Record-Setting Crowd As Golden Knights Lose To Sharks In OT
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
The Vegas Golden Knights keep packing them in and generating millions of dollars of gate revenues with a record attendance of 18,671 Saturday as the Golden Knights dropped their first game in the postseason when the San Jose Sharks defeated the first-year team, 4-3, in double overtime to knot the conference semi-final series at one game apiece.
LVSportsBiz.com tracks the standing room only areas near the fortress/castle stage and along the Hyde Lounge overhang areas in T-Mobile Arena to gauge the attendance sizes.
The 18,671 announced attendance was another record-setting crowd size. The official seating capacity is 17,367. The Knights filled their home arena behind the New York-New York parking garage to 103.9 percent of capacity during the regular season’s 41 home dates. LVSportsBiz.com estimated a crowd in the 18,600 range.
The Golden Knights loss means there will be a Game 5 and another event that will generate several million dollars in gate revenues. Figure 18,500 fans at $200 per average ticket ( a conservative low price) and that’s $3.7 million, minus the players’ cut.
And like the first two home games between the VGK and LA Kings in Round 1 and the first game of Round 2 with the Sharks, the crowd was overwhelmingly Golden Knights’ grey-clad partisans.
Team President Kerry Bubolz told a Latin Chamber of Commerce lunch crowd Thursday that he was chatting with the CEO of the Kings who mentioned to him that the strategy of trying to keep the crowd mostly Golden Knights fans was working.
There weren’t many Kings fans in the big ice house on the Strip in Round 1 and the same could be said about the number of teal-clad Sharks fans in Games 1 and 2 of Round 2.
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The series now switches to San Jose for Games 3 and 4 Monday and Wednesday. In Las Vegas, watch parties are set for the downtown events center owned by The D Monday and at the plaza next to T-Mobile Arena Wednesday.
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