Sabres coach already sounds resigned to Toronto Maple Leafs fan takeover in Buffalo

While the Toronto Maple Leafs may often get criticized for being too corporate in their own arena, the same accusation isn’t often lobbied when they’re the visiting team.

Though Scotiabank Arena’s lower bowl may be notorious for being filled with businessmen and women in suits rather than “real fans,” Leafs road games typically see the visiting crowd filled with plenty of blue and white.

And while the practice is common in the rest of the NHL’s 31 arenas, it’s perhaps most notable at Buffalo’s KeyBank Center, where Toronto happens to be playing tonight.

With just a short drive from Toronto or the rest of Southern Ontario, it’s not uncommon to see swaths of Leafs fans vastly outnumbering the Sabres in their own building.

Given that the Sabres have been in a perpetually long rebuild — they haven’t sniffed the playoffs since 2011 — many local fans appear happy to resell their tickets to the Leafs faithful at a markup to recoup some of their season ticket cost.

And meeting with the media before tonight’s matchup, Buffalo head coach Lindy Ruff had a clever quip about the reality of the situation.

“If we play well, we can take the fans out of the game,” Ruff said, as per Sportsnet’s Luke Fox.

In 2023, the Sabres even went far enough to openly publicize a plan to limit tickets bought from addresses outside of the Buffalo region, i.e. north of the Canadian border.

“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 Buffalo News’ Mike 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.”

The Leafs have gone 6-4-0 in their last ten games in Buffalo, though they’ve definitely had some stinkers along the way. Among their losses include a 9-3 defeat in 2023 and a pair of 5-2 losses in 2020 and 2022.

Puck drop for tonight’s game is set for 7 pm ET.

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