We’re less than a week out from a new season of Buffalo Sabres hockey. We’re also a week away from the start of the Rochester Amerks season. In the past, we’ve provided coverage on both and we’re going to continue to do that again this season. However, it’s going to be made available in a different way than the last few years.

Premium Level

I’ve created a premium level for the site for $9.99 a month that will give you access to all Sabres, Amerks, and Bandits coverage on the site. Our $5 level will remain, but that will not give you access to the Amerks content.

Let me get into why I’m doing this. First off, when I launched this site almost three years ago, $5 was the common rate for subscriptions on hockey sites. Over that time, the price for subscriptions has gone up at most major hockey sites or new levels have been added to split what content is available at each level.

I do not want to increase our basic level from $5. Therefore, we’ll continue to provide coverage of the Sabres and Bandits at that level.

Why I’m putting the Amerks content behind this premium-level paywall is for two reasons. We’re going to provide more coverage of the Sabres AHL affiliate this season because of how many prospects fans want to know about that will be playing on that team. It’s basically like adding another team that we’ll be following and providing content on.

The second reason and to be honest, the primary reason for his level is the player tracking. We’ll be doing the player tracking of the microstats once again for the Amerks players. It’ll be different this year because I won’t be recording on-ice shot share or shot quality. I’ll be focusing on the microstats specifics that go into what a player is doing when they’re on the ice.

We’ll be using z-scores to show where the players rank relative to their teammates and creating player dashboards like the one you see below (the final version will look different).

Manually tracking games can be exhausting at times. It takes in the neighborhood of two hours to go through an individual game. I felt that it was right that our site treats this as premium content that isn’t provided anywhere else publicly.

To bring it all together, Amerks content given in the premium level will be this player tracking data as well as any other content on coverage of that club we provide throughout the season. If you’re not currently a subscriber and want to sign up you can go to the link here.

Current Subscribers

The next thing I want to lay out is how this is going to work for current subscribers.

Monthly Subscribers

If you’re a monthly subscriber via the site or Patreon, you’ll see the premium level has been added as an option. For the remainder of October, I’m going to keep Amerks coverage open to subscribers of all levels. This way, monthly subscribers that want to wait until their month of October is used up can renew at the premium level in November and not have to pay double.

Annual Subscribers

As a courtesy to all annual subscribers, I’ll be automatically moving you to the premium level until the end of your annual term. You won’t have to do anything until the end of your annual cycle. The site won’t pro-rate at the annual level so I don’t want people paying extra.

Once your annual period expires, you’ll have to renew at the annual or monthly premium level to continue to receive premium access. Of course, you can decide to renew at the “basic” level as well if that’s what you want to do.

If anyone has any questions or concerns you can send us a message on Patreon, DM on Twitter, or email me at expectedbuf@gmail.com.