To the joy of local hockey fans, a group of investors wants to bring the NHL to America’s gambling den.
If all goes as planned, the investors not only would give Las Vegas its first big-league sports club but also boost amateur hockey — a far smaller but still lucrative line of business — with more players and better facilities.
Title-insurance mogul Bill Foley and Palms casino developers the Maloof family are trying to land a National Hockey League franchise. They want to use the arena being built behind New York-New York, whose developers broke ground without a team lined up, and launched a website to drum up interest among fans.
Foley also reportedly wants to open a practice facility that could be used by locals and to grow youth hockey here.
Hockey is small in Las Vegas, but thanks to new NHL teams nationally, the sport has grown in nontraditional markets like ours.
San Jose, Calif., is one. I grew up near there and joined my first ice hockey team in middle school in 1993, two years after the NHL’s San Jose Sharks were founded.
Before the Sharks, there were a handful of youth clubs and some aging rinks in the Bay Area. Since then, hockey has grown considerably, with new teams, facilities and feeder businesses.
Youth sports is an estimated $5 billion-per-year industry in the United States. Hockey surely plays a sizable role, as parents often spend thousands of dollars a year on team dues, travel and equipment.
There were almost 352,000 youth players nationally last year, according to organizing group USA Hockey. Nevada had just 486 players 18 and younger. Most states had more, including Alabama (728) and New Mexico (695). By comparison, hockey titan Minnesota had 45,512.
Las Vegas has two year-round recreational ice rinks — SoBe Ice Arena at Fiesta Rancho and Las Vegas Ice Center on Flamingo Road near the 215 Beltway. Neither is bad, but Foley potentially could poach customers with a shiny, upgraded facility.
Even with the NHL in town, Las Vegas won’t mass-produce top-flight youth players, like the Midwest and Canada do, anytime soon. But it would spur interest in hockey and get kids off the couch — as long as their parents don’t go broke along the way.