LAS VEGAS -- Before the Los Angeles Kings' final home preseason game in Las Vegas earlier this month, Luc Robitaille, the president of business operations for the Kings, presented Bill Foley, the majority owner of Las Vegas' NHL franchise, with a silver hockey stick. It was a ceremonial passing of the torch from the team that had been Las Vegas' adopted hockey team to the team that next season will become Las Vegas' first major professional sports franchise.
"The Kings had a lot to do with developing interest in hockey in Las Vegas," Foley said. "They've been playing preseason games here for years. It's great for us. We're coming in here a couple of steps ahead."
Not only have the Kings been playing preseason hockey games in Las Vegas since 1991, but the Anschutz Entertainment Group, the company that owns the Kings, has been trying to build an arena in Las Vegas, which it always believed could house an NHL team, for the past decade. AEG was able to partner with MGM Resorts International a little more than two years ago to build the T-Mobile Arena on the Las Vegas Strip, just behind the New York-New York and Monte Carlo hotels. The arena, which opened in April, was a big reason the NHL awarded Las Vegas and Foley an expansion franchise two months later.
"We always felt an arena would be successful here," said Dan Beckerman, AEG president and CEO and alternate governor of the Kings. "The fact that the arena was coming out of the ground made it real for everyone. And for the prospects of Bill Foley and his group, having the arena as a reality made the process of getting a team a lot smoother."
As a company with a 50 percent ownership interest in T-Mobile Arena, the addition of an NHL team as an anchor tenant was always a hope for AEG, but as the owners of the Kings, the larger goal was also to bring in a new hockey team to the West Coast, create a rivalry and ease the travel burden for the Kings.
When the Kings were part of the NHL's major expansion in 1967, they joined the league along with the California Seals in Oakland (and four other teams). After the Seals left town in 1976, the Kings were left as the only team west of Minnesota and south of the Canadian border for much of the next 15 years until the San Jose Sharks, Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and Phoenix Coyotes eventually joined them.
When the Las Vegas team starts play for the 2017-18 season, the Kings will not only get a new Pacific Division rival, but they will get much-needed road games that are just a 55-minute flight from Los Angeles. That's not to mention a road crowd that will likely be pro-Kings initially, with a fan base that has been cultivated over the past 25 years and Kings home and away games still shown locally in Las Vegas on Fox Sports West.
Bob Miller, who has been the play-by-play announcer of the Kings since 1973, still vividly remembers having to give the weather report before a game for the first time in his career on Sept. 27, 1991, when the Kings played the New York Rangers in an outdoor game at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Not only was it the first NHL game in the city, but it was also the first outdoor game between two NHL teams, which would become an annual tradition 17 years later.
"I remember the day of the game, they put a tarp over the ice to keep the direct rays of the sun off and it was held up by ropes but when they took it down, they dropped it down on the ice and the ropes were hot and melted into the ice," Miller said. "They were all these ridges in the ice and at 1:30 I looked out of my room at Caesars Palace and I thought, There's no way we're playing tonight."
Miller's broadcast partner, Jim Fox, who played right wing for the Kings from 1980 to 1990, wanted to take a closer look at the ice, which was littered with grasshoppers.
"Someone working on the ice asked me to strap on a pair of skates and go see how it was, and at that point it was unplayable," Fox said. "There were gauges where the tarp had fallen and melted the ice. It was up and down. So they worked on it and somehow made it work. It wasn't the best ice but it was playable by the time the game started."
It wouldn't be the last time the Kings encountered a bad playing surface in Las Vegas. In 1998, the Kings and Colorado Avalanche played at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, and the score at the end of regulation was 2-2. With the ice in bad shape, the officials asked the coaches if they wanted to decide the preseason game with a shootout. So seven years before the NHL adopted the shootout, Las Vegas got a taste of what would be in the NHL's future.
"I was confused, I didn't know what they were doing," Miller said. "I thought they had awarded Colorado a penalty shot, but the referee said the ice was so bad that they didn't want to take a chance with an overtime, so they went to the coaches and asked them if they wanted a shootout. They said sure and it went 10 rounds and Sandy Moger won the game for the Kings with a goal on Patrick Roy. A writer called the NHL the next day and asked them, 'When did you go to a shootout?' They said, 'We didn't' and he said, 'Well, you did last night in Vegas.'"
After the Kings' first game at Caesars Palace in 1991, they didn't return to Las Vegas until 1995, when they again played the Rangers, this time at Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV. The success of both games prompted the Kings to host annual preseason games in Las Vegas dubbed "Frozen Fury." The annual tradition began in 1997 at MGM Grand and ended earlier this month with the first NHL game at the new T-Mobile Arena between the Kings and the Dallas Stars. While the Kings will return to Las Vegas next season, they will do so for the first time as the road team.
"If we wouldn't have played here all these years, I don't think there would be a team here," Robitaille said. "People saw the attention we got and that hockey got year after year, and that's one of the main reasons they were able to get a team here. AEG stepping up and building the arena here was a big key, but I think it had everything to do with us playing here for so long. It was important for us to establish the league and establish market here. Now we pass the torch and look forward to a new rivalry."