Operations
First Niagara Center is home to the Buffalo Sabres of the National Hockey League and the Buffalo Bandits of the National Lacrosse League. The arena was the home of the Buffalo Destroyers of the Arena Football League, the Buffalo Blizzard of the National Professional Soccer League II, and the Buffalo Wings of Roller Hockey International during each team's brief existence. During the 2012 NHL lockout, the arena has hosted several Rochester Americans games.
The arena also is used regularly for college basketball games and hosts concerts. It has been home to the NCAA (2000, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2014) and MAAC (1997, 1999, 2001, 2005) men's basketball tournaments. In 2003 the Arena hosted the Frozen Four NCAA Ice Hockey tournament. In addition, First Niagara Center has been used for hosting several professional wrestling events, mainly WWE's Fully Loaded 1999, The Great American Bash (2005) and Armageddon 2008, World Championship Wrestling's Fall Brawl 2000, the February 28, 2011 episode of Monday Night Raw and WWE Night Of Champions 2011, which took place on September 18, 2011. Wrestling came back to the First Niagara Center when the WWE held a WWE Raw- Road to Wrestlemania house show Sunday March 11, 2012.
The arena was also host to a house party for the 2008 NHL Winter Classic. Festivities included the Buffalo Sabres Alumni Hockey Team playing in pre-game action, followed by the Winter Classic shown on the scoreboard. In December 2010 through January 2011, the arena hosted the IIHF World Junior Championship tournament.
The arena is also a regular stop for major concert tours and is the largest concert venue in Buffalo proper (it is one of two regular stops in Western New York for concert tours, the other being the performing arts center at Darien Lake).
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Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)