There was plenty of excitement surrounding the NHL’s official announcement of a 31st expansion team, with a Las Vegas franchise set to join the league in 2017-18.
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The team will make the 17,500-seat T-Mobile Arena its home on the Vegas strip, and will play in the Western Conference.
The IHL’s Las Vegas Thunder attracted large crowds in the 1990s when they played at the Thomas and Mack Center, and the ECHL’s Las Vegas Wranglers took the Thunder’s place until 2014 while playing at the Orleans Arena.
Las Vegas marks the first NHL expansion team since 1997, when the league agreed to add teams on a staggered basis in Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus and Minnesota.
“We are pleased to welcome Bill Foley and the city of Las Vegas to the League and are truly excited that an NHL franchise will be the first major professional sports team in this vibrant, growing, global destination city”.
While Quebec City has been an NHL market in the past and is rich with hockey fans, Las Vegas represents yet another chance to grow the sport in a non-traditional and untapped hockey market.
Protect seven forwards, three defensemen, one goaltender. They’ll have the same lottery odds as the third-to-last team from the 2016-17 season.
Along with a top-six pick in next year’s draft, the Vegas franchise will be stocked by a June 2017 expansion draft that will be more favorable than previous drafts, theoretically allowing Foley’s team to become competitive more quickly.
The expansion efforts won’t be cheap for the Foley/Maloof group either, as Yahoo reports (citing the Associated Press) that the expansion fee for the new Las Vegas team is expected to be $500 million.
“We think this is a tremendously exciting opportunity not just for Las Vegas but for the league as well”, Bettman told news conference in Las Vegas. I lived in & absolutely loved Las Vegas.
Quebec City’s dreams of landing a National Hockey League team were crushed on Wednesday but the company behind the bid vowed to keep working on bringing the Nordiques back to Canada.
While we still have a full season before Las Vegas has the opportunity to form their team, let the speculation begin as to which players will be available when the Expansion Draft opens up. The addition of Las Vegas to the NHL could be a solid success due to the major factor that it will be the only major league team in the city, or it could be a failure over the long term once the initial excitement levels off.
The team will begin to build its roster with an expansion draft in June 2017 ahead of its inaugural campaign.
Bettman also announced that an expansion bid from Quebec City was deferred.. We don’t want there to be another agenda. He has strongly considered the Black Knights, a name that has special meaning to Foley, a West Point graduate.
When Patrice Bergeron was asked Tuesday what he thought when he heard “Las Vegas”, the Bruins centerman did not miss a beat.
There won’t be much winning right away in all likelihood, but if Foley listens to his fans and shows a willingness to adapt to their wants and needs, maybe this can work. The players selected will also have to have a combined value of between 60 to 100 percent of the previous season’s salary cap ceiling.
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“The decision to defer however, was based on elements over which the Quebec City group had no control whatsoever.”
