Is Vegas a Good Bet for the NHL?

Adam Proteau writing for the Hockey News.com doesn't think so.

Is the NHL arrogant enough to believe that – in the midst of exotic animal exhibitions, sins of the flesh and oxygen-fueled gambling – the Average Joe is going to shell out to watch the likes of Lou Lamoriello’s Trap-tacular Extravaganza?

Isn’t the idea of the defense-first NHL in Vegas very much like dropping Chastity the Abstinence Clown into the middle of Amsterdam’s red-light district and expecting bonzo box office to follow?

Nobody doubts the first few years of the operation would garner the NHL some of the best publicity it has ever had.

But once the newness of the game inevitably wore off – the way it has in Miami, Nashville, Washington and Long Island, among other places – a half-empty building surrounded by nothing but money-making attractions would make the NHL a laughingstock in a way that NBC and its horseracing fetish couldn’t ever come close to.

If that were to occur, Bettman and Bruckheimer would be losers on one of the biggest stages there is. And you know what Hunter S. Thompson said about a loser in Vegas.

Okay, maybe you don’t. In his famous Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas novel, Thompson wrote, “For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.”

The NHL doesn’t need any more kicks to its collective junk than it’s already received. But if it were proven Carrot Top and Wayne Newton can turn a profit in Las Vegas yet hockey can’t, the utter degradation of the sport would be complete.

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