One of those empty seats for that game belonged to Louie Gott, a season ticket holder for the last 30 years. Gott has decided not to renew his season tickets and is purposely leaving his seat empty for the remainder of the season, in part to make a statement and in part because selling and even giving away tickets has become more work than it’s worth.
To understand exactly what Gott is giving up, you need to understand his origin story as a season ticket holder. When Gott was 11, his father got out of prison, and the two didn’t have much of a relationship. Hoping to build a bond with his son, his father asked Louie what he liked. He told him he liked the Sabres, so his dad bought them season tickets.
“For 15 years, it was very rare that we even missed a game,” Gott said. “We built our whole relationship in that arena.”
Around the start of the Sabres’ playoff drought, Gott’s father got sick, and Gott took over the season tickets. In 2016, his father died, and for the last eight seasons, Gott has kept the tickets and recently started splitting them with a friend.
He almost gave them up a couple of years ago, but the Sabres’ employees in the ticket office went to great lengths to keep his business. For the last 10 games of the season, they upgraded his seats from the 300-level to the 100-level. They sent an employee up to his seats and brought him to a bar to have drinks. They even got him tickets to a concert at the arena he wanted to go to.
This time around, Gott told them he didn’t want to be convinced. The friend he split the tickets with told him, “Don’t even ask me.” Gott told his ticket rep not to call him unless there was a “huge organizational shakeup.”
“I’m like apologetic when I call them,” Gott said. “I’m not going to sit here and scream at them. It’s a tough job.”
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“(The Sabres) ruined a night out,” Gott said. “It’s more practical to sit at home during a miserable winter night than go out and watch a hockey game, which is a sport I love.”
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Sabres COO Pete Guelli, who holds the same title with the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, sent a letter to season ticket holders on Feb. 27 pitching them on renewing. In that letter, he noted season ticket holders could lock in their current price without an increase but only if they renewed by March 17 at 5 p.m. That deadline angered some fans who have stuck with the team and consistent price hikes for tickets. By comparison, the New York Rangers announced they wouldn’t be raising season ticket prices if they missed the playoffs. After the early bird renewal deadline, the Sabres’ ticket employees started calling those who didn’t renew, offering an extension of the deadline.
That letter also took a hopeful tone. Guelli wrote that the team is “on the doorstep” of where it wants to be, despite having the fourth-worst points percentage in the NHL. He wrote about the “massive steps” the Sabres have taken on the penalty kill, even though the unit ranked 21st in the league at the time. After that letter, the Sabres lost six straight games.
“They’re lying to your face almost right now,” Gott said. “I get that there’s not too many answers right now, but they’re very tone-deaf as an organization right now.”
Guelli declined to comment for this story.
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Hints are everywhere that consumer satisfaction has waned. In
The Athletic’s recent ownership rankings, Sabres fans submitted the most responses and rated owner Terry Pegula 32nd in the league by a wide margin. Of the more than 1,300 fans who responded to our
Sabres fan survey last month, 67 percent rated their confidence in Pegula a zero or a one on a scale from zero to five. The same was true for GM Kevyn Adams.
A main point of frustration for fans is that the Sabres haven’t spent to the salary cap ceiling since the pandemic, and the cap is about to skyrocket in the next few years. The Sabres are the only team that has left at least $6 million in cap space unspent in each of the last five seasons. Pegula hasn’t spoken publicly about the team since 2020, when he deemed the organization’s mission was to be “effective, efficient and economic.” That day, Pegula hired Adams as general manager. He also fired more than 20 people in the hockey operations department.
Three seasons into Adams’ tenure, the team was showing promising results. But in the last two seasons, the Sabres have regressed. They’re back near the bottom of the standings. Adams also angered the fan base in a December news conference when he noted that Buffalo isn’t a destination city for players and that the team would have to earn that moniker by winning because “we don’t have palm trees. We have high taxes.”
That prompted fans to show up to the next home game
carrying palm trees around the arena.
“Fire Adams!” chants have been common at Sabres home games, and he was booed when the staff was introduced at the home opener. Fans in the 300s have even resorted to screaming toward Pegula’s box when he’s there.
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