An NHL team in Las Vegas may seem like a marriage made in one of the city’s notorious wedding chapels, but the city has supported professional hockey before, with several minor league hockey teams having called it home as far back as 1968.
Las Vegas, a tourist haven in a growing region of more than 2 million residents, has long been shut out of major professional sports, largely because of its ties to legal gambling. But with an arena set to open in April and a committed ownership group that has sold roughly 13,500 season tickets for a prospective franchise, the only question left is whether the NHL wants Las Vegas. The league has been considering expansion applications from Las Vegas and Quebec City since last summer and held a meeting to discuss the subject last week in New York.
“I think it’ll be a huge success,” said Butch Goring, a former Islanders forward who coached the International Hockey League’s Las Vegas Thunder for one season. “There’s certainly enough money to sustain a hockey team. They have a brand-new building. I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
It is no secret that the league’s forays into nontraditional hockey markets have yielded mixed results. Las Vegas has its own tumultuous history with minor league franchises, particularly in hockey.
The Thunder operated for six seasons, from 1993 to 1999. Despite their lack of affiliation with an NHL team, the Thunder averaged more than 7,000 fans per game in their first four seasons at the Thomas and Mack Center, located on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“It was very, very well received,” said Goring, who coached the Thunder to a 115-point season in 1993-94. “The Thomas and Mack Center wasn’t ideal circumstances for hockey, but we played to near-capacity crowds every night, and there was a lot of talk around town. A lot of people enjoyed the IHL.”
Attendance dwindled as the team struggled in the subsequent two seasons, and the university refused to negotiate a new agreement with the Thunder after 1999. The team ended up folding after it failed to secure a suitable building.
The Wranglers of the East Coast Hockey League, a minor league two levels down from the NHL, have a similar story. They existed for 11 years and were most famous for their annual midnight game. They played in the Orleans Arena at the Orleans Hotel and Casino, about a mile from the Las Vegas Strip. The Wranglers reached the Kelly Cup finals twice, including a 2008 appearance under the leadership of Glen Gulutzan, a former coach of the Dallas Stars.
But hit hard by the recession and waning interest, the team ceased operation after Orleans Arena would not renew its lease in 2014.
Still, the failed hockey experiments in Las Vegas have yielded several youth organizations, including a girls-only hockey team, the Nevada Heat. The Nevada Storm, a youth hockey program run out of the Las Vegas Ice Center by the brothers John and Kirk Brooks, has been a major proponent of bringing the NHL to Las Vegas.
The brothers led last year’s season-ticket drive and advertised on their rink’s boards to raise awareness. That work, in part, allowed the Storm to become a member of the city’s Founding 75, a committee of the most influential people committed to helping Las Vegas land an NHL team.
“Each of these people was supposed to generate a certain number of tickets,” John Brooks said of the committee members. “We wanted to put the youth organization as part of the Founding 75. We weren’t worried about our own names being on the list. We want to help bring the NHL to Vegas.”
The Storm and the Las Vegas Flames, another youth hockey league, operate in-house leagues and travel teams that have produced a budding crop of young players. The number of travel players with the Storm has nearly quadrupled in two years under coach Gabe Gauthier’s direction, going from three teams and 45 players to eight teams and 175 participants. That includes a junior team that competes in the Western States Hockey League.
The Storm’s in-house league accommodates about 200 players, and its Learn to Play and Learn to Skate programs are at capacity.
“It’s gotten a lot better,” the longtime Las Vegas sports-talk radio host Dave Cokin said of the city’s youth hockey leagues. “We’ve even had a few kids who have gone on to major Division I colleges. Who knows how much better it would get with an NHL team, but there’s got to be a correlation.”
Jason Zucker has a strong connection to Las Vegas. Except for two years spent in Newport Beach, California, he played the majority of his youth hockey in the Las Vegas Outlaws, a former youth organization, before moving to Michigan for junior hockey when he was 15.
“The hockey was pretty good,” Zucker said. “We used to travel to tournaments, and people would ask, ‘You guys are from Vegas?’ But when we’d play against them, they were surprised by how good we were.”
After he was drafted by the Minnesota Wild in the second round of the 2010 NHL draft, Zucker went to the University of Denver and has played for the Wild since 2012. Despite spending his NHL career in hockey-mad Minnesota, Zucker has kept a close eye on the sport’s evolution in Las Vegas.
Zucker has seen people like Gauthier, who played eight NHL games in the Kings’ organization during a nine-year pro career, and Ken Quinney, a coach for the Flames who played for the Thunder and also played 59 NHL games with the Quebec Nordiques, take over the youth programs and help in their progression.
“It’s evolved quite a bit,” Zucker said. “There is better coaching — people who care about the kids and care about hockey in general. I think that’s the thing people miss is that people care about hockey.”
Because of its successful youth programs, Las Vegas may be ahead of other warm-weather expansion cities. In places like Tampa, Florida, Phoenix and South Florida, youth organizations cropped up as a result of NHL teams’ arriving in town, but hockey in Las Vegas has grown independently of the NHL. The league has held a number of exhibition games in the city, and its annual awards ceremony has been in Las Vegas for the past six years.
“We have a foundation before the big-market NHL team got here, and having that good foundation will make it grow even more,” Gauthier said. “We’ve been working very hard to establish the youth program and create an identity in Las Vegas, and having the help of an NHL team will help grow that faster.”
The NHL would also be poised to capitalize on one of the few sports markets in the United States with a fan base that is pining for its first major league team. The area is home to a Class AAA baseball team, a New York Mets affiliate, and hosts the NBA summer league, but Las Vegas’ Major League Soccer expansion bid was passed over last year.
“Being the first sport added, you have a unique chance rather than being the third or fourth sport in a city like Denver or Phoenix,” Brooks said.
Major leagues have been reticent to come to Las Vegas because of the city’s sports gambling industry. But in recent years, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has endorsed the expansion of legalized sports gambling. On Thursday, Las Vegas Sands Corp. announced plans to build a new football stadium for UNLV, and the owner of the Raiders, Mark Davis, who is looking for a home for his team, visited Friday.
“When you think of Las Vegas, you think of the gambling center of North America,” Goring, the former Thunder coach, said. “But it’s a town that is very in tune with what is happening in the sports landscape. They may be coming at it from another angle, but I don’t foresee that as a problem. I think it’ll do wonderfully.”
The T-Mobile Arena is near completion on the Strip. It will seat 17,500 for hockey and was designed to attract either an NBA or an NHL team.
MGM Grand Resorts and the Anschutz Entertainment Group privately financed the arena, which already has events planned — including an opening-night concert on April 6 featuring Wayne Newton and the Killers.
An NHL team in Las Vegas would not be without challenges, of course. Winning — a tall order for any expansion team — is the best way to gain attention. But the club must also be concerned with pricing itself fairly, but competitively, among the city’s many entertainment options or risk shutting out the local population.
Upper-level seats for full-season packages at T-Mobile Arena start at about $20 per ticket per game. Lower-level seats start at $90 apiece, and fans who place long-term commitments — some of which span 10 years — will have first choice of seat location.
“If the average ticket price is going to be $90, then they’ll have trouble selling tickets,” Cokin, the radio host, said. “There’s so much entertainment in this town, and asking a family of four to spend $400, that won’t happen.”
But Brooks said he believed a pro sports team — especially hockey — in town would be different.
“There are a lot of people that say, ‘Oh, you know Vegas has all that entertainment,’” he said. “But nothing compares to pro sports. Plus, hockey is so much better live and in person.”
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