A Vegas Golden Knights fan celebrates during the third period of Game 6 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup first-round playoff series against the Dallas Stars at T-Mobile Arena Friday, May 3, 2024.
Monday, June 24, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The National Hockey League's Las Vegas dream began on September 27, 1991, in the parking lot of Caesars Palace.
On that 85-degree evening, Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings beat the New York Rangers 5-2 in an exhibition in front of 13,000 fans.
It was hailed as a landmark event at the time, but few if any realized it would be the first of many in the same vicinity.
Thirty-three years later, Las Vegas has become a prime location for the NHL’s premier events — staging several firsts, and now, potentially a last.
The NHL’s latest takeover of Las Vegas happens this week, headlined on Friday and Saturday by the league’s 2024 Entry Draft which will become the first sports-related and live-televised event in the history of Sphere. It also might be the NHL’s final centralized draft.
The league will no longer throw a draft event and require franchises to send representatives to one city starting next year, as officials will make their picks from their own team headquarters.
The NHL didn’t have to think too hard about where to hold the de facto send-off event. It was back to Las Vegas, where the league has repeatedly put on its biggest shows over the last 15 years.
Even before the milestone of bringing the city its first major professional sports franchise in 2017, the Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL held its awards show locally for 10 years straight starting in 2009.
The league keeps coming back and reasserting its commitment to the city because the latter has never let the former down, according to NHL Chief Content Officer Steve Mayer.
"We just know that everybody is all in, that's the beauty of it," Mayer said. "Everybody is there to support an event from top to bottom."
Mayer described a bond, belief and trust in the two sides that predates the Golden Knights but has been strengthened by the franchise’s unprecedented success.
Las Vegas might have a team in each of the country’s big four major sports leagues by the end of the decade, but the NHL took a bigger chance on the city than any of its peers by being the first to arrive.
It’s been nearly 10 years since Golden Knights owner Bill Foley and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman held a season-ticket drive to gauge local interest in February 2015. Some hockey fans around the country didn’t take the event seriously and scoffed at Las Vegas’ prospects as an expansion city.
Seven different semiprofessional hockey teams had been in and out of Las Vegas since 1970 including the Las Vegas Wranglers folding the year before the ticket drive. That was evidence to many that the NHL didn’t belong in Las Vegas, but those in power believed otherwise.
"The narrative was it was a really bad idea for the NHL to put a team here, and we certainly have shown that it was it was a terrific idea," Golden Knights President Kerry Bubolz said.
"I give Gary Bettman and Bill Foley all the credit because they're the ones that took the risk to do it."
The leap of faith paid off immediately, and it becomes more apparent every year. Now seven seasons in, the Golden Knights hold the sixth-highest win percentage in the league over the span with an average capacity of well more than 100% for games at T-Mobile Arena.
Oh, and of course, they have the Stanley Cup to their name.
They’ve accomplished more than some teams have in 50 years and have become the blueprint for what remains an endlessly expansion-hungry league.
The NHL has established six new teams since 1999 as opposed to four new teams total across the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball and might not be done yet.
"When the Golden Knights were launched everybody had said 'Vegas could never support a team' and everybody was scared to go to Vegas,” Mayer said. “No way.”
The arrival of the Golden Knights has turned Las Vegas into a crazed hockey market, one that’s hosted every major NHL event and helped set the standard going forward.
The 2022 NHL All-Star Game will forever be remembered for shutting down a portion of the Strip and turning the iconic Bellagio Fountains into a skills-competition course.
Caesars got somewhat of an encore from its 1991 game too, when a rink was put out front in June 2009 for a promotional event where stars like Alexander Ovechkin skated while in town for the first local awards show at Palms.
"Those 10 years we hosted those awards, eight years before we had the Expansion Draft, showed what we could do for (the NHL’s) corporate partners," said Lisa Motley, vice president of sports and special events for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. "For the fans in Las Vegas, we really rolled out the red carpet and showed Las Vegas really is a professional town to host. All of that really paved the way for the expansion team."
The NHL Awards has bounced around town at nearly every major resort since and will mark another one off the list on June 27 when the show is held at Fontainebleau Las Vegas.
"We've done some really amazing creative things over the years," Mayer said. "You can look at the variety of what we've done over the years and the variety of where we've done it shows that there's no end."
While the ideas have been limitless for the NHL in Las Vegas, it's the connection with the community that's also continued to make the league so attracted to the city.
Executives can’t help but notice the Golden Knights’ logo being as ubiquitous in Las Vegas as the Maple Leafs’ or Canadiens’ emblems are around the league’s Canadian offices in Toronto and Montreal, respectively.
Bubolz said 70,000 people have chosen custom Golden Knights license plates across the state so far.
The Golden Knights represent Las Vegas not just for the glitz and glamour of the Strip, but everyone in the valley.
"We're really fortunate that this has gone from an almost nonexistent market to a true hockey town," Bubolz said.
That commitment from fans has always given the NHL confidence that its events will succeed in Las Vegas.
The out-of-town fans help too as a larger number are attracted to plan an entire vacation around an NHL outing in Las Vegas.
The relationship is mutually beneficial and provides significant financial impact, as Motley says traveling NHL fans spend 13% more than typical visitors while in town.
"Every single team that plays the Vegas Golden Knights or their fan base plans, a vacation around the team's games," Mayer said. "That's awesome…We see that in many of our cities, but here, it's incredible. Everything about Las Vegas is first class."
Skeptics may still not be able to comprehend how ice hockey has the pull to take over a city in the middle of the summer when temperatures will be well into the triple digits.
But against the odds, hockey in Las Vegas has become a mainstay and the appeal stretches beyond just the Golden Knights.
Motley compared the uncommon relationship to a trio she saw on a trip to Alaska — a starfish, a jellyfish and a bald eagle.
Those three things shouldn’t work together, but there’s something beautiful about all three being in the same place together.
"To me, that's what hockey in the desert was one of these doesn't belong with the other, but together, they're just perfect," Motley said.
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