When Terry bought the team, I was afraid it was going to turn into another Dan Snyder situation, and it has. Snyder took over my football team, ran them into the ground, destroyed my love for the team, and even though he's gone, my passion has never returned.
I love hockey more than football, and I'm hanging on by a thread. In the early 90s and 00s, I never missed a game on tv. I literally built my schedule around being able to watch hockey. The Knoxs, Rigas, and Gollisano ran a team that kept me interested. These days, if I miss a game, I miss a game. I still try to watch, but I don't go out of my way to do so. I brought friends and my ex-fiancee to games to try to get them interested and the Sabres are just flat and boring to potential fans, especially during the matinee games. The arena experience is, well, not exactly exciting and the team usually cares about as much as I do - they might watch a game, but if something better is going on, they certainly aren't going out of their way to show up.
There's no heart. There's no pride.
I live 2 hours away, so I don't go to many games in person per year, but I always used to try to catch a few,
For the people worried about the team leaving if Terry sells, well, you're in the same position that I'm in, being too far to attend games in person. If Terry stays and continues to give fans a crappy arena experience and on ice product, fewer and fewer people are going to show interest, and the team won't be able to afford to stay anyway.
In just 2 years with Snyder gone, the Commanders made it to the NFC championship game. I half-heartedly watched a couple games this year, but the damage Snyder did is going to take some time to heal, if it ever heals at all. Pegula might as well be Dan Snyder as far as how the team has been run into the ground. Snyder was a superfan too, probably even moreso than Terry, and had to be involved in player personnel decisions. It'll take years for the Commanders fans to recover, and it will take even longer for the Sabres fanbase to recover due to the lesser interest in the NHL vs the NFL.
At the end of the day, Terry is the problem. The buck stops with him regardless of how much daily interference he has. If he's hands off, he still picked the GMs that have given us horrible results. If he's hands on, then he's busy picking players, coaches, etc too. He needs to go. If it means the Sabres move, that's going to happen eventually even if he stays.
That wraps up my post for this decade and I'll be back to lurking.