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Kerry Bubolz beamed with pride as he watched Las Vegas hockey history unfold on the ice outside his office window. The president and COO of the Vegas Golden Knights had spent nearly seven years laying the foundation to make moments like this — the first in-state high school hockey game between two Nevada-based schools — a reality.
“Unfortunately, they can’t just keep playing each other every game,” Bubolz joked after the September game at City National Arena, where the 2023 Stanley Cup champions practice.
The teams from both Faith Lutheran (team founded in 2018) and Bishop Gorman (founded in 2023) travel on weekends to compete in a Los Angeles-area league run by the Anaheim Ducks. If the Golden Knights’ track record is any indication of what lies ahead, however, there’s reason to believe Las Vegas could have a high school hockey league of its own before too long.
Despite widespread skepticism about hockey’s viability in Sin City when owner Bill Foley bet $500 million on Las Vegas’ first major sports franchise in 2016, the organization has rapidly built Las Vegas into a burgeoning hockey hub and staked a massive claim in what has become the country’s buzziest sports market.
At T-Mobile Arena, the Golden Knights have sold out all 252 games, regular and postseason, since their inception (not including games where COVID prevented teams from allowing fans to attend), with locals far outnumbering visiting fans among the roughly 18,000 in the stands. The team’s 54 playoff wins since entering the league is second to only the Tampa Bay Lightning, and its first Stanley Cup championship in June in only its sixth season of existence was the fastest-ever for an NHL franchise.
The Silver Knights, the team’s owned-and-operated AHL affiliate in nearby Henderson, draw an additional 4,700 fans per game at The Dollar Loan Center, a new 5,500-seat arena that also houses the Foley-owned Vegas Knight Hawks of the Indoor Football League and the NBA G League Ignite developmental team.
The Golden Knights now operate four community ice sheets between City National Arena and America First Center, hosting youth leagues, clinics, figure skating and other activities. The number of registered ice hockey players in the state of Nevada has ballooned from 1,592 to 4,975 since the Golden Knights’ debut in 2017-18, according to USA Hockey, a 212.5% increase during a period when national participation declined by 1.6%.
“This wasn’t a hockey town,” said Nancy Lough, director of education for the sports innovation program at UNLV. “[The Golden Knights] came here and taught everybody how to play hockey. If you wanted to play hockey, they were there.”
As a standalone business, the Golden Knights have been outkicking their coverage since Day 1. Despite playing in the second smallest U.S. media market by population among NHL teams (behind the Sabres), they have been a top-10 revenue team since their inaugural season and now consistently rank in the top five.
Viva Las Vegas! The Golden Knights have sold out T-Mobile Arena for every game in franchise history, barring COVID factors.getty images
“We’re not a very big market, but we’re one of the top revenue teams in the entire NHL because we made revenue a priority,” Bubolz said. “Your media rights are directly associated with your market size, so we don’t have one of the top media deals, but where we’ve outperformed the market dramatically is in ticketing, sponsorship, premium and retail.”
While the team declined to share its total annual revenue, Foley said the Golden Knights have increased their regular-season income by 5%-6% per season over the past six years. That doesn’t include the windfall generated from home playoff games, which the team has hosted in five of its six seasons.
The Golden Knights have capped season-ticket sales at around 14,000 since their first season but have been aggressive with pricing. According to Team Marketing Report’s Fan Cost Index, the Golden Knights’ average ticket price of $92.87 in 2017-18 was the fourth highest in the league, behind the Rangers, Maple Leafs and Blackhawks. By 2021-22, the most recent season for which TMR data was available, the average ticket price had increased 34% to $124.09, which still ranked fourth in the league.
“We push the envelope a little bit on ticket prices, but a lot of people in Las Vegas have responded, and they got behind us,” Foley said. “The result is we’ve been sold out every night that we’ve been in existence.”
Business on the ticketing front has been so good — StubHub has Vegas as the NHL’s most in-demand team this year — that there hasn’t been much room to capitalize on the recent Stanley Cup victory. Bubolz said the team sold a few thousand ticket packages at elevated prices following the Cup Final, but that most inventory was already spoken for.
