VGK Victorious! Befitting of the Silver State, Stanley Cup gets new home in Vegas

The Vegas Golden Knights (VGK) culminated a six-year journey from expansion team to world champions winning Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final on Tuesday night. The Knights eliminated the Florida Panthers with a score of 9-3 to become the seventh franchise in NHL history to win a championship in six seasons or less.

Game 5 began with a nod to the franchise’s storied history. First-year VGK coach Bruce Cassidy started five of the Knights’ remaining six original members — Jonathan Marchessault, Reilly Smith, William Karlsson, Brayden McNabb, and Shea Theodore — who fondly refer to themselves as the “Golden Misfits” because they were considered castoffs from other teams like the rest of their expansion teammates when they joined the newly formed team in 2017.

The team’s first game of the 2017 season was just days after the 1 October tragedy at the Route 91 Harvest music festival, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The arrival of the VGK helped provide the city’s residents with a salve for their grief offering a way to find a reason to cheer through their sorrow. The Knights’ inaugural season almost had a Hollywood ending with a fairytale run ignited by a band of misfits who reached the Stanley Cup Finals losing in five games to the Washington Capitals.

“I wish we would have done it the first year when this city really needed it after Oct. 1,” president of hockey operations George McPhee told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “But we stayed with it and kept making the hard decisions. It was never personal with anyone. It was just about making this team better if we could do that. And it worked.”

Slow and steady paid off this year as the Knights determinedly plodded their way to a winning season that ended on Tuesday night with the Knights’ scoring a franchise-record high of nine goals, a hat trick for team captain Mark Stone, and a dominating 6-1 score by the second intermission to become the 21st active franchise to hoist a Stanley Cup.

“It’s why you play the game,” Stone, who became the fourth player in NHL history with a hat trick in a Cup-clinching game, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “You play the game to win, and we won. I was sitting on the bench with three minutes left just looking at each other (thinking), ‘We’re about to win the Stanley Cup.’”

TERPconsulting has a special connection to VGK, having provided fire protection engineering and code consulting services during the construction of their practice facility, City National Arena. Located in the suburb of Summerlin, City National Arena opened on September 18, 2017, after 11 months of construction. The two-story NHL training facility is adjacent to Downtown Summerlin and Red Rock Resort Casino and Spa and features a pair of regulation-size ice rinks with approximately 1,200 seats, locker room, concession areas, restaurant, team store, training rooms, and team offices. TERPconsulting prepared the 145,000 ft² facility’s Fire Protection Report as well as provided general fire/life safety code consulting throughout all phases of the project.

Go Knights Go!