There’s no feeling quite like being beat at your own game, particularly when your competition comes waltzing in down the very trail that you spent your career blazing.
After putting in years’ worth of lobbying, organizing and stereotype-fighting grunt work to convince the National Hockey League to award Las Vegas an expansion franchise, Bill Foley and company will soon find themselves playing second fiddle to football’s Raiders – which received approval this week to relocate from Oakland.
While some would reckon the biggest losers in Raiders’ move are the Clark County taxpayers who will end up paying at least $750 million for the new stadium, Foley and the Golden Knights franchise are the ones who would be most justified to pull their hair out in frustration.
Though Foley diplomatically expressed his perspective on a local radio show this week, he left little room for ambiguity.
“If I had complete control of the situation, I would not have opted to have the Raiders come here,” Foley said on the Vegas Hockey Hotline radio show, per the Las Vegas Sun. “But I didn’t, so I welcome them.”
Not only is Raider fever raining on the Golden Knight parade just six months before the puck drops on the team’s inaugural season, it means Foley’s monopoly on professional sports in the Las Vegas valley will last just three seasons.
Adding insult to injury is that Foley didn’t receive a dime of public money for his efforts while Mark Davis and the Raiders were lavished with what is likely the most expensive stadium subsidy in U.S. history.
“I felt like there were a lot better ways to spend $750 million than bringing the Raiders to Las Vegas,” Foley said, per the Sun. “We could spend it on police, firefighters and teachers and have them all be the best in the country. But I guess we’re going to spend it on the Raiders.”
For Foley, the clock is now ticking to get his franchise not just up and running but competitive before 2020 when the Raiders parade into town.
The problem is that manufactured hype tends to subside quickly around teams that aren’t very good, particularly when there are other options become available. The Raiders are a team on the rise with young stars on both offense and defense like Derek Carr, Amari Cooper and Khalil Mack, and those players will likely be in the prime of their careers come 2020.
Unfortunately, building the Golden Knights overnight is an uphill proposition. Starting an expansion franchise in any sport is an arduous task, and the process of building a team from scrap into a competitive force is a long haul that never even comes to full fruition for many teams.
Consider, the last four NHL expansion franchises – Minnesota and Columbus in 2000, Atlanta (now Winnipeg) in 1999 and Nashville in 1998 – have between them won a grand total of seven playoff series in 67 combined seasons.
The nine most recent franchises – including in Anaheim, Florida, Ottawa, Tampa Bay and San Jose – have combined for 60 playoff series wins and three Stanley Cups over 186 seasons dating back to 1991 with 41 of those series wins came from just three teams.
By contrast, the “Original Six” franchises have combined to win six titles over that same period. Pittsburgh, though not an original team, has added another three.
The nine aforementioned franchises combined for just two winning campaigns over their first three seasons. The notable success story is the Florida Panthers, who lost in the Stanley Cup Finals in their third year in 1995-96. They have yet to win another playoff series since, however.
It’s safe to say that Foley will need nothing short of a miracle to produce a competitive squad in his three-year window.
But can’t hockey and football co-exist?
Of course they can. But the ubiquitous presence of the NFL empire tends to crowd out other sports within local markets. For example, the Washington Capitals are the best team in the NHL at the moment with 106 points, but the conversation on the city’s sports talk radio shows is driven by the Redskins – arguably the NFL’s most dysfunctional team – 365 days a year.
The other issue here is that the appeal of being the only pro team in the market was clearly one of the reasons the NHL awarded the team to Vegas. It could have given the team to Quebec City – which would have been a much smaller but hockey fanatical market.
As I’ve written in this space before, hockey is by nature a niche sport that has minimal intrinsic appeal to people who live in the Sun Belt, as ice skating is not a desert pastime and is probably one of the most physically difficult activities to learn how to do as an adult. This is why the NHL’s southward migration during the 1990s was largely a failure.
For the Golden Knights to be broadly embraced by locals, especially if they aren’t very good, the monopoly factor is critical.
All that said, I am happy for Vegas and I will be cheering for the Golden Knights – especially as their logo is reminiscent of Boba Fett from Star Wars. Here’s to hoping their Vegas fan base is as loyal as their early season ticket sale figures suggest and that they shatter the precedent set by their colleagues of the 1990s expansion era.
