Vegas Golden Knights: How a First-Year Expansion Team Healed Las Vegas and Shocked the Hockey World

by Joe Pane, Deke Castleman

The amazing story of Las Vegas’s inaugural season of hockey! William Foley took a big risk when he and his partners paid $500 million to the National Hockey League for a Las Vegas expansion team. Would the locals support it? Could it win games? Would it earn back the investment? It turned out that Vegas was the perfect place for such a gamble, and Vegas Golden Knights delves deeply into the VGK’s brief, unlikely, and momentous quest for the Stanley Cup in its inaugural season. The first home game occurred only nine days after and a mile away from the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. The opening ceremony, which remembered the fallen and honored the first responders, captured the hearts of all Las Vegans and never let go. It didn’t hurt that the team started setting records the first expansion team in the NHL’s long history to win six of their first seven games, including two on the road. From there, the Knights’ march to the playoffs was inexorable. They led their division at the end of the regular season, swept their first series in four games, took the second series in six, and won the Western Division championship in five. As if by magic, the first-year ragtag bunch of castaways were four wins away from hoisting one of the most coveted trophies on Earth. This momentous story didn’t culminate in the feel-good fairy-tale climax, but many of the Golden Knights’ expansion-team accomplishments―astronomical ticket prices, phenomenal merchandise sales, media saturation, fan adulation, and dozens of records that might never be broken―were relevant not only to the NHL but to all major-league sports. And by the time the VGK became one of two teams to vie for the Lord Stanley Cup, the support for this team, this phenomenon, had gone viral, receiving tweets from―and selling apparel to―fans in more than 100 countries. The fantastic journey this team was taking grew into an enormous cultural phenomenon, especially coming from such a transient and skin-deep city like Las Vegas. In the end, this was a situation that almost can’t exist in sports where, for there to be a winner, there has to be a loser. Whether the Vegas Golden Knights won or lost was, amazingly enough for a major-league sports franchise, almost beside the point. For the VGK just to be in the Stanley Cup Final proves that both teams in hockey’s championship series were winners. There will never be another triumph quite like the one that this book chronicles.

364 pages, Hardcover

Published September 25, 2018

Reviews

[Graham Bates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vegas Golden Knights is basically an fan-side view of the development and first season of the Vegas Golden Knight hockey team. It is thorough in its chronicle of the entire year, including summaries for each regular-season and postseason game. It is written by someone who has watched hockey for generations, and the added vignettes are a welcome addition to people who are unfamiliar with hockey; however, Pane seems to have an allergy to suspense, since his book gives away the outcome of almost every game at the beginning of each summary. This made the rest of the summary seem redundant and unnecessary. While the outcome was known at the outset, Pane made little effort to hide this from people (like myself) who did not watch any of the games throughout the year. In addition, there were two glaring mistakes: Reilly Smith played for Miami of Ohio, not Florida and near the end of the regular season a game was mislabeled as an away game instead of home. Those easy-to-see errors and the constant drama-squashing oversharing - in addition to the stream-of-consciousness feel - make this a good book for historians wanting a full chronicle of events in the game but not a person enthralled with the unpredictable nature of sport.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

The early chapters describing the formation of the team were interesting. Then the author gives an overview of every game VGK played in their first season which is laborious. I skipped it and went to lunch.