“Relative to a lot of our ticketing and premium areas, we were already over capacity and had already picked our path from pricing,” he said. “So, a lot of those revenues were pre-Stanley Cup.”
The Golden Knights also rank among the league’s top teams in sponsorship. Foley said the team earned close to $40 million in sponsorship revenue last season, compared to less than $25 million in 2017-18. Foley acknowledged that a lot of the team’s partnership income comes from the casino industry, but he added that the club has brought on more partners than other NHL teams by offering numerous tiered options and narrowly slicing categories. The team lists 94 marketing partners on its online roster.
Bubolz said the team has seen “a nice increase of new partners and new categories” since the Stanley Cup, having added 12 new sponsors in that time, including AIS for office technology and Salient for cyber security.
The top business priority for the Golden Knights since the Stanley Cup celebration concluded has been the transition of their local media rights. Regional sports network AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain carried the team’s local telecasts during its first six seasons across its TV territory (which includes Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and select counties in Arizona, California and Nebraska). That deal expired at the end of the 2022-23 season, and with channel owner WBD Sports exiting the regional sports network business, the Golden Knights had to adapt.
“We had two priorities,” Bubolz said. “Let’s make sure we get paid and finish out the season, and let’s go find a new partner. And that’s what we did.”
The team signed a deal with Scripps Sports, becoming the first club in the NHL to take its local telecasts to an over-the-air broadcaster. In addition to games being available on Scripps stations, the partners launched a direct-to-consumer streaming service allowing fans to watch all 69 local telecasts this regular season, along with the first round of the playoffs, for $69, or on a single-game basis for $6.99 each.
The team is moving from AT&T SportsNet to Scripps Sports this year for local broadcasts.getty images
Bubolz declined to comment on the financial terms of the Scripps agreement, but said the deal is “comparable” financially to the team’s deal with WBD Sports. He acknowledged that local media revenue is one area where the Golden Knights trail other NHL teams due to their small market size.
This is Scripps’ first deal with a professional sports team. Games will air on KMCC, local channel 34, and get cross-promotion from the company’s local ABC affiliate, but it may take time for the audience to follow them there. From a distribution perspective, the team sees the partnership with Scripps as a major upgrade. Bubolz said that even in the immediate Las Vegas market, the team’s games on AT&T SportsNet were only available in 35% of homes, with coverage as low as 10% in nearby Reno and Salt Lake City. With Scripps, games will be available over-the-air and direct-to-consumer throughout the region.
“We expect to see the benefits of that across our entire business,” Bubolz said. “Hopefully more regional dollars from a sponsorship perspective and more regional dollars from a retail perspective.”
The Golden Knights have a lot more company in the Las Vegas sports landscape than when they first arrived. The WNBA’s Aces and NFL’s Raiders have set up shop over the past few years, and MLB’s Oakland A’s appear destined for the desert. Tim Leiweke’s Oak View Group plans to build a $10 billion casino resort on The Strip featuring an arena that could house an NBA team, and MLS has also shown interest in expanding there.
“Our fan base is different than the NFL fan base, it’s different than a baseball fan base,” Foley said. “I would say if the NBA comes here, that’s going to be a little more competition for us.”
In addition, while the city has long been home to big events such as the annual NASCAR Cup Series race and National Finals Rodeo, it has leveled up in recent years with the arrival of a Formula One grand prix, the first edition of which debuts next month, and Super Bowl LVIII in February.
While the arrival of new sports means more competition for fans and corporate dollars, Lough believes the Golden Knights’ ability to connect with the community in their earliest days will ensure they maintain a prominent position in the marketplace.
“The people who live here would tell you that this was a tourist town, it wasn’t really ours,” Lough said. “That really changed with the Golden Knights. Being ‘Vegas Born’ was brilliant marketing. The Golden Knights became this city’s identity, and it was the first time that the city had an identity as a community.”
That dynamic isn’t lost on Bubolz, who said looking beyond the bright lights of The Strip to the broader community will continue to guide the team’s approach.
“We really believe that we have our place in this market as the Vegas Born team,” Bubolz said. “So we’ll continue to plant our flag around being Vegas Born and continue to build our team.”
