In a week where oil futures went all the way to zero and dove into negative numbers, Terry Pegula’s value as owner of the Buffalo Sabres quickly did the same. Make no mistake — the 69-year-old billionaire has value as a person, a father and, in Florida, a taxpayer. But as owner of the Buffalo Sabres, he’s become absolutely worthless.

The first two days of April’s third full week brought news that the Pegula family businesses were in far worse shape than we initially knew. In a Buffalo News piece conveniently dropped the day before a more thorough investigation into Pegula Sports and Entertainment’s internal strife, company president Kim Pegula made it clear the billionaire’s goal is to make the organization “viable,” a sign that trouble was on the horizon well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The News cited a Forbes report about the Sabres, which said the team made $1.9 million in operating income in 2018-19. But Monday’s explosive report from The Athletic’s Tim Graham made it clear that number is likely inaccurate: one source estimated the Sabres “have been losing between $40 million and $60 million the past few seasons.”

“We do not have an endless supply of capital,” Pegula told Graham via email, a stark contrast from her husband’s declaration nine years ago that he didn’t buy the Sabres to make money. If he wanted to make money, Pegula said, he “go drill a gas well.”

But Pegula’s gas wells have reportedly been capped since last summer, and now it’s clear the family doesn’t have the money they once thought they had. The revelation helps reframe a lot of what we’ve seen from the team, as penny-pinching during a pandemic now quickly shifts from apparent cruelty to mere opportunity. Ownership is likely not ignorant of the struggles of their lesser employees, but their incompetence and mismanagement has put them in a position where a pandemic is a business opportunity to “right-size.”

Perhaps most frustratingly, the responses from Kim Pegula make it clear there’s no blame to be found with the Pegulas themselves. If anything, organizational problems came from their own generosity and keeping employees from past ownership in their current positions. They just trusted too much, you see, and laying off staff is an attempt to correct such problems.

Unfortunately we already know the Sabres were operating much more efficiently before Pegula ownership took over. Tom Golisano was happy, the team was finding ways to occasionally both turn a profit and also be competitive every few years. Then Terry Pegula showed up, declared no “financial mandates” would control the Sabres and started to corner the market on sports in Western New York.

Pegula’s purchase of the team didn’t save the Sabres. That narrative is wholly false, and falling back on it intentionally obscures the truth of why fans were so optimistic about Terry Pegula. Rather, Billionaire Owners who happened to love Sabres hockey were supposed to free the team from the shackles of cost certainty. The worry about the bottom line over fielding a competitive team on the ice was to be gone. Forever.

Pegula was a game-changer for Buffalo sports explicitly because he was bringing “an endless supply of capital” to the Bills and Sabres. At least that’s what he promised back in 2011, to uproarious approval from fans. That suddenly disappearing and morphing into a goal listed among keeping the Pegula family’s “lifestyle” in place, compared to the initial decree, is a huge fucking problem.

Moreover, it changes the value of Pegula to fans of the teams he owns. What is the ownership of Terry and Kim Pegula worth if the money has run out and a “financial mandate” has returned for the foreseeable future? Looking at it from that perspective, it’s hard to value those in charge higher than the plummeting assets on which they so heavily rely.

The Sabres are amid the worst stretch in franchise history with no obvious path to success in place. Pegula’s wealth in its current state — frozen in assets that are far below their perceived value in boom times and otherwise tied up in money-losing vanity projects — means there’s nothing left to invest in the failing product that is the Buffalo Sabres. All that’s left of Pegulamania is worthless guidance that’s made them a money-loser and a franchise whose reputation consists of a failed rebuilding effort and the insistence to hire the exact wrong person to fix it. Add money problems into the mix and you have to wonder how much worse a Pegula-owned Sabres franchise can actually get.

Will ownership keep a failing general manager in place longer than they should because of his contract, afraid of more dead weight tied up in the financial ledger? Will the team be unwilling to pursue free agents, raise ticket prices and generally keep the clamps on fans to bolster revenue they once said wasn’t a priority to collect? There’s no reason to assume Pegula can make a winner out of the Sabres because he’s failed at every turn, and with no capital to invest the job just got that much harder.

There’s reported concern that the Bills are in danger of being negatively impacted by the plight of ownership, too. Given the gift of the league’s massive television contracts, it’s incredibly hard to lose money on an NFL franchise. But as the last league operating under Business As Usual, we haven’t seen panic hit franchises that may not be getting the full bag this year. If that changes, we could see some truly dark times from PSE, a terrifying thought given how low morale is and how bad the financial situation appears to be.

The Pegulas have made it clear which fans are valuable to them these days: those that pay for tickets and merchandise and don’t criticize no matter what product is put out there to “enjoy.” It’s been nearly a decade since the value equation made sense for Sabres fans, and if the new hallmark of Pegula ownership is the “financial mandates” they promised wouldn’t exist for the Sabres on day one, their value according to Forbes has never been more irrelevant. In fact, it’s almost certainly a net negative for fans.