THE KNIGHT LIFE WILL CHANGE LAS VEGAS
It’s just a logo right now, but in a few days, Sin City will have a real pro sports team
“You must be out of your … mind!”
It’s been almost four years to the day that former NHLer Murray Craven uttered those words. At that time, Bill Foley, his golfing buddy and fellow cottager up on Montana’s beautiful Whitefish Lake, had just informed Craven of his plan to pursue an NHL team for Las Vegas.
Some 48 months later, Craven can still vividly recall standing on his dock as Foley, who had pulled up in his boat, dropped that Vegas bombshell on him.
So much has changed since then. Foley is now the majority owner of a Vegas franchise that will begin play this fall at the T-Mobile Arena. Craven is the team’s senior vice-president, his duties ranging from overseeing the construction of the franchise’s state-of-the-art practice rink to selecting toilets for the team’s dressing room complex (Of note: He picked the models that are attached to the walls so it’s easier to clean the floors underneath).
It’s all in the name of the expansion Vegas Golden Knights, an NHL franchise unlike any we’ve seen before.
It starts with Foley, the team’s most rabid fan. There’s Craven, who made key front office personnel choices in addition to choosing the perfect arena loos. The franchise’s director of sports performance, Jay Mellette, previously served as Cirque du soleil’s director of performance medicine, overseeing 1,300 athletes that included Scandinavian aerialists and Japanese martial arts experts. The business office features former Vegas hotel execs who have wined and dined some of the most prominent high rollers and entertainers in the world.
What makes Vegas so different is the market itself. It comes by the name Sin City honestly. Given the bright lights and blackjack tables that define the Strip, don’t be surprised if players’ fathers start demanding that every visiting team’s dad’s trip is the one to Vegas.
There’s been no shortage of glitz and glamour, including the splashy revealing of the team’s name on a spotlight-filled stage in front of thousands outside T-Mobile Arena last year. It’s Vegas — it’s what they do.
In the coming two weeks, style will be replaced by substance. With the upcoming expansion and entry drafts, the Golden Knights will become more than a logo — they will become a team.
On Tuesday, head coach Gerard Gallant stood behind the home team’s bench at T-Mobile for the first time. By the evening of June 24, the draft having just been completed, he’ll have a full roster of players.
“It’s what we’ve been grinding towards each and every day,” Craven says. “All the little details, the nuances, and suddenly, it’s almost here and you can feel the excitement around town. I guess Bill wasn’t out of his … mind after all.”
Bill Foley sits in a board room in the Golden Knights team offices in Summerlin, an upscale suburb about a 20-minute drive from the Strip. Wearing jeans and a casual shirt, he hardly fits the fashion stereotype of a business tycoon, even though he serves as chairman of the estimated $4-billion mortgage giant Fidelity National Financial along with dabbling in wineries and ranching.
That’s just the way the downto-earth Foley likes it.
“Yeah, I made money on those other business ventures, but they were boring,” the 72-year-old says. “This isn’t. This is fun.” That is Bill Foley in a nutshell. Sure, he spent a sliver of his childhood in Ottawa, playing street hockey with the local kids. That snapshot of his life was far too brief to make him a hockey expert, but he dove headfirst into this project anyway.
In these same offices where Craven, general manager George McPhee and other team officials will make their expansion draft selections over a three-day period starting this weekend, they conducted a number of mock drafts in the past year. Foley was in the room for each one, listening, learning and, in his own words, “loving the debates over players guys don’t agree about.”
“He gets right into it when guys argue,” Vegas scout Mike Foligno, an ex-NHLer, says with a chuckle. “I think he covets hearing different opinions.”
Here’s how committed Foley is: He admits to spending time in front of his computer watching video replays of individual shifts by players who potentially could be Golden Knights by the end of this month.
“It’s a unique thing to be involved in,” McPhee says. “And it’s why we’re all involved in sports, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be fun. We’re not trying to feed the world here.
