Vegas Golden Knights doesn’t suck, all things considered

The primary disappointment with the Vegas Golden Knights is actually an appropriate approximation of the Las Vegas experience, in that it’s based on “what could have been.”

What if that roulette ball bounced one more time? What if the dealer pulled a nine instead of a face card? What if she didn’t take my wallet, and leave me in that ice bath with a bandage over where my kidney used to be?

What if they were the Vegas Aces? The Vegas BlackJacks? The Vegas Gamblers, Jackpot, Outlaws, Dealers, Sinners, Rat Pack, Craps or Strippers? The Vegas Scorpions, Desert Hawks, Bighorns or any variation of snake?

It’s not even the best variation on “Knights,” which was “Desert Knights,” an immediately memorable and evocation name rather than one you needed permission from the University of Central Florida to borrow.

But here’s what we know about the team name: The NHL wouldn’t allow any gambling references in the nickname FOR A TEAM IN LAS VEGAS, and Bill Foley paid $500 million for the right to make any vague Army reference he dang well wanted to.

So all things considered, “Vegas Golden Knights” doesn’t suck. Especially because we essentially know that it will follow the lead of the Anaheim Ducks, the Tampa Bay Rays and any number of other teams that foolhardily added a descriptive adjective to their team names and then summarily dropped them later. Hell, they’ve already dispensed with “Las” because it was too wordy.

So it’s going to just be the Vegas Knights as some point, and Vegas Knights is cheeky.

The primary disappointment with the logo is … well, I have no idea why people don’t dig a logo that’s basically Magneto’s helmet run through a precious metals filter.

(The Arizona Coyotes quickly change their logo to a bald dog in a wheelchair with Cerebro on its head. Rivalry!)

It’s a kick-ass great crest for a team, but then I’m an easy lay for logos that use negative space for letters. I’d go as far as to say that it’s my favorite expansion logo since the San Jose Sharks. I don’t know why it was “roasted” at its unveiling. Again, all things considered, it’s pretty damn cool.

It’s also another win for Adidas, which created all the World Cup of Hockey gear, too. And while some have expressed reservations about how the Vegas Golden Knights jerseys are going to look – in the sense that they could be absolutely atrocious, given the color scheme – we put our faith in the gear-makers that bestowed upon an unsuspecting public the glory of the Team North America World Cup jerseys.

They only thing I didn’t care for yesterday in Vegas – besides the technical difficulties that mandated more time for warm-up comic Gary Bettman to dazzle the crowd – was the secondary logo:

Like, I get the inspiration. And I get the military thing again – seriously, the first game between the West Point-obsessed Golden Knights and Florida Panthers might break the world record for “Honoring Our Military” crowd pop moments during stoppages in play.

And I rather like the fact that it looks like two broad swords murdering the Winnipeg Jets 2.0 logo.

But other than that, meh.

So, in summary: Golden Knights is fine when you consider the NHL sucked the fun out of every other name variation and that the owner probably has “The Green Berets” on his porn shelf; the logo is legitimately awesome, if only because you can repurpose your Boba Fett cos-play for home games …

… the colors are promising in Adidas’s jersey-making hands; and the secondary logo is more clever than, you know, good.

Overall, a winner in Vegas, and you know what that means: Someone’s bringing you a watered-down gin and tonic so you’ll keep playing, until you eventually lose and retreat to the penny slots.

Hmmmm, the Vegas Slots. What could have been, Mr. Foley. What could have been.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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