Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Vegas And The NHL

09/26/2017 at 8:25am EDT

from Paul Brownfield of Bloomberg,

By late summer, some 14 million visitors had landed at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Whether they came from Boston or Beijing, many were on the ground only about 72 hours. Probably, when they deplaned, their plans were fluid. That’s why—for an experience that’s about luggage retrieval—the baggage claim at McCarran is so thrilling, filled with electronic signs teasing a multitude of options for sensory overload, or what people in hospitality here have long called “impressions.” Even in the age of screen bombardment, this remains an essential part of the Vegas-entry high—to be so wanted, you’re followed from bags to cab to hotel check-in to elevator to the first time you flick on the in-room television.

One attraction, though, was surprisingly impressionless: the Vegas Golden Knights. It’s not just a new hockey team; it’s the first franchise from one of the four major leagues—NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB—to call Las Vegas home. This seems like it should be a big deal, and maybe it will be, but I sensed it would be easier to make small talk with the rental car clerk by bringing up the Oakland Raiders’ relocation here, set for 2020.

If everyone in Las Vegas anticipates the NFL effect—casino mogul Steve Wynn has predicted a “thermonuclear” boost in room occupancy—support for the Golden Knights has a more muted, we’re-all-pulling-for-you air, as if the team were a civic light opera....

The curse of the NHL is its troublesome adaptation as a TV sport. It’s resistant to the star-making culture that’s turned the NFL and NBA into year-round, Twitter-fueled soap operas. The bland public face presented by the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Sidney Crosby, considered the game’s best player, typifies the soldierly ethos of the NHL, whose athletes rarely emerge as personalities off the ice.

The speed, choreography, and fearlessness with which the game is played could compensate for that fact, except that TV cameras don’t capture it adequately. When Bettman became commissioner in 1993, the NHL hadn’t had a U.S. broadcast network contract in almost two decades, the period in which Wayne Gretzky, the most transcendent star in the league’s 100-year history, was in his prime. This is akin to nobody outside Chicago appreciating Michael Jordan’s run with the Chicago Bulls. It affirmed Bettman’s resolve to expand hockey’s reach and put the product before American home audiences, low-single-digit ratings be damned.

much more, in-depth...

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About Kukla's Korner Hockey

Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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