House Money

All it took for the Vegas Golden Knights to beat the odds—and 50 years’ worth of expansion franchise failure—was a little luck, a lot of rotation and a few aces up their sleeves.

- Emily Kaplan

Pierre-Edouard Bellemare’s first trip to Las Vegas was a colossal bust. In 2013, the French-born winger’s Skellefteå AIK won the Swedish Hockey League championship, and the team splurged with a weeklong trip to Vegas. Upon arriving at the airport, Bellemare was told that his passport—which didn’t have a necessary biometric chip—was no good. So instead, he spent the week holed up at his mother’s house in France. Naturally, it rained every day.

His teammates showed little mercy, texting him panoramic photos of their helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon and Snapchatting selfies from backstage at an Avicii show. Bellemare sulked—and renewed his passport, with an expiration of 2023. That’s good, his mother, Frederique, told him, because it means one day you can live in the United States—and live there for a while.

“I didn’t say shut up,” Bellemare says now. “But I was thinking, ‘This is bulls---.’” After all, the NHL was little more than a pipe dream for the 28-year-old—even his own coaches on the French national team told him to give up on the idea. “You’ll see,” Frederique said at the time. “One day we will be laughing about this.”

A year later, Bellemare helped lead Skellefteå to a second straight title and signed as a free agent with the Flyers. Now the left winger is an alternate captain for the Golden Knights in their wildly successful inaugural season. “So now I’m not just traveling to Vegas, I own a house in Vegas,” he says. “I have a wife and child here. I sometimes have to think, ‘How did my career end up like this?’”