The whole game experience has suffered.
Attending a Sabres game involves an assault to the senses and wallet. Music is blasted at obnoxiously loud levels and concession prices are outrageous, as high as $18 for a beer and more than $10 for a slice of pizza. Concession workers might as well wear ski masks when they cash out customers.
Add to this a building interior that hasn’t been significantly updated since the arena opened in 1996.
While tickets are relatively cheap for fans, concessions are expensive at the downtown arena.
The failure to make the playoffs for so many years has hurt the team’s bottom line, but weep not for Terry Pegula. He bought the Sabres for $189 million; the team is now valued at $1.1 billion.
His saving grace in this town is the success of the Bills, but his force-feeding of personal seat licenses for the new stadium and jacking up of ticket prices suggest he’s not a fan-friendly owner. There’s also the matter of the $850 million he wrested out of taxpayers to help build that new stadium and the hardball he’s playing over the community benefits agreement.
I haven’t attended a Bills game in almost two decades. Too much time, too much money.
The Sabres are another matter, however.
I’ve been a season ticket holder since 1987. My buddies and I split two sets of tickets, one in the lower bowl, the other pair in the balcony. By my count I have sat through 550 or so games over the years.
Why am I still giving Terry Pegula my money?
Long story short, I love hockey.
I played, I coached, I ran men’s hockey leagues and kids’ hockey schools. When Buffalo hosted the World Junior Championship in 2011 and 2018, I bought the packages — both times. Ditto for the 2016 World Cup of Hockey in Toronto.
Hell, Sunday I ventured to St. Catharines to catch a Junior A game.
Then, yesterday, despite my misgivings, I put down a deposit for my Sabres tickets for the 2025-26 season. The price is right, with my seats close to the ice costing about the same as a ticket to sit in the nosebleeds for the Bills. They’re even a better deal when you consider a top-priced ticket in the lower bowl will cost $115 a seat next season compared with $344 for the Maple Leafs. If the Leafs were to make the Stanley Cup finals, the seat would cost nearly $2,000.
So, yeah, the Sabres are a relative bargain, but I swear, one of these years …
The Sabres remain in Buffalo because of the many die-hards like me. But Pegula is pushing his luck. The fan base has shrunk and the NHL has a history of relocating franchises. Hockey hotbeds including Minneapolis and Quebec City and unproven markets including Phoenix and Atlanta have all lost their teams in the past several decades.
I’m not saying the same fate awaits Buffalo — not yet, anyway. But Pegula needs to get his act together, as The Athletic ranking demonstrates.
