from Alex Prewitt of Sports Illustrated,
And so, on his first day at the facility, Bellemare visited the team offices upstairs to make introductions and begin learning names. A nice gesture, but an almost impossible task. “Right away,” Bellemare says, “you get like, Oh boy.” Defenseman Nate Schmidt has focused his efforts on teammates, albeit with mixed results. “To establish chemistry with people you give them nicknames and start remembering everything by it,” he explains. “Sometimes they’ve liked it, sometimes I’ve gotten an awkward stare back.” Try having to manage them all. “I didn’t know a lot of our guys,” head coach Gerard Gallant says. “They’d walk by, you’d guess their name. Now you put the name with the face, it’s a lot easier.”
And how’s it going so far? “I’m awful with names. Awful.”
Sunday night, the Golden Knights had their first preseason game in Vancouver and walloped the Canucks 9-4. The next morning, city leaders proclaimed that Sept. 18 would be known as City National Arena Day in Clark County and southern Nevada. “This is a game-changer for us,” lieutenant governor Mark Hutchison told the crowd, not long before the first ceremonial puck was dropped at the new rink. “Vegas had one thing missing: Major league professional sports.”
Of course, it’s all novel for locals too. Defenseman Deryk Engelland, whose family was already living in Las Vegas during the offseason before he joined the Golden Knights, had a first-day-of-school experience Monday morning. Upon coming downstairs in his gameday suit, a few hours before flying to Denver for his preseason debut, his wife started taking pictures. “Probably the best dressed I’ve been leaving the house, for sure,” Engelland says. “Definitely a new feeling coming to the rink. It’s going to be real. We’re playing a different team.”
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