A Season Of Healing After Oct. 1 Mass Shooting In Vegas Comes Full Circle For Golden Knights Tonight With Possible Playoff Clinching On Home Ice

By ALAN SNEL

LVSportsBiz.com

 

Route 91 Harvest country music festival, Las Vegas Strip and Vegas Golden Knights. Oct. 1.

 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida and Florida Panthers. Feb. 14.

 

Two horrific mass shootings that killed 75 people between them. Fifty-eight perished at an outdoor night-time music event on the Strip, just a few hours after the Golden Knights finished a pre-season NHL game at nearby T-Mobile Arena.  Seventeen gone at day-time at a high school in South Florida in the suburban northwest corner of Broward County.

 

And in both cases, local NHL teams did all they could to help their respective communities heal and cope the best they could. That’s why LVSportsBiz.com is writing this story after we first published a story on this topic about a month ago.

 

 

Monday night, the Golden Knights play the opening game of their historic season’s last homestand.

 

The Las Vegas NHL team has come full circle with tonight’s game because the Golden Knights can clinch a playoff berth against the Colorado Avalanche after starting the regular season Oct. 10 with an emotionally-charged win over the Arizona Coyotes only nine days after the most horrific and deadliest mass shooting rampage in our nation’s history.

 

On that Oct. 10 evening at T-Mobile Arena, the Golden Knights’ senior statesman, defenseman Deryk Engelland, gave a goose bumps-inspiring pre-game ceremony talk that set the tone for healing in Las Vegas after a man used a Mandalay Bay casino-hotel suite as a perch to slaughter 58 music festival fans and injure another 700.

 

We always go back to our first home game. It wasn’t about our team winning. It was about the first responders and the tragedy that happened the week before that. It was a tough way to start our season, but I think the guys and everyone supported it well. The all went out and played an unbelievable first night and I just think it carried over. It was a real tough game, and really we came to the rink that night and it had nothing to do with winning the first game ever in our own building. It had everything to do with thanking the first responders and all those people. — VGK Coach Gerard Gallant

 

Golden Knights fans — and Las Vegas — will never forget these words:

And last month, the Florida Panthers’ veteran goaltender, Roberto Luongo, gave a stirring and emotional speech in the spirit of Engelland’s public words to help the emotional mending in Parkland. Here is Luongo’s speech.

 

There is a direct tie between Las Vegas and Parkland. Golden Knights coach Gerard Gallant and linemates Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith used to play for the Florida Panthers, and know Parkland, while Luongo lives in Parkland.

 

On Saturday, in the wake of a nation upset by so many mass shootings involving rapid-fire weapons you typically associate with the battlefields of war, Americans took their call to stop gun violence to the streets of Las Vegas, Parkland, Washington, D.C.,  Los Angeles and hundreds of other cities across the land.

 

LVSportsBiz.com caught up with American-born Golden Knights player Jon Merrill, who attended the University of Michigan and understands the social and political implications of gun violence in this country. Merrill explained that his girlfriend and her daughters were part of the march in Las Vegas Saturday when his team played the Avalanche in Denver.

 

Here is our interview with Merrill at his locker after this morning’s practice at the team’s Summerlin training center:

The fact is NHL players typically don’t speak out on social or political issues too much in the U.S.

 

There’s an obvious reason.

 

Many NHL players come from countries outside of the U.S. Indeed, the Golden Knights’ roster is made up of hockey players from not only Canada, but from Sweden, France, Czechoslovakia and Finland. They may play on a team anchored in the American southwest desert, but their sensibilities on public issues are rooted in other nations with different approaches to gun safety and racial topics. And they may not be at ease in discussing complicated American issues like gun violence.

 

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One of the Golden Knights’ most pleasant players is defensive-minded forward Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, who is born in Le Blanc-Mesnil, France and normally enjoys chatting with writers. But this morning, Bellamare declined to talk with LVSportsBiz.com on the mass shootings and the marches, saying he did not feel comfortable to discuss it because he didn’t know all the information around Saturday’s public marches in this country.

 

Another cheery VGK player is defenseman Brad Hunt, known for his friendliness to fans and his left-handed slapshot. Hunt is from British Columbia, Canada and offered his perspectives on the role of professional athletes when it comes to social/political issues during this morning’s interview with LVSportsBiz.com.

Pro athletes — like all of us — have to decide when there’s an issue compelling enough to speak out on. Sports can be fun and magical, like when Loyola-Chicago hoopsters takes a Cinderella journey to college basketball’s Final Four, with Sister Jean Bobbleheads lining the trek.

 

But sports can also be a platform to speak out on hot-button issues, as we have seen in the National Football League and just recently in Sacramento, where Sacramento Kings and Boston Celtics players wore shirts in the wake of a recent police shooting of a local resident.

 

But one thing we can agree on is the Vegas Golden Knights and Florida Panthers are forever linked this season in helping their respective sunbelt communities heal after tragic and painful mass shootings.

 

And a season of healing that began Oct. 10 with four goals in the first nine minutes and a win against the Arizona Coyotes continues tonight when the Golden Knights could secure a ticket to the Stanley Cup playoffs.

 

LVSportsBiz.com will be at T-Mobile Arena tonight and return to this story later for updates.

 

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