“Vegas” (Something) Knights?

Update, 12:30 PM:  Sin Bin Vegas let me know that the vegas.nhl.com subdomain referenced below was once the home of information about the Las Vegas-based NHL Awards.  This would explain the inconsistency and serve as one more check against its existence meaning anything.

Update, 1:55 PM: It turns out that there are several subdomains of NHL.com that point to sites that no longer exist.  Apparently the league’s IT people just don’t clean up their DNS.  I think it’s pretty clear at this point that what’s described below isn’t as meaningful as it originally seemed.

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Over the last week or so, many questions about the identity of the new Las Vegas NHL franchise have been answered.

On September 9th, team owner Bill Foley gave an interview stating that the name was trademarked and that he had his domain(s).  No new trademarks hit the USPTO database and no new domains were registered, so it would appear that it’s one of the names from the August 23rd filings: Desert Knights, Silver Knights, or Golden Knights.

But there’s one more question: “Las Vegas” or “Vegas” as a place-name?

Trademarks were filed for both variants of all three names.  Yesterday, Sin Bin Vegas reported that “Vegas” was Foley’s preference.  It turns out that there may already be evidence that “Vegas” will be used.

Every team has a web site at teamname.nhl.com.  There are not sites for desertknights.nhl.com or silverknights.nhl.com or goldenknights.nhl.com.  There’s no site for lasvegas.nhl.com.  At the technical level, there’s no DNS set up for any of those.  But vegas.nhl.com does have DNS set up.  Browsing to that address just gets you a 404 error right now, no actual content, but the fact that the domain is pointed anywhere might be a sign of something.

Things worth noting: No other team has a cityname.nhl.com domain.  Every other team’s NHL.com subdomain is hosted by Akamai while vegas.nhl.com is hosted by Cbeyond.  That means there is something very different about this subdomain.

I think the fact that vegas.nhl.com exists (in a way) is curious.  I don’t know exactly what it means, though.

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I no longer think the dot-com domain registrations tell us much of anything.  Names Foley (or his spokespeople) have said he owned are not owned by him.  I don’t think we can read into their ownership to determine which of the three names is the final one.

With that in mind, I also no longer think Golden Knights will be the name.  Based on how he described the jerseys last week, I think we’re looking at Desert Knights.  Vegas Desert Knights.