By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
On Tuesday, the Vegas Golden Knights will roll out General Manager Kelly McCrimmon, coach Pete DeBoer and, as a VGK press release put it, “select players,” to answer questions from the media.
The regular season has ended and so has the Golden Knights’ season — an oddity after the Vegas expansion team made the National Hockey League postseason in its first four seasons.
In season 5 — or Year V as the team promoted it — the Golden Knights failed to make the playoffs in a league that invites half of its teams to vie for a Stanley Cup title.
The VGK will be answering questions Tuesday about a season that did not meet expectations.
Veteran Golden Knights winger Max Pacioretty said the team underperformed — an interesting term when you consider McCrimmon used the same word to describe the Golden Knights’ performance when former VGK coach Gerard Gallant was fired Jan. 15, 2020.
Gallant has guided the New York Rangers to a playoff spot this season. Gallant’s successor in Las Vegas, Pete DeBoer, has not.
It will be fascinating to see what type of tone Tuesday’s final “media availability” takes when you consider that it’s difficult to get to the truth on Golden Knights player issues and injuries during a season with so many injuries to key players.
The case of Robin Lehner near the end of the season was a classic example as the the national media reported Lehner’s season was done with season-ending surgery while the team countered that Lehner was ready to play if called upon. A few days later, the team sent a link to the media explaining, “Robin Lehner will undergo shoulder surgery and will miss the remainder of the 2021-22 season.”
What happened to Reilly Smith, an original Golden Knights player? He’s injured, but the team has not disclosed much on Smith.
It’s a franchise that controls the public perception and narrative through press releases and limited player availability after practices and games.
The team of Misfits in Year 1 that used its speed and hustle to reach a Stanley Cup Final is now a franchise of older individual talents that failed to click enough to reach the 16-team Stanley Cup tournament in Year 5.
The franchise may have underperformed on the ice in 2022, but it maxed out on home ticket revenues as the VGK sold enough tickets to fill T-Mobile Arena to 104 percent of capacity by averaging announced average attendance of 18,100 in a building with 17,367 fixed seats.
In the limited times that VGK president Kerry Bubolz and team ticket sales chief Todd Pollock discussed ticket prices with the media, Bubolz and Pollock led the media to believe that Golden Knights ticket prices were in the middle of the pack in the NHL.
Not so. The Team Marketing Report, a Chicago-based publication that analyzes ticket and fan cost prices in major league sports, found an average Golden Knights home ticket was fourth highest in the 32-team league. Team Marketing Report said the average Knights ticket was $124.09 — a high price for a team based in one of the smaller NHL markets in the United States.
Here’s a graphic showing average attendance capacity rates as tweeted out by PuckReportNHL.
The Golden Knights launched a franchise in 2017 amid civic pride after a horrific mass shooting on the Strip, fun entertainment acts like Blue Man Group and a miracle run to the league championship finals.
Five years later, the fun, cuddly feelings for Las Vegas’ first major league team have been replaced with a mixed bag of emotions surrounding an underperforming team with a credibility gap of information.
The Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil intermission acts are long gone.
Let’s see what happens at 9:30 AM Tuesday.
PSA