When you look at the population of Las Vegas itself the figure isn’t huge – nearly 624,000 in the city and around 2 million in the urban area. But when you look at the number of people who visit each year this leaps to an incredible 40 million plus. What’s more, it’s a figure that has been steadily rising since 1970.
So with figures like this it’s surprising that, until now, the city is so under-represented by major league sports teams. There are a number of theories behind this and one is that visitors who do come are more interested in enjoying the lavish casinos and incredible entertainment from world-famous performers rather than watching a team in which they have no direct interest.
But it’s a city that realises that gambling alone may not be enough to sustain it going forward, especially in the light of the growing popularity of the real money online casino which many people are now choosing to visit instead.
NHL comes to town
As a result, Las Vegas has for some time been trying to court major teams to establish themselves in the city and the Las Vegas Golden Knights is the first result of these efforts.
It may seem counterintuitive that the NHL’s first expansion team since 2000 should be based in a city in a desert where the temperature rarely falls below 70 degrees but this hasn’t proved to be any problem for the team so far.
In fact ever since they played their first ever match on October 6th against the Dallas Stars they’ve enjoyed an incredible run of success winning no less than eight of their first nine games conceding only to Detroit Red Wings. As the season progresses they are still doing well with their longest losing streak to date only being two games in a row.
What makes this even more remarkable is that this is a brand new squad put together for the first time for this season and so far the outstanding performers have been David Perron, James Neil and Reilly Smith who have amassed no less than 19 goals between them.
Instant fans
The team is also getting great support from fans. Long before they ever took to the ice there were already 13,200 applications for season tickets and with an average attendance of over 17,000 for their home games which are played at the city’s T-Mobile Arena fans obviously like what head coach Gerard Gallant is doing with the team.
So, although they’re only a quarter of their way through the season this signs are all good that the Golden Knights will carry on making a big impression on the Pacific Division. There’s also good news for fans of other major league sports with the prospect of the Oakland Raider NFL team moving to Las Vegas to play all their games there from 2020 onwards as well as a WNBA team due to start playing in the city from next year onwards.
This all has to be a big boost for Las Vegas in general as it gives even more reasons to visit and will surely help to introduce millions more to everything it has to offer – whether or not it’s on ice.
