As the Golden Knights approach their 10th anniversary in the NHL, they’ve gone from an upstart franchise looking at others for a standard to follow, to the one setting a standard for the two newest franchises that have entered the league since, league commissioner Gary Bettman and Utah Mammoth owner Ryan Smith both agreed, speaking before Game 3 in Salt Lake City on Friday night.
“You start from an expansion standpoint, Vegas and Seattle did it right, although slightly different circumstances, to here in Utah,” Bettman said. “Starting with how well George McPhee managed the expansion draft, the fact that they reinvented what pregame shows are made in quintessential Vegas. It’s been very gratifying to see that a market that some were skeptical about when we announced expansion, to now see that every other sport thinks they invented, it has been a little gratifying.”
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That owner Bill Foley and Bettman saw something before the WNBA, NFL, MLB and NBA did, in a town long known for being an adult Disneyland with its 24-hour gambling, burlesque shows and late-night steak specials, is something nobody will take away from them.
What followed after the announcement that there would be ice hockey in the desert was something nobody would predict, with one of the greatest professional sports franchise debuts in 2017-18, when the Knights made it to the Stanley Cup Final, and then hoisting the Cup in 2023. The franchise has been in the postseason in all but one season since its inception, with this year’s opening round becoming special with the close ties between Utah and Nevada.
“I think the national landscape doesn’t understand the proximity in so many different ways, of Utah and Las Vegas,” Smith said. “Growing up in Las Vegas, it’s where kids went for youth sports, it’s where we went on the weekends. We’re just close.”
Smith, who also owns the NBA’s Utah Jazz, earned the NHL’s newest franchise on April 18, 2024, when the league’s Board of Governors granted him an expansion franchise.
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In lieu of an expansion draft to stock the new team, Smith acquired the hockey assets of the Arizona Coyotes, which suspended hockey operations at the same time, as players, coaches and draft picks simply shifted to Utah.
The team is now in its second season, and has established as fervent a fanbase as the Knights have in Vegas.
And even though the Knights were a true expansion team, and the Mammoth were a relocation project from Phoenix, it was the standard that left Smith optimistic for the future.
The ties between St. George, Utah and Southern Nevada run deeper than most people might realize, as legendary basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian once held his basketball camp at Dixie College, now known as Utah Tech, in the late 1970s.
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Before CSN established an athletics department, Dixie became the go-to school for Southern Nevada athletes needing a start-up vehicle before landing their dream car, er, college of choice.
So, naturally, despite the teams being in different divisions – the Mammoth in the Central and Knights in the Pacific – an opening-round series is the perfect setting for a border rivalry.
The Mammoth fired up the rivalry even more before Game 3, when the organization offered a jersey exchange in front of the Delta Center, offering Utah residents to swap their fandom from the Knights to their new team. It worked, too, as hundreds of fans lined up to swap jerseys hours before puck drop.
“As much as everyone thinks I’m just trolling (the Knights), no, it’s 50 percent,” Smith joked. “I think it’s way more of a respect for how they’ve grown. And I think that’s part of the responsibilities. Kind of slide over and let the new group come in, in a weird way, similar to the way that someone slid over for them to come in. And so nothing but respect.”
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Respect is all Smith has for Foley, McPhee and general manager Kelly McCrimmon, and everything Vegas has built the past nine seasons.
“I understand the soul that hockey has brought to Vegas in a really creative way,” Smith added. “Watching it succeed there gave me a ton of confidence that it would work here. Given my background and the landscape and the way I think culturally, we’re way more similar than different, and that’s the part that most people don’t understand.”
What’s clearly understood, even with the NBA and MLB arriving in the next two years, is that in helping Las Vegas establish an identity beyond the Strip, the Knights have a firm fanbase that started from day one and helped set the standard for professional sports in a town that’s gone from the Entertainment Capital of the World to one of the most sought after cities for professional sports franchises and all sporting events.
PHOTO CAPTION: NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Utah Mammoth owner Ryan Smith speak to the media before game three of the first round of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Delta Center.
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