FROM THE ARCHIVE: Pair of Aces

The Vegas Golden Knights were the newest expansion team in the NHL with a Stanley Cup Finals appearance to their name already.

The Hockey News took a look at the major players who helped Vegas build a winner early in its history.

Read about the main players in the Vegas Golden Knights organization, via The Hockey News Archives.

He’ll shake your hand and sip coffee with you. Vegas’ owner is part of the Golden Knights buzz and a real driver when it comes to giving back to the military

IN A CITY that hosts big-name entertainers on a regular basis, Golden Knights owner Bill Foley is a man about town. He’ll talk hockey at a local coffee shop, pose for photos with fans and take part in the team’s charitable events.

Foley is actively involved in day-to-day operations, though he’s far from meddlesome. He is hands-on, though, when it comes to marketing and game-night presentations, even taking a starring role in one of the Golden Knights’ crowd-revving pre-game videos.

As a West Point graduate and former captain in the U.S. Air Force, Foley’s support of military families are centerpieces of his philanthropic endeavors. An avid golfer, wine connoisseur and devotee of Tim Horton’s coffee, Foley has hit the jackpot with the Golden Knights, but his sports empire may not end with just one Vegas-based team. This past summer, he confirmed meeting with Major League Soccer about potentially landing an expansion franchise.

Foley has credited much of his success to his military education and training, and, in return, he has given back with donations that helped launch a new athletic training center that includes an indoor football field. Three years ago, Foley was named one of the U.S. Military Academy’s Distinguished Graduate Award winners.

YOU CAN’T GO MORE than a block or two down the Las Vegas Strip without seeing something adorned by the Golden Knights logo.

The team’s branding mission has been a smashing success, orchestrated by Kerry Bubolz, the club’s president and COO, who came aboard in 2016 after spending 13 years with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers as president of business operations.

The club’s branding effort goes well beyond jerseys, T-shirts and license plates – or even a jet with their official airline partner. Grassroots hockey and the desert seemingly don’t go together, but the Golden Knights have created a long-term grand vision for hockey with youth programs that have quadrupled in size, as well as getting behind a second community facility in suburban Vegas with two NHL-sized rinks.

Bubolz previously worked with the Carolina Hurricanes, Dallas Stars and IHL’s Cleveland Lumberjacks.

GEORGE MCPHEE DID A masterful job assembling the Golden Knights roster through the 2017 expansion draft. So much so that the re-dubbed “Golden Misfits” challenged for the Stanley Cup in Year 1 – an unheard of feat for an expansion team in any league.

Since creating the initial Cup-contending roster, McPhee has managed to pull off some key moves when opportunities arose. His biggest acquisition was landing Mark Stone from Ottawa and immediately re-signing him to a multi-year deal. McPhee also traded for Max Pacioretty and signed Paul Stastny.

McPhee was promoted to president of hockey operations prior to this season, with his right-hand man Kelly McCrimmon taking over as GM. Though the Golden Knights had run into salary-cap challenges by Year 3, the team is once again a Cup contender.

McPhee previously spent five years in hockey operations with Vancouver before a 17-year run as GM in Washington.

THE SPORTS landscape in Las Vegas begins and ends with the Golden Knights. A year from now, though, they’ll have company, as the NFL’s Raiders invade the new dome stadium behind Mandalay Bay. The buzz created by the Golden Knights will pale in comparison to that of the Raiders, so the hockey club will have to dig into its box of ideas to stay front and center – especially September through December.

One way the Golden Knights are doing that is by expanding their reach in the western U.S. Their off-season bus tour was such a hit in past years that it returned in 2019, and the team increased its broadcast reach to include Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana in an effort to boost its appeal in the Mountain Region.

The Golden Knights have maintained their “Vegas Born” slogan since inception, and they’ll continue to push that message when the California-born Raiders move in. That tagline will keep on serving the Golden Knights as a reminder this team is Sin City’s own, not a transplant. The team will persist with its youth drives as well, in particular learn-to-skate programs and its popular initiative that saw staffers venture into local schools to instruct physical-education teachers on how to introduce floor hockey to students.

More than any off-ice initiative, winning will keep the Knights’ fan base thriving. Since Game 1 of Season 1, the success on the ice has kept the team locally relevant. The Vegas sporting landscape will change, but the Golden Knights were first on the scene, popular from the get-go and at the top of the standings. That can’t be said about the Raiders or Vegas’ long-time sporting fixture, the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels.

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