It’s Official: Golden Knights Face San Jose Sharks In Round 1 Of Stanley Cup Tourney
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
Now that we know the Vegas Golden Knights and the San Jose Sharks will face each other in the playoffs’ first round, I’m expecting the home games at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas to have only a small percentage of Sharks fans in the building.
Do you recall last season’s playoffs when the Knights defeated the Sharks in round two? There were only small numbers of San Jose fans at the Big Ice House on the Strip when the Golden Knights were the home team.
During least year’s playoffs when I interviewed the few Sharks fans who had traveled to attend the playoff games in Las Vegas, they told me the tickets were too costly in Las Vegas for many San Jose fans to buy.
This season, the Golden Knights are again instituting the “Knights Vow” playoff ticket program, which allows VGK fans to pay a lower price for home playoff tickets if they agree to not re-sell the ticket. That program worked well last year in the first two rounds, when T-Mobile Arena did not see see too many Los Angeles Kings or Sharks fans in those two rounds.
The Knights and Sharks are developing a rivalry, especially after Saturday’s Sharks’ 4-3 overtime win over the VGK when Knights forward Ryan Reaves and Sharks forward Joe Thornton battled and were each fined Sunday $2,500 for high sticking.
And funny enough, the first battle between the Knights and Sharks was during the summer of 2017 between the teams’ social media staffs. At the time, LVSportsBiz.com wrote about a testy Twitter exchange between the Sharks and the Knights. It began with the San Jose Twitter account pointing out that its local temperature was actually two degrees warmer than the Las Vegas weather Sept. 1, 2017.
And then the VGK account tweeted, “Because everybody knows how good @SanJoseSharks are at holding leads.”
Ouch!
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LVSportsBiz.com will again be at the Top of the Escalator for Monday night’s game when the Knights host the Edmonton Oilers for a 7 p.m. start. We will have the pregame segment on Facebook Live.
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