LAS VEGAS _ Standing in a hallway outside the Vegas Golden Knights' locker room recently, George McPhee thought back to the day it all began.
This was long before the Golden Knights became an NHL phenomenon and the most successful first-year expansion team in the history of the four major sports. This was before the sellout crowds and the mounting expectations, before the T-Mobile Arena near the Vegas strip hummed with a cacophonous joy each game night.
It was July 2016, and McPhee had just been introduced as the Knights' general manager by majority owner Bill Foley, who with his fellow investors had paid $500 million for the right to become the NHL's 31st team. It was 11 months until the expansion draft, 15 months until the puck dropped for the first regular-season game.
When the news conference ended, everyone left. But McPhee went upstairs, sat in his unfurnished office, took a deep breath and began calling people about coming to work for the Knights.
"I had no idea what we could offer them in terms of company benefits, health care and all that," he said. "That's how rudimentary it was. We were literally starting from that point."
The prospective Seattle hockey franchise, if tapped by the NHL as its 32nd team as expected, might soon find itself at the same daunting, yet thrilling juncture, a blank slate ready to be written upon. There is undeniable power in being able to create one's own vision of team building, yet the sheer magnitude of the task at hand _ building the infrastructure virtually from scratch _ was readily apparent to McPhee.
He was an NHL lifer who had turned 59 a few days earlier. McPhee played seven seasons for the Rangers and Devils, and had worked in management for three decades for the Canucks, Capitals and Islanders before Foley convinced him that Las Vegas, incongruously, was a place where hockey could thrive. Whenever they held an event, Foley told him incredulously, more people kept showing up. McPhee took the plunge and dived headfirst into the unknown _ and the unsullied.
"It is something that most managers in the NHL would love to do at some point in their career, because you really get to build it from the ground up and create your own culture," McPhee said. "You don't have to dig out from under whatever the previous administration had done.
"But there also is a tremendous responsibility, too, to give your market a chance to succeed. You don't want to be a laughingstock. You want to win."
