Golden Knights owner: Las Vegas already outselling the Penguins, Flyers and Bruins

Bill Foley says the NHL's 31st team is sitting pretty as it builds a market for the first time

The Vegas Golden Knights haven't taken the ice for a single game yet.

But their owner, Bill Foley, says the NHL's latest expansion team is already among the league's best ticket sellers, outdoing iconic franchises like the Philadelphia Flyers, Boston Bruins and repeat Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins in preseason sales for 2017-18.

"We are No. 5, six or seven in terms of ticket revenue in the league," Foley told Mark Ewing, of Forbes. "That's how good Las Vegas has been to us. Edmonton has more revenue in their brand-new arena. The Rangers, Toronto, Chicago Blackhawks, they're all ahead of us. Montreal is right with us. We have more revenue than the Flyers, Penguins, the Boston Bruins."

This comes despite what Foley deemed a "fumble" of a first-time ticket drive for the Golden Knights, the NHL's 31st team and the first major professional sports club to land in Las Vegas.

"We fumbled around with it, and at the end of about 60 days we had 11,000 deposits for season tickets for a team that did not exist to play in an arena that had not been built," Foley said, per Forbes. "The arena was not finished until April of '16."

Now, with the apparent benefit of marketing multi-year tickets and, of course, an all-new team comprised of relatively well known veteran castoffs, Foley and the Golden Knights have sold "13,500 of the 17,000 seats" at T-Mobile Arena.

And for Foley, it's just the start of a promising market for hockey in Nevada.

"We did a market study for Las Vegas and determined that we had about 200,000 avid hockey fans, people from Minnesota or Canada, the northeast," he told Forbes. "People trying to get to a nice climate. We went to the high end and our average ticket price is about $88. The league average is down in the $70s. Financially, we will be strong."