The NHL had never had a team in Las Vegas before, so it should be no surprise that it had likely never had a playoff series-opening number quite like what the Golden Knights staged Wednesday before squaring off against the Los Angeles Kings. To judge from the online reaction, many hockey fans would be just fine with never seeing anything like it again, but by all means, judge for yourself.
“And stay down, you knave!”
Okay, maybe that’s not what the sword-wielding knight had to say, after bravely fending off the, um, flag attack from his black-clad opponent. We do know how the Kings reacted, as the team fired back on Twitter with an appropriate amount of snark, while others expressed their own levels of disdain.
In fairness, other observers thought the intro was kind of epic or, probably more accurately, epically cheesy. “Holy s— that Golden Knights intro makes wanna stab my roommate, I’m pumped,” one fan tweeted.
The Knights’ “intro extravaganza was ridiculously and hilariously awesome,” another tweeted. “And could not have been done any other way in any other barn in the NHL.”
In any event, the home crowd at Las Vegas’s T-Mobile Arena was lapping it up, and why not? The entire season has been something of a fairy tale, as the Golden Knights, the first major professional sports team to set up camp in the city, enjoyed far and away the greatest inaugural season by an expansion squad in NHL history — and possibly in the history of any league.
Along the way, fans in Las Vegas were treated to introductions much like what unfolded Wednesday. Here is an example:
If that seems unbearably corny for the NHL, well, just remember that this is the same city that gave the world Wayne Newton (or at least sustained his career far beyond what should have seemed possible) and Siegfried and Roy. It’s also a city that has a stunningly good first-year franchise, one that jumped all over the Kings in the early going, taking a 1-0 lead to the first intermission and held on for the victory and a one-game lead in the best-of-seven series.
Now that is one pumped-up crowd. Of course, how could it not be, after that intro?
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