Posted by John Vrooman on Wednesday, January 24, 2018 in National Hockey League.

Interview with Bleacher Report.

1. Are you surprised by the fan support this year? In the past, you’ve referred to Vegas as a “sham” market. Obviously the attendance success shouldn’t change the economic makeup of the city, but do you still stick by this or is there more heft behind them than you originally thought?

2. Should the Raiders be encouraged by the Golden Knights’ success? Is it possible that team could fall prey to the NFL’s declining ratings and overall fan support?

3. Should the Golden Knights be worried about the Raiders? Is going from 0 pro sports to two so quickly an issue in the short term? It seems like it rectifies itself in the long-term — see Nashville — but there are speedbumps to get there. Though the NFL has had issues it’s still a much bigger business than the NHL.

The Vegas Golden Knights are enjoying a perfect storm resulting from the confluence two events. First, the honey-moon period for an expansion franchise in a non-traditional hockey market like Vegas is usually about 3 seasons.

Second, the home attendance in a non-traditional hockey market like Vegas is extremely sensitive (highly elastic) with respect to the quality of the team on the ice. This is especially true for an economically one-dimensional and inverted corporate/tourist season-ticket fan-base expansion experiment like Las Vegas.

The honey-moon effect is common, but the instant success formula is uniquely unprecedented for the Knights because of the historic first-season team quality generated by the uncharacteristically generous expansion draft for the new Vegas club.

Usually the generosity of the expansion draft varies directly with the degree of egalitarian revenue sharing in the respective leagues. The NHL shares the least revenue of all the Big 4 NA leagues by far. (Approximately: NHL 20%, NBA 40%, MLB 50% and NFL 60%).

Traditionally NHL expansion drafts have been the least beneficial of all the Big 4 leagues, but in the case of last year’s Vegas expansion draft the newly egalitarian League has finally decided to give the new kids in Vegas an open shot at the playoffs, if not the Cup.

This generosity is especially true for top net minders left unprotected and available in the expansion draft (existing clubs could only protect 2), but also generally true for defensemen and quality forwards. This historic Vegas inaugural success is clearly by design of a more forward thinking League, whose BOG has finally realized after isolated sun-belt failures, that each of the individual clubs and League as a whole are only as strong as their weakest club.

As long as the Golden Knights are skating, scoring and defending at this Stanley Cup level they can also hold of the challenges of the big, bad and probably overrated NFL Raiders who are scheduled to arrive in 2020. This is conceivably why the BOG was so generous (if not prescient) in setting the egalitarian parameters for the Las Vegas expansion draft. In effect, the League has reverse engineered its own perfect storm.

The case of the Stanley Cup runners-up Nashville Predators is a classic example of how even an isolated NHL club in the middle of the Sun Belt can defend against the seemingly bullet-proof NFL.

The rise of the Preds’ upside down season-ticket base in a non-traditional hockey market like Nash-Vegas has corresponded almost perfectly with the decline of the quality NFL’s Tennessee Titans and the deterioration of their all-important corporate season ticket base.

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