Hard To Say Good-Bye After Golden Knights’ Miracle 2017-18 Season

By Alan Snel

LVSportsBiz.com

 

They wore the number 18 jerseys with “Neal” on the back and even the number 57 Golden Knights sweater, too, for David Perron during VGK Season 2 even though inaugural season standouts James Neal and Perron were long gone by the time Vegas’ sophomore season came along.

So, Golden Knights fans have been through this before, losing a favorite home-town player and expansion draft pick to another NHL team.

And Monday they endured it again after Season 2, as original June 2017 expansion draftees like Erik Haula, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare and Colin Miller along with versatile Season 1 forward Ryan Carpenter all said good-bye to Las Vegas recently, leaving fans with pangs of sadness and memories from a miracle first season.

 

Here’s one fan’s outlook via the Vegas Knights Click page on Facebook:

 

 

That’s business in the National Hockey League — and the other professional sports leagues where player contracts have to square with salary caps and team budgets.

Here’s how VGK superfan Christopher “Warmies Guy” Green put it: “I truly value the contributions of all the players we are saying goodbye to today many of whom have become as close to us as our family members. I will forever treasure the experiences and interactions I have had with them. In the end hockey teams have to be run as a pay-as-you-go business and staring down that unforgiving bottom line is a very difficult task for the best financial managers, of which George McPhee is one. All of our wonderful former teammates know they are welcome back to Las Vegas on or off the ice.”

When you’re a NHL player, you’re just not known by the number on the back of your hockey sweater. You’re also known by the salary cap hit you inflict on your team’s salary budget. The Knights, like everyone else, are trying to cap salary expenses at $81.5 million.

 

Golden Knights hockey chief George McPhee said he was “really happy” for Carpenter and Bellemare.

“It’s the nature of the business,” McPhee said during a 15-minute Q and A with media Monday afternoon at the VGK headquarters in Summerlin.

“Three, four, five players move.”

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