“And so, we enjoy the challenge of building things, and he’s enjoying the process of watching it happen as a completely objective outsider. And now to be on the inside, the stuff we take for granted is probably interesting for someone like Bill who’s doing it for the first time.”
With the 30 other NHL teams submitting their protection lists Saturday, McPhee and his lieutenants will start weeding through the available names before submitting their selections by Tuesday. Three days later comes the entry draft in Chicago. It will be a busy time for the GM and members of his pro staff, who arrived in Vegas Wednesday for the final countdown.
McPhee has been extremely busy. There are rumours he may have reached agreements with Anaheim, to avoid taking defenceman Kevin Bieksa, and Columbus, to avoid forward Scott Hartnell. Whatever the case, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly relayed to GMs in a conference call Tuesday that they are to remain quiet on deals that already have been cut.
“Look, we might have to go around the clock a couple of times around the expansion draft,” McPhee says. “You typically don’t have to do that in this business, but we have 72 hours to negotiate with players, with teams and to meet the requirements.”
In the process, McPhee will savour every moment.
“Mr. Foley is right,” he says. “It’s not boring. It’s much better than title insurance.”
In his role with Cirque du soleil, Jay Mellette saw pretty much every type of injury he could imagine.
“Contortionists are interesting,” he said after joining the Knights earlier this year. “They fold themselves in half, then they’ll come in the next day saying they have back pain.’”
From assistant GM Kelly McCrimmon to former TSN and Winnipeg Free Press columnist Gary Lawless, the Knights have hired people with solid hockey backgrounds to build and promote the product. At the same time, Mellette is the prime example of how McPhee says the Knights are thinking outside the box in a city that invented the term. The relationship between Mellette and the Knights started when Craven approached him for advice on how to get the optimal performance from an athlete. Overseeing 1,300 of them, Mellette would know. Not long afterward, the discussions became more informal.
“We’d talk over beers,” Mellette says. When the chats transformed into a job offer, Mellette jumped at it.
“It’s not often in a career where you can formulate a culture from scratch like this,” Mellette says. “You have to have an open mind on things. At Cirque du soleil, there was no published material on how to best get someone who stands on their head for a living to return from injury. You had to figure it out.”
Mellette grew up in Daytona Beach, Fla. — “Not much hockey culture there,” he admits — but he was educated in the passion for the game once he joined Cirque du soleil. Spending a month each year at the entertainment giant’s headquarters in Montreal, “if you can’t talk about the Habs there, you’re out of the conversation.”
Mellette says that he was “humbled” at the recent combine in Buffalo, N.Y, watching prospects work the muscles needed to play hockey.
“There is so much I need to learn,” he says.
“That’s why I’m going to surround myself with the most knowledgeable hockey people I can on staff.”
Mellette brings a unique perspective to the stodgy hockey world. For example: During a visit to the practice rink construction site several months ago, the suggestion was made to a foreman that the 24 C temperatures must be pleasant to work in, instead of the normal sweltering desert heat.
“Not really,” he said. “It’s actually kind of chilly.”
That’s not true in most hockey cities, but here, yes. Maybe that’s why my cab driver was wearing a tuque while I was in short sleeves.
On Wednesday afternoon, in yet another example of how Vegas is a hockey market like no other, the Knights announced the D Las Vegas had become the team’s official downtown casino, hosting fan fests and special watch parties. McPhee insists “there’s a casino pretty much within 10 miles of every NHL rink,” but no other team has a gaggle of them just steps away.
Yet, in the end, Mellette says this isn’t about the Strip or slot machines or attracting tourists. It’s about the hundreds of thousands of residents who live relatively normal lives and call Vegas home. As he says, it’s about “the community.”
“There’s a hunger here for the Knights,” he says. “For me, it’s a community story. The energy is going to be unbelievable, especially with what’s happening in the next few weeks. It’s going to be huge — huge.”