NHL's Las Vegas expansion team named during bumbling presentation

Brandon Schlager

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NHL's Las Vegas expansion team named during bumbling presentation image

Five months ago Las Vegas was awarded the NHL's 31st franchise. Now we know what to call it.

The city's first major professional sports team will be known, officially, as the Vegas Golden Knights. A group of NHL dignitaries, including commissioner Gary Bettman and team owner Bill Foley, made the unveil Tuesday night amid fanfare and some technical difficulties at T-Mobile Arena on the Las Vegas Strip, where the club will play beginning 2017.

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The party did not go off without a hitch.

After a performance by Cirque du Soleil, Bettman took the stage to traditional boos — "Keep the boos going. It proves you're a real NHL city," he quipped — but a glitch in the video presentation created a painfully awkward delay. Foley stepped in with an impromptu countdown, and finally hockey in Las Vegas had an identity.

The primary logo and color scheme — steel gray, gold, red and black — earned surprisingly positive reviews on social media after the unveil.

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Foley, a West Point alumnus, didn't have much creative leeway with the moniker, which was long rumored to include some derivative of "Knights." Trademark pushback took away his preferred choice of Black Knights, or even simply Knights, and the NHL was adamant there were to be no connotations, however harmless, to the Sin City's famed gambling culture.

"Our logo and our name is really going to exhibit the highest element of the warrior class — the knight," Foley told the crowd. "The knight protects the unprotected. The knight defends the realm. The knight never gives up, never gives in, always advances, never retreats. And that is what our team is going to be."

Now that the franchise has an identity, attention turns to assembling a mix-and-match roster of players poached from the other 30 NHL franchises in June's expansion draft. It has been 16 years since the NHL last expanded, with new rules in place to ensure the roster is competitive immediately, so let the real work begin.

"Believe me, we won't screw up the first game like we screwed up the video," Foley said.

Brandon Schlager

Brandon Schlager Photo

Brandon Schlager is an assistant managing editor at The Sporting News. A proud Buffalo, N.Y. native and graduate of SUNY Buffalo State, he joined SN as an intern in 2014 and now oversees editorial content strategy.