National Post (National Edition)
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The fans started to show up in the morning of the first-ever regular season home game.
There were about a hundred of them, wearing Vegas Golden Knights jerseys, Tshirts and hats, and cheering non-stop inside the team’s brand-new practice facility about a 20-minute drive from the downtown strip. They cheered when a goal was scored during the power play drill. They banged on the glass after Marc-Andre Fleury made a save.
One fan even held up a cardboard poster of the Stanley Cup. It was a literal sign that the NHL had officially arrived in Vegas.
“I think they’ve shown great support right from the start,” Fleury said of the fans. “Right from the first pre-season game, they were behind us all the way. We’re the only team here in town and we want to make people proud of us and proud of the team.”
That last part has become perhaps even more important after the tragic events that occurred on Oct. 1, when a lone gunman shot and killed 58 concertgoers and injured almost 500 on the Las Vegas strip.
Tuesday night’s home opener against the Arizona Coyotes was to be a chance to honour the victims, as well as their families and the first responders. A member of the Route 91 Harvest Festival Team, the music festival that was the site of the shooting, had been chosen to sing the national anthem. Players from both teams wore stickers on their helmets that said Vegas Strong.
“It’s going to be a hard night, no doubt,” said Golden Knights head coach Gerard Gallant.
At the same time, it was an important night — the first of many toward building a fan base. That, too, is going to be hard. Not every fan that was at the morning skate on Tuesday was from Las Vegas. The person wearing the FLEURY jersey said he was on a vacation from California. The group of kids banging on the glass whenever a goal was scored played on a hockey team that was visiting from Vancouver.
This is a tourist city. The people who do live here tend to be transplants.
That can work in the team’s favour. But it can also be a challenge. While the fan holding the cardboard poster of the Stanley Cup lived in Las Vegas, he was originally from Pittsburgh where he used to cheer for the Penguins. The trick is for the Golden Knights to convert him and others to their team.
“I stayed at the Bellagio when I first came here and was looking for places,” said forward James Neal, “and the people I ran into at the hotel and just in the community while looking for homes were from different hockey towns and had lived here for so many years and were just looking forward to having a hockey team.
“You definitely see lots of people coming in to see their team and to see the Vegas Golden Knights. Everyone I’ve talked to, whether they’re from Pittsburgh or Detroit or wherever, that’s their second favourite team now. Bringing hockey to Vegas, they have their Golden Knights jerseys and are ready to go.”
Perhaps, but it’s easy getting fans to put on a jersey when you’ve only played a couple of games. The franchise has just entered the honeymoon phase of the relationship. Right now, it’s still exciting to have a shiny arena and brand-new merchandise. It’s exciting just to have a professional sports team. That could change in the next couple of years, when the NFL’s Oakland Raiders move onto the strip.
That is why this first season is important. No one expects a Stanley Cup or even a playoff berth, but the team can earn a lot of goodwill if it continues to stay competitive.
For now, there is nothing but excitement for the hockey team. Heading into Tuesday night’s home opener, Vegas was undefeated after two games. Fleury had been named the NHL’s second star of the week and Neal, who had scored two gamewinning goals, was quickly becoming a fan favourite.
“Definitely a good feeling,” said Fleury. “It’s not easy to build a team from scratch, right, and picking guys from other teams and other leagues. I’m proud of the way the guys battled those two nights. We know we’re probably not the best team around, so we have to work hard every night to have a chance and to keep improving.”