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Frank Doyle
Las Vegas Group Takes Next Step in Securing NHL Franchise
The ownership group aiming to bring an NHL franchise to Las Vegas is now moving on to the second phase of its plan to have a hockey team ready for the 2016-17 season.
Since starting the ticket drive in late February, an ESPN report indicates the Vegas team has sold more than 10,000 season ticket deposits and has now moved on to focus its attention to larger businesses and corporations. Bill Foley, the team’s prospective owner, has Vegas casinos as well as banking institutions, telecommunications companies as well as major delivery services like UPS and FedEx.
“We’ve done really, really well,” Foley told reporters.
By all accounts, after the ticket drive slowed a little over the past month, that’s exactly what has happened over the past couple of weeks as the group tries to fill a stadium of approximately 17,500 people.
“When they designed their ticket drive, they did it with our input and basically we told them what we’d like to see is how many local, non-corporate fans they can get to put up real money without a promise of having a NHL team,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told Sportsnet earlier this month. “If you look at it through that lens, I think the response has been good. Because if you add to that what they probably have already in corporate and casino commitments, they basically have a full building.”
And that’s big news for the NHL in general. The league may not admit it just yet, but at some point it will want to even the number of teams in the Eastern and Western Conference. As of now there is 16 teams and 14 in the West, so you’d think some sort of conference realignment or another expansion team would make sense at some point.
The NHL will return to Las Vegas in June for the 2014-15 NHL Awards Ceremony.
