The Swamp

mister d wrote: ↑Sun Aug 05, 2018 9:16 am Sounds like Vegas is betting he doesn’t reach that goal mark again.

Right, which is the safe/smart bet. But if he does, he's gonna have to get paid big-time.

And they can cover that, so probably agree it makes sense.

Vegas' ECHL affiliate (Quad City) folded, so it looks like the new affiliate is going to be Fort Wayne. Personally, I think it's cool as shit. I remember going to see an occasional game at the War Memorial back in the day.

So VGK had a season ticket holder pre-sale today for regular season tickets where season ticket holders could buy some extra tickets for a game if they wanted and I thought I'd maybe pick up a couple extra tickets for the Red Wings game in March.

I navigate to that game and see there's tickets available in our section, but a few rows higher up and think that'll be perfect and guess how much they wanted per ticket? I'll wait.

$225. EACH. Before the BS ticket fees. For essentially a random regular season game. I honestly thought they fucked up and left the Stanley Cup Finals pricing in there so I sent an email to our ticket rep and he said everything was correct.

Who the fuck in their right mind would pay that? Even with the crazy demand last year our tickets were "only" selling on the secondary market for about $150-$170 each for even peak games like Chicago or Pittsburgh. (They're about $60 each per ticket face.)

Guess I can't begrudge them trying to make a buck, especially if morons are willing to pay it but god damn.

brian wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:42 pm Vegas' ECHL affiliate (Quad City) folded, so it looks like the new affiliate is going to be Fort Wayne. Personally, I think it's cool as shit. I remember going to see an occasional game at the War Memorial back in the day.

Fuck the Komets. :)

brian wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 11:43 amGuess I can't begrudge them trying to make a buck, especially if morons are willing to pay it but god damn.

If they fall back to earth, that could tremendously backfire.

Yeah, though it may not matter this year. But it’s not a good look regardless. I really don’t understand why anyone would pay it. Even if they hit near their O/U on points this season (96) for what would be a fairly average season league-wide there’s no way tickets on the secondary market will be that expensive. Hell, if they hit 110 pts again I don’t think upper bowl seats will be going for more than about $150.

If they are going for about $250 each then I’ll have to sell a few games because I’d be a damned fool not to.

brian wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 4:56 pm If they are going for about $250 each then I’ll have to sell a few games because I’d be a damned fool not to.

A guy with season ticket seats near our group's seats told me that at the beginning of each season, he puts up for sale his tickets to the most desirable games, at ridiculous prices, just to see if anybody bites. Sometimes, somebody does.

Vegas went all out to welcome Pacioretty.

Same picture each time is like when a half dozen celebrities all tweet an endorsement with the same basic wording, right?

Not certain I get the reference but adjusting the stuff on Strip marquees isn’t as common as you think I believe.

To be sure, on some level this is the normal kind of sucking up stuff a new player will say to the media, but it says a lot that a guy who was a captain of the most storied team in the NHL is blown away by the crowd at a preseason game with a team that is in its second year.

I’m certain GMGM doesn’t want to be giving a 19-year-old serious minutes on D but he’s gonna have to. Brannstrom is too good to be playing in the AHL.

I think the one thing that all of the national pieces about how quickly the city adopted the Knights get wrong or can’t quite understand unless you live here is just how deep the fandom permiates which is something I’ve never seen in this town.

Not unlike a lot of places there are many Las Vegas. There are about 200,000 or so people who don’t speak English. There are people who landed here on their last chance. There are Vietnamese bartenders in downtown bars who almost certainly have never seen a hockey game except as background noise. And everywhere you go or what you do people are all in.

There might have been 2 million people here but this place wasn’t really a city before the Knights.

The thing that professional sports get you that nothing else does is being in a bar watching a game and seeing a 1 percenter biker running around the bar giving high fives after a goal.

Pretty impressive for a franchise in its second year (noteworthy only because it's the players saying it). Nashville and Vegas will have some definite advantages luring players with the tax incentives and fan.

That's great. But,it will be interesting to see if the fan intensity is the same in ten years. I'm sure they'll still be good fans, but it's a hard thing to sustain over time.

The thing is, the magic of last year set an immediate culture of winning and FUN that will likely take something like a 2 or 3 year walk in the wilderness of shitty hockey to break.

If they can maintain playoff level hockey (not always easy), they will sustain that atmosphere.

