Las Vegas mayor leading cheers for Golden Knights

LAS VEGAS - "Ice hockey."
There's something charming about the way Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman describes the sport that has overwhelmed this market, a place many believed only enjoyed ice when it was bobbing in a tumbler.

Late Monday afternoon, wearing a Vegas Golden Knights scarf in her seventh-floor office, Goodman shook her head and laughed, often, as she considered the unthinkably good story that has been this city's first-year NHL team.
"This really is remarkable," Goodman said. "I sit in wonderment all the time. It's been an absolutely explosive event that's taken this town by storm in the heat of the desert. Ice hockey. … Now this town is absolutely bonkers over the playoffs."
The almost surreal season of the Golden Knights continues Wednesday with their first Stanley Cup Playoff experience, Game 1 of the Western Conference First Round against the Los Angeles Kings at T-Mobile Arena (10 p.m. ET; NBCSN, CBC, TVAS, FS-W).
"Someone said recently, 'A knight never falls to a king,'" Goodman said with a grin, comparing playoff opponents to pieces on a chess board. "With the pressure that everyone's under, I hope they make it through the first round. But they love it. It just turns up the excitement for people who come to Las Vegas for a good rest, or for no rest at all. We love a winner. From where this team came about and where it's gone to is so awesome.

"The people who knew nothing about ice hockey -- nothing, zero, zilch, no interest, they'll never be interested. Well, they're diehards now. They sleep in their Golden Knights shirts. It's so big and so exciting and so pervasive in our community. I walk down the street and see a black shirt and I know it will have the Golden Knights logo on the front. Everybody is passionate about this team."
Hockey has been part of Goodman's life since her youth in New York, where she attended New York Rangers games with her mother. It was her husband, Oscar Goodman, who preceded her in the Las Vegas mayor's office from 1999 to 2011, who stoked the fires of hockey in their sun-baked home a continent away from the couple's eastern U.S. roots.
Oscar Goodman was a bold, aggressive promoter of Las Vegas whose "Welcome to Fabulous Mayor Goodman's Office" sign still stands outside the City Hall suite now occupied by his wife. He believed the city needed major-league sports to complement its legendary landscape of world-class entertainment and casinos that now attract 43 million visitors a year.
The first door he knocked on in 1999, to get the proverbial puck rolling, was that of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.
"Oscar grew up in Philadelphia and I in New York, hubs of professional sports," Carolyn Goodman said. "Oscar said in 1999 that Las Vegas was so ready for pro sports, and his first call was not to anybody but Gary Bettman. He asked Gary, 'What do you think?'"
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It was more a meet-and-greet than a hard sell, but Goodman made certain the seed for NHL hockey in Las Vegas was planted.
"Then he proceeded down the line, talking to commissioners of other major-league sports," Goodman said, speaking of her husband's dogged pursuit of pro sports for Las Vegas. "I was so surprised that Oscar didn't choose to talk first to Major League Baseball or the NFL or NBA. He wanted ice hockey."
Seventeen years after his first meeting with Commissioner Bettman, Carolyn Goodman having been elected in 2011 when her husband had reached the city's three-term limit, Oscar Goodman's dream was realized. On June 22, 2016, led by businessman Bill Foley and supported by fans who showed almost maniacal interest, Las Vegas was granted a franchise to become the NHL's 31st team.
"To see this happen…" Carolyn Goodman said. "Bill Foley, the genius who had done his research about who and what we are, sat in this office three years ago with his embryonic management team and asked, 'What do you think?'
"He was very smart. Bill had done his homework. He got the groups together, started to work all kinds of media, convened parties and gatherings of people and then selected one by one his team at the helm and let it go from there. Bill has done everything with the community and young people in mind. He's the consummate builder of a great franchise. I'm so thrilled he's been rewarded with this season."

Vegas has been a head-shaking story throughout 2017-18, an expansion team cobbled together in a June 21 expansion draft. Even before the first puck dropped, the Golden Knights were hip deep in their community. When 58 people were killed in a mass shooting at a Las Vegas country-music festival Oct. 1, a team of players, coaches and management waded into the grieving and then the healing process of a place that was brand new to virtually all of them, never putting a foot out of place, rallying to the side of survivors and families of the lost whose lives had been changed forever.
It was that gesture, and the team's stirring Oct. 11 home-opener tribute to those lost, that most profoundly has moved the Mayor.
"When they brought all the first responders onto the ice …" she said. "They have been so connected. I don't think a day goes by that those of us who were in some way connected to the immediacy of [the tragedy] don't think of it. The way the Golden Knights responded so quickly, bringing out the officers, survivors and the citizens who helped. It was so emotional. The magnitude of the thanks and appreciation was so huge.
"Recently (March 31, before the Golden Knights' final game of the regular season), raising a memorial banner with 58 stars and 58 names, I believe that each of the players felt that they were part of the Las Vegas family. When I see the youngsters at the practice arena in Summerlin, the team has become family. We've sort of adopted them."
The jury is out on whether the public's pre-conceived notions about Las Vegas have been changed by the stunning performance of the Golden Knights.
"I don't know that It ever changes. There's always been a preconceived about 'Sin City,'" Goodman said, dropping quotation marks in the air around the label. "Trust me: having had the best of education, the best of luck when I lived in Manhattan, there's no better place than Las Vegas. Whether you're into the ballet or arts, sports, education or history, it's tangible. You can be involved in it, touch it."
The success of the Golden Knights, the Mayor says, is no surprise.
"Have a good plan, get the right people in on the plan, develop the love and the camaraderie and you're bound for success," she said. "They're bound to each other now as much as they're bound to the concept of loving their sport.
"Whether they had won or lost this season, they would have been embraced. Their games are electrifying because of the cocoon of T-Mobile [Arena] that creates something. Every win got them more fans and those fans saw the potential with every win. The players, the management, the way these guys are everywhere, out in the community, working with the kids, doing something … I'm just blown away. It's such an exciting piece of life to see."