Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Golden Knights confident that TV deal will bring desired exposure

Golden Knights Open House

L.E. Baskow

Owner Bill Foley of the Golden Knights hockey team holds a press conference during a 24-hour open house at T-Mobile Arena on Tuesday, February 21, 2017.

Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley and President Kerry Bubolz stepped aside for a moment during Tuesday afternoon’s news conference at the Stratosphere.

The two strolled to the edge of the observation deck and chatted privately while peering over the Las Vegas Valley from nearly 1,000 feet above.

They glanced down at the glimmering aquamarine pools below, flanked by a sea of houses that stretches nearly to the base of the Spring Mountains.

“Looking across the entire valley from up here, that’s where we are going to bring the Golden Knights — into the homes, into the restaurants and into the hotels and casinos,” Bubolz said.

Tuesday the Golden Knights officially announced Root Sports and AT&T Sports Network as their television home. All 82 regular season games — with the exception of select nationally televised games — will be shown live on the channels.

The problem?

Most of the houses Foley and Bubolz were observing wouldn’t get the games if the season started today.

Root Sports operates in four regions — Northwest, Pittsburgh, Rocky Mountain and Southwest. Golden Knights games will be shown on the Rocky Mountain channel, but it is currently not available via cable operator Cox Communications or CenturyLink’s Prism TV service in Las Vegas.

The regional sports network, owned by AT&T U-verse and DirecTV, is available on Dish Network (channel 414) and DirecTV (channel 683) with sports packages. The package on DirecTV costs subscribers an extra $14 per month ($168 per year).

As of Tuesday morning Juergen Barbusca, manager of communications for Cox Las Vegas, said, “At this time, we have not been contacted by Root Sports, but we review new additions to our channel lineup on an ongoing basis."

Cox is the third largest multiple services operator (MSO) in the cable industry behind Comcast and Time Warner, currently serving approximately 6 million residences and businesses nationally. Because the company is privately held, it won’t publish local numbers.

The Golden Knights don’t appear to be worried about it yet.

“Now that the deal has been announced, our partners at AT&T Sports Network will start to sit down with Cox Cable and really all of the carriers in the market,” Bubolz said. “They will go through a process and ultimately by the time we get to October we feel like we’ll have a confident group of full distribution.”

Tuesday evening Mark Molzen, corporate spokesman for CenturyLink, said, “CenturyLink and Root Sports are in initial discussions regarding the potential carriage of the Root Sports Rocky Mountain service on Prism TV in Nevada.”

Now that the multiyear deal between the Golden Knights and the television network is done, it’s completely up to AT&T Sports Network and Root Sports to negotiate a deal with cable providers.

“It’s in their best interest to have as wide of an exposure as possible,” Foley said. “I’m very confident that the other mediums will want to have the Golden Knights.”

Foley said the games will also be streamed online as part of the deal, but couldn’t yet give details.

He also said there were multiple regional sports networks vying for the television rights of the team, and the deciding factor was AT&T Sports Network’s ability to broadcast the Golden Knights across multiple states.

“My vision for this TV transaction has always been about making our team the team of the Rockies,” Foley said. “We are going to be the sports team of the Rocky Mountains and AT&T SportsNet is going to help us get there.”

Along with Nevada, Golden Knights games will also be broadcast in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and select areas of Arizona and California.

“It’s really important for me to be able to send our players to Boise for an event and have them get behind our team, or send them to Reno or Salt Lake or even have a little bus tour through Montana,” Foley said.

And while it is certainly shrewd for Foley to build fan bases elsewhere, he might want to focus on his own backyard.

Foley announced the Golden Knights will open the regular season at home on Oct. 10, and if things don’t change, more than half of Las Vegas could be in the dark.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy