With so much written about the Vegas Golden Knights in the sports pages, I got to wondering where their practice facility might be. Surely it's not in one of the few small rinks around the city.
[Editor's Note: With Game 5, a possible elimination game, of the Stanley Cup Final being played tonight at T-Mobile Arena and all sports-fan eyes on Las Vegas, we thought it appropriate to answer this question by running a little excerpt from our upcoming book, tentatively titled: Vegas Golden Knights -- How a First-Year Expansion Team Conquered the World, by Joe Pane (our Knights on Ice blogger) with Deke Castleman.
Short story behind the book: In mid-March, when it looked like the VGK would be in the playoffs, we started thinking that if they made a deep run, there might be a book in it; books ’r us, after all, and we had 70 or so blogs about the season, thus far.
In the first two playoff rounds, as the VGK kept winning, the idea kept growing, till finally, just before Game 3 of the Western Conference Championship against the Winnipeg Jets on May 18, with Vegas leading the series 2-1, we announced (to ourselves) that if they won Game 4, we’d pull the trigger on the book. They won -- and the scrambling began.
One of the great sports stories of all time is happening in our town and we couldn’t let the opportunity pass us by. We plan to send the book to the printer very soon. Stay tuned.]
The commemorative shovels were engraved with “Vegas Hockey/Practice Facility, October 5, 2016." The team hadn’t been named yet, but training camp leading up to the NHL preseason would begin in little more than 11 months. In that time, a team practice facility, along with its corporate offices and a community ice center, had to be completed and operational.
But even coming as far as the groundbreaking ceremony was something of a triumph. The location of the facility changed three times, necessitating alterations in schedule and budget; the final location required some radical redesigning. Originally, it was announced that Clark County would fund 100% of the construction costs from its parks budget and the team was going to rent space for two hours a day, but that somehow flipped to 100% privately funded. Negotiations over the lease with the Howard Hughes Corporation, which owns the land, delayed the final deal for weeks and the permit process added time onto that. So construction didn’t begin for a full month after groundbreaking.
Amazingly, as is everything about this story, the 146,000-square-foot facility located in Summerlin, a sprawling upscale master-planned community in the western Las Vegas Valley (dubbed by Howard Hughes himself after his mother’s maiden name), opened slightly ahead of schedule and mostly within budget, though that went up in $5 million increments from $15 million to around $30 million.
Nearing completion, the team and City National Bank, based in Los Angeles with four Las Vegas branches, inked a multiyear partnership deal that included City National’s name on the arena. The financial particulars weren’t disclosed, but the sponsorship no doubt helped defray the building’s opening and maintenance costs.
City National Arena features two full-size NHL ice rinks, one for the team and one for the public, with bleacher seating for 600 at each, a weight room, medical facility, players’ lounge, team store, skate rental, snack bar, and restaurant. The restaurant, Montana-based MacKenzie River Pizza, Grill and Pub, is part of the Glacier Restaurant Group owned by VGK co-owner Bill Foley; it's open to the public and overlooks the practice rink. The players are fed breakfast, lunch, and pre-game meals on game days. The players’ lounge, by all accounts, is among the world’s most luxurious for a hockey team. And most of the players live in Summerlin, so it’s an easy few-minute commute to work.
City National Arena is also the home rink for UNLV’s Rebel hockey club and the Junior Golden Knights program. It’s often standing room only during VGK practices, adding to the hockey fever around the city; the players hear the roar of a crowd when they skate out onto the practice rink in the morning. At the end of practices, fans line up to get autographs from the team, which draws fans and players even closer.
