Just Four Years Ago, Bettman Visited Las Vegas to Bless a Hockey Ticket Campaign — And the Rest is VGKistory

By ALAN SNEL

LVSportsBiz.com

 

A lot can happen in four years.

 

Sunday was the four-year anniversary of Gary Bettman’s visit to the MGM Grand hotel-casino to give the league’s blessing to a Las Vegas hockey ticket deposit campaign spearheaded by a property title insurance/restaurant development businessman by the name of Bill Foley and a bunch of sports-loving brothers known as the Maloofs who used to own the NBA Rockets and Kings.

 

It was Feb. 10, 2015, four years ago Sunday, when brothers Joe and Gavin Maloof joined Foley and other luminaries like then-County Commission Chairman/current Gov. Steve Sisolak at the Bettman Las Vegas pow-wow where the NHL commissioner gave his official blessing to the Foley/Maloofs ticket campaign. I remember.

I remember getting there early and seeing Foley and Bettman chatting in a corner outside the MGM Grand meeting room. Foley was confident, often telling people at the time that there were 130,000 “avid hockey fans” in the Las Vegas market who had annual incomes of at least $55,000. Maybe he was sharing that stat with Bettman right here four years ago.

 

They set up a skating surface in the MGM Grand room for two men’s hockey league players to skate in and then face each other as Gavin Maloof dropped a puck at the news conference to initiate the ticket campaign.

 

So, before there was a cute little dog wearing a mini-Fleury jersey drawing hundreds of social media likes and a giant fabricated knight helmet descending from the T-Mobile Arena rafters for VGK players to skate through to start games and a hockey team reaching the Stanley Cup Finals in its inaugural season, there was Sisolak handing over a signed check of $1,000 to Foley at the Feb. 10, 2015 event for the politician’s ticket deposit to watch a team that would be later named, “Golden Knights.” Check out photos of Joe Maloof, four years ago, and then with brother Gavin at the VGK’s inaugural season home-opener Oct. 10, 2017.

 

 

I called Joe Maloof Monday about the four-year anniversary of the official “Vegas Wants Hockey” campaign start and he said, “I’m proud to be a founding partner of a dream that now is a reality.” You can read more on the Maloofs planting the seeds of NHL hockey.

 

The early “Las Vegas Founding 75” hockey jerseys given to community leaders who paid beefy ticket deposits were draped over chairs at the Feb, 10, 2015 announcement.

Back in early 2015, the Maloof brothers were already making the rounds to hockey bars around the Las Vegas area to stir interest in flying pucks and ice skates in the desert. A couple of weeks before the Bettman visit four years earlier, the Maloof duo made a cameo at one suburban bar.  “This is a historic event,” Gavin Maloof told hockey fans that January night in 2015. “We are trying to get the first major league sports team in the 150 years of the state of Nevada. And it will be at the finest arena in the world.”

 

Construction of that arena Gavin Maloof was talking about was not close to being finished at the time. T-Mobile Arena opened more than a year later in April 2016 and it proved to be a pivotal reason why the Lords of Hockey blessed the creation of a NHL franchise in Las Vegas as the league’s 31st club.

 

In on the ticket deposit initiative was a young ticket guy named Todd Pollock, who studied sales and sponsorships at Baylor and would go on to become Vegas Golden Knights employee number one and is the VGK vp for ticketing and suites. He marked the four years with a post on Twitter Sunday.

 

Four years after Bettman came to Las Vegas, the Golden Knights are doing well. The average season ticket is now $100.18, generating tens of millions of dollars in annual ticket revenue thanks to standing-room-only crowds of 18,300 plus, which is filling the arena to 105.5 percent of capacity. For the complete VGK back story, read our LVSportsBiz.com story here.

 

The future looks bright. There are 6,000 VGK fans on a ticket waiting list. I guess that ticket campaign launched in early 2015 did OK.

 

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