With the official announcement of Terry Pegula buying the Buffalo Sabres coming on Tuesday and the final press conference of Tom Golisano, Larry Quinn, and Dan DiPofi happening Thursday, the Terry Pegula era will officially start. With that era, many, many, many people are happy with the notion that an owner that is a fan of the team will bring amazing things to the team and that the team will become a mulitple Stanley Cup winner in a few years.
How Pegula will manage the team is yet to be seen because he hasn’t made any public comments on the sale of the team. We know that he likes hockey and that he is apparently a fan first instead of being a businessman first. That notion excites people just because its such a different way the Sabres have been run in the past few years. Running a team as a fan can bring mixed results. We here at Die By The Blade bat around ideas all day in how we would fix this team, but we will never have the power of influence over anyone in power.
Wielding influence as an owner though can have some major consequences depending on your motivations for making a move. If Pegula’s motivation is to truly make the team better and making money be damned, then most often times his judgement should work for him. If he makes a move to generate ticket sales or create a face for the franchise, like Ilya Kovalchuk in New Jersey, most often times those decisions fly in the face of the direction of the franchise and they don’t usually work.
The Terry Pegula era brings a sense of change and breathes some life into a organization that seems to have been rife with public relations disasters and a lack of desire to win in the past few years. However Pegula decides to run this franchise is going to determine where the Sabres are going to be five years from now. We all remember Golisano delivering us from bankruptcy hell just like we are praising Pegula from delivering us from Golisano hell. The hope is that no one needs to deliver us from Pegula hell.