The Vegas Golden Knights chose to celebrate a monumental moment for the franchise by thinking back to how their inaugural season began — hoping the new ice hockey team could bring smiles to a city reeling from tragedy.
Shortly after Vegas became the first expansion team to clinch a playoff berth with a 4-1 win over the Colorado Avalanche on Monday, the mantra in the locker room was the same as the one adopted shortly before the team’s home opener: “Vegas Strong.”
Team owner Bill Foley, veteran goalie Marc-Andre Fleury and leading scorer William Karlsson were among those who thought back to the mass shooting that killed 58 and injured hundreds more on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 1 last year.
“It was a disaster that night, it was a terrible massacre, we changed our initial opening night ceremonies, I thought we really connected with the town — I’m so proud of the whole team,” Foley said. “From then on, it was pretty unbelievable. We got off to that fast start. We’ve survived a lot of challenges this year, besides being an expansion team who nobody picked to do anything.”
No expansion team had ever made the playoffs since the league expanded in the 1967-1968 season.
“It doesn’t bring anybody back or we don’t heal anybody, but I hope that we’ve changed people’s mind a bit, and get them to come here and have a good time at T-Mobile [Arena] and be proud of their hometown team,” Fleury said.
Alex Tuch, Jonathan Marchessault, Shea Theodore and Karlsson each scored, while Fleury improved to 28-11-4 after stopping 28 shots.
It was also the 200th career victory for coach Gerard Gallant.
“I’m really happy about making the playoffs, the 200th win doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Gallant said. “We always go back to our first home game. It wasn’t about our team winning, it wasn’t about nothing — it was about the first responders and the tragedy that happened the week before that. It was a tough way to start our season, but I think the guys and everybody supported it well. They all came out and played an unbelievable game that first night and I just think it carried over.”
The Golden Knights are six points ahead of the Sharks in the Pacific Division. San Jose beat Chicago earlier on Monday.
The Avalanche are fourth in the Central Division, but dropped to the second wild-card spot in the Western Conference.
“I’m not going to talk about a first-round [playoff] matchup, we gotta get there first,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said. “I would have liked to add another point or two tonight, but we weren’t able to get it done.”
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