In general, most teams almost always do special stuff for early renewals: free jerseys/sticks, sometimes lower seat prices, often drawings for memorabilia, etc. Otherwise, there's no incentive to renew early, and teams don't know how many seats will be guaranteed sold, and (in the B's case) how many people might be taken off the waitlist. So, while I don't think you could have predicted this particular perk...the B's have done things this before. Hopefully, you renewed early enough.
I'd be more concerned with how good the seats are that they're making available to STHs. The NHL is probably reserving tons of seats for sponsors, big wigs, friends of friends of assistant coaches, etc. Those seats are never in the pool to begin with, and if they just give STHs a bunch of junk seats hoping they'll take whatever the "best seat available" is, well...that kinda stinks.
They sometimes "promise" stuff that really turns out to be a load of junk. For example, in 2013-4, they promised anyone who had a deposit in for a 2014-5 game plan (or maybe it was a STH waitlist deposit) that they'd have early access to the first round of the 2014 playoffs for single game tickets. I logged on out of curiosity, and the prices were awful compared to StubHub - and, I assume, compared to the STH price for a playoff strip.
