Icing on the Cake: Nevada DMV Creates Vegas Golden Knights License Plate

By: Kyle Magin April 25, 2018
The Vegas Golden Knights hockey team's logo may soon grace license plates in Nevada.
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Great news for Sin City hockey fans who can’t grow a playoff beard: an alternative way to show your loyalty is on the way.

Nevada’s DMV has designed a specialty license plate for fans of the Silver State’s first big-time professional sports team, the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Vegas Golden Knights. In their first season of play, the Knights finished first in the league’s Pacific Division and won their first-round series in the Stanley Cup playoffs, stoking hockey fever in the desert.

Once the team approves the design, the plate will go into production, which should take several weeks, said Kevin Malone, a DMV spokesman. Once available, the plate will cost $35 annually.

A bipartisan state Senate bill—an uncommon occurrence in the state’s combative upper chamber—brought the plate to life during the 2017 legislative session. Perhaps more striking was the fact that the bill received support not only from the blues and reds, but the often-opposed south and north: Senators Kelvin Atkinson (D-North Las Vegas), and Ben Kieckhefer (R-Reno), among a bevy of others, co-sponsored the bill.

Atkinson, who admitted to generally opposing specialty plates in May 2017 when he introduced the measure, made an exception in the case of the Knights as a way to help bolster support for the new club.

Between the bill’s introduction and now, the team made a strong case for support on its own. Serving as a rallying point for the Las Vegas community after the devastating Oct. 1, 2017 mass shooting, the Knights won their first home game on Oct. 10 to become the NHL’s first team to go 3-0 to start a season. On March 31, the team became the first expansion team in any major American sport—ever—to win its division in its first season of play. By April 17, the team became the NHL’s first-ever expansion squad to sweep a playoff series in its first season of play.

However the season ends up for the revelatory Knights, Nevadans will soon be able to commemorate their fandom with a specialty license plate. You could easily cover the cost for it if you bet the Knights when they were a 500-1 underdog entering the season. 

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