Trailer for the documentary on the 2017-18 VGK season just dropped.

Does the trailer include spoilers?

Nonlinear FC wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2019 1:29 pm Does the trailer include spoilers?

Hopefully they have to shoot a new ending after this year's playoffs.

ETA: I honestly don't know how much of it is focused specifically on last year's season vs. the birth of the team and the aftermath of 1 October, etc., etc.

VGK had their rookie camp last week/weekend and one of the non-roster invitees was a kid (Keenan Suthers) who plays at St. Lawrence who is 6-foot-9. And he's a forward (the tallest forward in NHL history is 6-foot-6). I tried to get some pics to show just how freaking tall this kid is, but only got him hunched over (like for faceoffs, etc.)

This story is from three years ago when he was "only" 6-7, but I'm rooting for him to get signed as college FA by someone. He's a pretty nice player, not just some kind of freakshow.

Ryan Reaves got approval from the Las Vegas City Council for a license to open a brewery and distillery in downtown Las Vegas and also (jokingly, presumably) called out my councilman (who is a tremendous asshole - I wish him ill):

Well that's a completely logical place to have it.

mister d wrote: ↑Wed Aug 21, 2019 12:16 pm Well that's a completely logical place to have it.

They wouldn't get much of a crowd in Lake Placid.

It'd be awesome if one of the players talked shit about Trump and it made him call the Miracle on Ice overrated.

Giff wrote: ↑Wed Aug 21, 2019 1:51 pm It'd be awesome if one of the players talked shit about Trump and it made him call the Miracle on Ice overrated.

Those guys are all in their 60s. Given that, they are probably more likely to be maga.

sancarlos wrote: ↑Wed Aug 21, 2019 1:56 pm

Giff wrote: ↑Wed Aug 21, 2019 1:51 pm It'd be awesome if one of the players talked shit about Trump and it made him call the Miracle on Ice overrated.

Those guys are all in their 60s. Given that, they are probably more likely to be maga.

"Eruzione says 1980 Russian team had 'a lot of good people.'"

I try to avoid pointing this out here too often but within 15-20 years Vegas is going to be one of NHL’s cornerstone franchises along with most of the Original Six and probably bigger than some of those from a worldwide perspective. They’re already in the top 10 in the NHL as far as followers from outside North America on social media after only two years.

So stuff like this is going to be the new norm.

We just had our preseason tickets delivered electronically and since I can't go to the first two games on the 15th and then the 26th (gonna be in Detroit and then St. Louis, respectively), I posted them for sale for almost double face value and they sold almost instantly. Preseason tickets. For almost double face value.

ETA: I realize Vegas gets knocked a little for the value of the tickets being inflated by the number of opposing fans who are trying to buy, which creates this ridiculous demand that obviously outstrips supply in a 17,000 seat arena with standing room for 1,000, but these aren't Coyotes fans buying tickets for a preseason game at double face.

BFIH.

I wouldn't go that far, but amazingly, surprisingly good fans. (I would put a Pepsi Challenge up to anyone who has never been to an NHL game in person to attend a game in Las Vegas and then attend a game in a random other NHL city/arena and compare the two.)

For those of us who lived here a long time, this is pretty surprising. And it's not just because the team is good (though that helps obvs). It goes beyond that. Some of it has to do when them getting here (as far as pro sports) first*. Some of it has to do with what happened after 1 October. Some of it has to do with there was always a lot of people who relocated here from Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, etc. and were willing to sell their friends and neighbors on the NHL. This team has created a lot of new hockey fans, which is the whole idea behind going into a new market. The TV ratings for the playoffs in Las Vegas after VGK were eliminated were still top 10 in the United States.

* - This is kind of apropos of nothing as far as a footnote, but Bettman -- for all of the deserved criticism he gets because of the labor strife -- deserves credit for at least as much stuff as he gets shit about and one of the things he was right/smart about was that getting the NHL in Las Vegas first would help the league grow revenues, not just in Las Vegas but from relationships with gaming and internationally. I feel like there's a full-throated defense of Bettman as a commissioner that needs to be written by someone.

VGK has a third jersey finally coming out this summer and it is going to be gold. I can pretty much guarantee it's either going to be the coolest third jersey in the league or an absolutely disaster. There's a reason most teams don't wear gold as a primary color.

I'm still scarred by these tbh: