Is it too much too soon?
Knights have to hope what happened in Vegas will stay in Vegas for the long term Marc-Andre Fleury’s save percentage has plummeted against Washington in the Stanley Cup final.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned watching NHL teams sprout in the sun belt, maybe it’s this: When they’re winning, they can make an awfully compelling case that they reside in credible, even electric markets.
There was a time, don’t forget, when South Florida was being proclaimed a hockey stronghold, back when the three-year-old Florida Panthers made their rat-enhanced run to the Stanley Cup final in the spring of 1996. A couple of decades later, with the Panthers having missed the playoffs 15 of the past 17 seasons, we’ve come to know better.
There was a time, too, when the Carolina Hurricanes were being awarded the Stanley Cup in 2006, that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman couldn’t help but proclaim that franchise a success.
“(Hurricanes then-owner) Peter Karmanos had a dream hockey would work in Carolina,” Bettman said. “And guess what? He was right.”
A dozen years later, with the Hurricanes ranking 29th in attendance this past season, exactly how right was he?
Even the Arizona Coyotes were selling out playoff games and looking like a plausibly respectable NHL market when they made an unlikely trip to the Western Conference final back in 2012, never mind that they were only a few years removed from being bought out of bankruptcy by the league. The Coyotes haven’t been back in the playoffs since. And one of the NHL’s longest lingering problems — what to do about that money-bleeding team in Glendale? — never seems to go away.
Which brings us to the Vegas Golden Knights. They’re one loss away from the end of their incredible inaugural season. And the odds aren’t good that they’ll climb out of this hole. Of the 33 teams that have found themselves down 3-1 in a Stanley Cup final, 32 have gone home the loser. And sure, the fact the Washington Capitals franchise is an all-time 7-5 in post-season series in which they’ve led 3-1 is a knee-knocking aberration that ought to remind the folks in Vegas that anything’s possible, as if these playoffs haven’t illustrated that clearly enough.
But if we are, indeed, staring at the end of the road for Vegas, maybe it had to be expected.
Marc-Andre Fleury’s stunning .947 save percentage in the opening three rounds of the post-season has given way to an sub-pedestrian .845 rate in the opening four games of the final. What goes up must come down.
Runners-up or not, the Golden Knights will be able to say they’re the most successful expansion team in the history of the sport — maybe any sport — by more than one measure. It’d be easy enough to believe, at a moment this triumphant, that their seemingly puckcrazy desert oasis will remain an NHL stronghold for years to come.
Still, anyone who has seen early-days euphoria eventually morph into decades of ennui in non-traditional hockey markets will respectfully reserve judgment on Vegas’s long-term durability. In a few years, after all, the landscape on which the Golden Knights built their fever dream of a season promises to be different. The National Football League, which has promised to deliver the Oakland Raiders to a $1.8- billion stadium expected to be completed in time for the 2020 season, is en route to the market. That won’t change the fact the Golden Knights were the first big-four franchise to call the town home. But it will heighten competition for disposable income and dull the novelty of hockey being the only big-time pro sport on offer. The NBA, with its longtime ties to the town, is another sporting behemoth that could plausibly lay down roots within Vegas’s growing community. And if Nevada loses its monopoly on legal single-game sports betting, maybe it’s not quite the destination for fans it used to be.
That’s not to take away from the success of the Golden Knights to date. There hasn’t been a misstep in the franchise’s launch. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re residing in a city where even the biggest shows come and go, where even the biggest stars have residencies that inevitably end.
Maybe the Golden Knights are as good as their results say they are. Maybe they aren’t en route to a reckoning with reality anytime soon. Maybe their first-year results were as real as they were repeatable. But let’s say they were also built on a bit of magic and a heavy dose of puck luck. There’s also a chance this season’s outsized success spoiled a market that suddenly might not appreciate the growth curve of the typical NHL expansion team — an existence that often consists of year upon year of mediocre to submediocre performances intermingled with the occasional brush with the promise of a future that’s better.
It’s possible things are different this time. It’s possible the Golden Knights, as southern expansion franchises go, amount to a better mousetrap run by smarter cats. Las Vegas’s arena is better located than Florida’s or Arizona’s, to be sure. Its pre-game hype acts are better than most anything the league has ever seen. Its team, thanks to the work of GM George McPhee, has been a blast of a revelation that might not even be done yet. But if that team doesn’t turn out to be sustainably elite, there’ll come a time when the Golden Knights are suddenly judged on a set of metrics that so far haven’t been put to use. We know Las Vegas is happy to embrace a novelty. We know it’s been overjoyed to celebrate as a hockey-playing newcomer hit the jackpot. But whether or not all this first-year passion will eventually morph into the kind of loyal patience — in a city built on instant gratification that’s been handed so much so soon, it hardly seems a sure bet.
FESCHUK from S1