Let me give a little bit of context here.
Terrence M. "Terry" Pegula is the owner of both of Buffalo's sports teams, the Bills and the Sabres. Ten years ago, he rode in on a proverbial white horse, while the Sabres were in a down period, and promised to return the franchise to glory—promising a Stanley Cup within three years. Ten years later, he's never made the playoffs, let alone won a Stanley Cup, and has run his franchise into the ground, making the Sabres a laughingstock of the NHL. He was given three top-2 draft picks in the past few years: one has been traded (Sam Reinhart) and neither of the other two, both widely expected to be "generational talents," have lived up to anything (Jack Eichel and Rasmus Dahlin); the team's currently fighting with Eichel since he needs neck surgery and for some strange reason, the Sabres are stopping him. He's gone through three general managers, four head coaches, and quite frankly, none of them have been smart hires.
Now, let's flash back again to 2014. Ralph Wilson had recently died. Two years prior, the local government had pressured Wilson into agreeing to a ten-year lease that effectively forbade the team from leaving Buffalo. So, three buyers end up stepping up: Pegula, Donald Trump, and Jon Bon Jovi. Trump was the stalking horse. Bon Jovi was backed by Toronto interests and we all expected that, if by some chance he won the bidding, the team was as good as gone. That left Pegula, who bought the team, and even as the Sabres were continuing to decline, the honeymoon was clearly not over. Pegula was treated as a savior, not so much because he was going to turn the Bills around, but that the team was just going to survive in Buffalo.
And unlike the Sabres, Pegula and his wife Kim actually did turn the Bills around. After 17 years of no playoffs, and fans starting to wonder if they were even worth keeping around, they've made the playoffs three out of four years and are now legitimate Super Bowl contenders. So now, with the Bills' stadium being one of the oldest in the NFL (almost 50 years old at this point) and still largely in the same form as it was in the 1970s, the Pegulas are negotiating a new venue. The lease Wilson signed expires in 2023.
The fact that Pegula is using Austin as a bargaining chip just as the Bills have become enjoyable again, and demanding the government pay the entire cost of the new stadium to avoid moving to Austin... it's uncharacteristically villainous for him. His ruining of the Sabres was incompetence, but to take away a franchise that has been bringing Buffalo so much joy over the past few years, with the team on the cusp of potentially winning Buffalo's first major sports championship would be quite evil.
And Buffalo's been through this before: in the mid-1970s, Paul Snyder had a team called the Buffalo Braves that were a modest success. When he found himself on the losing end of a fight over the arena with the local college teams and the Sabres, he purposely dismantled the team and sold it off after fans walked away. If Pegula wanted to wash his hands clean of sports ownership, who's to say he wouldn't trade away his stars just to spite Erie County? As for the Sabres, there are owners in Hamilton and Quebec City still waiting for an NHL team, to whom Pegula could easily sell, just to get out of Dodge.
I don't think he'll move the team, but this was bad form for him. Sports history is littered with bad-guy owners like Robert Irsay, Stan Kroenke, Art Modell, and so on who promised to keep the teams where they were, then moved them anyway. The Pegulas have longstanding ties to Western New York. We thought that this couldn't happen. Now, I'm not so sure.
