Buffalo Sabres

The Buffalo Sabres are a professional ice hockey team from Buffalo, New York, playing in the Atlantic Division of the NHL’s Eastern Conference. They entered the league in 1970 as an expansion franchise alongside the Vancouver Canucks. The Sabres have reached the Stanley Cup Final twice—losing to the Philadelphia Flyers in 1975 and the Dallas Stars in 1999—and, along with the Canucks, are the longest-tenured active NHL clubs never to have won the championship. Between the 2010–11 and 2025–26 seasons, they set an NHL record for the longest playoff drought at 14 years. The team has called KeyBank Center home since 1996, after spending their first 26 seasons at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium. Terry Pegula has owned the Sabres since 2011, when he bought the club from Tom Golisano.

The franchise was founded by Seymour H. Knox III and Northrup Knox, grandsons of the Woolworth’s co-founders, along with Buffalo attorney Robert O. Swados. Their initial board included Robert E. Rich Jr. and George W. Strawbridge Jr. Buffalo had a deep hockey history: the AHL’s Buffalo Bisons, a team that dated back to 1940 (with an earlier Bisons club from 1928 to 1936), won the Calder Cup just before the Sabres arrived. Wanting a name other than “Bison,” the Knoxes held a contest. Entries included “Mugwumps,” “Buzzing Bees,” and “Flying Zeppelins,” but Seymour Knox chose “Sabres” because he considered a saber a leader’s weapon, effective in both offense and defense. The Knoxes had twice failed to land an NHL team—first in the 1967 expansion, when Art Rooney helped steer the league toward Pittsburgh, and later when they tried to buy and move the Oakland Seals, a move the NHL blocked to avoid abandoning a market and isolating the Los Angeles Kings. The Sabres created their own AHL affiliate, the Cincinnati Swords, and hired former Maple Leafs executive Punch Imlach as general manager and head coach.

The Sabres debuted in 1970, the same year the Buffalo Bills joined the NFL through the AFL–NFL merger and the NBA’s Buffalo Braves began play. Buffalo went from having no major-league teams to three in one off-season. The Sabres quickly proved far more successful than the Braves, whose owner Paul Snyder feuded with the Knoxes and local college basketball, eventually selling the team in 1976; the Braves later moved out of Buffalo through a series of transactions tied to the ABA–NBA merger.