Sabres are trying to stop Leafs fans from swarming their arena in Buffalo

Even Toronto Maple Leafs fans will tell you there are few things more annoying than, well, a whole bunch of Leafs fans.

And it appears like at least one NHL team is doing their best to keep those fans away from their arena next season.

The Buffalo Sabres, Toronto’s longtime rival but a team that’s yet to sniff the playoffs in 12 years, is taking matters into their own hands in order to prevent a typical Ontario-heavy takeover.

As per an article from The Buffalo News‘ Mike Harrington, the Sabres are “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.”

While they didn’t directly name Toronto in the reasoning, it’s not hard to read between the tea leaves to see which games bring in the most opposing fans.

“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, Sabres vice president of sales and service, told Harrington. “We want to make sure that we’re providing that home-ice advantage to our players. We see when there’s a full building cheering them that the players get after it.”

One of the most notorious examples of Leafs fans swarming the KeyBank Center came last season, where former Sabre Ryan O’Reilly put up a hat trick for Toronto in a 6-2 victory over Buffalo in February.

Though hat tricks are typically only really celebrated on teams’ actual home ice, plenty of Leafs fans tossed their caps down in Buffalo, a practice that wasn’t exactly taken kindly by the Sabres organization.

Harrington added that several Sabres players “privately expressed their disgust that night and later in the week” about the Toronto-heavy crowd.

While O’Reilly is now gone from the division as he signed a four-year deal with the Nashville Predators, there are still likely to be plenty of Leafs fans who will look to head down the QEW to visit Buffalo for the team’s next meeting at the KeyBank Center on December 21.

Only time will tell how effective the Sabres’ policy actually is, or if we’ll still see plenty of “the wrong blue” in the crowd this upcoming season.

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