Alaska trip has LV set for its midnight start

Nick Christensen

Monday, Dec. 22, 2003 | 9:45 a.m.

Usually, having to catch an eight-hour red-eye flight from Anchorage to Las Vegas is not a pleasant way to spend a Sunday.

Usually, it's even worse when that flight is delayed by two hours, meaning a late arrival at Seattle for a missed connecting flight back to Las Vegas.

Usually, it's worse yet when it happens to a hockey team traveling more than 30 people who wind up split on to several flights, with the last group arriving home more than 17 hours after they arrived at Anchorage Airport.

But this wasn't a usual weekend for the Las Vegas Wranglers. It was anything but.

After splitting two games with the Alaska Aces, the Wranglers arrived periodically Sunday at McCarran Airport, busing back to the Orleans Arena to pick up their stuff and drive home. Tonight, they'll play host to the Bakersfield Condors at the Orleans Arena in what is believed to be the first hockey game ever to start at midnight.

Which is why, in fact, it may be a good thing that the Wranglers had so much travel difficulty on their weekend trip. Staying up all night may have actually helped the team get on a unique sleep schedule to keep them from feeling tired by the end of Monday's -- or is it Tuesday's -- game.

Wranglers coach Glen Gulutzan said he was skeptical of the idea at first.

"Being a hockey traditionalist, I wasn't really excited about it. But it's a game about marketing and publicity, so we'll see how it goes," Gulutzan said. "We pushed our routine back five hours. The beauty about hockey is you have to grind out your games, whether it's midnight or 2 in the afternoon, we're going to have to grind one out."

The idea came first from Billy Johnson, the Wranglers' vice president who spent time in minor-league baseball before coming to hockey and the Wranglers.

"I'm a baseball promoter who always wished he had a roof," Johnson said. "As a new franchise, in a town like Las Vegas where you can sort of experiment, we thought we would experiment, with illusions, and not delusions of grandeur. It'd be really cool in five years if a midnight game each year became a tradition."

And so the Wranglers and Bakersfield Condors will hit the ice at the stroke of 12 tonight. As of Thursday, Johnson said, around 3,000 tickets had been pre-sold for the game.

"I thought it was a joke at first," Wrangler forward Justin Kelly said Sunday while waiting for a plane at Seattle's airport. "It's kind of weird, kind of bizarre, but it's part of history, I guess. First hockey team to play at that time. It'll be fun once we get playing, once the game starts it's just hockey."

The idea was to attract shift workers who are working at 7 p.m., the usual game time. Johnson said that Mondays are usually weekend days for those shift workers, but surprisingly, a lot of slot clubs have also expressed interest in attending tonight's game.

Although it will be the first professional hockey game to start at midnight, it won't be the first time a minor-league franchise in Las Vegas has attempted it. The Las Vegas Silver Streaks of the World Basketball League tried it at the Thomas and Mack Center, with little success.

"The game started at midnight, back in 1988," said sports radio host Seat Williams, who was the play-by-play voice of the Silver Streaks that year. "They had a pajamas night promotion, which turned out to be a lot of fun. The crowd was very, very light, perhaps the lightest crowd of the year."

This, despite fans showing up in bikinis, which somehow got confused with pajamas.

"We catered to the casinos -- we had maybe 1,700 that night," said Jim Gemma, the Las Vegas 51s' media relations director who held that same position with the Silver Streaks in 1988. "It was really weird getting to the arena at midnight, to set up for a 2 a.m. game. It was weird walking out of the arena at 5 a.m. and the sun was coming up."

Despite the likelihood of a light crowd and the momentum the franchise picked up at the gate with their weeknight crowd of 6,878 last Wednesday, Johnson said he's not worried about the potential for a light crowd.

"I have to be honest, I would not have expected to have 6,800 (Wednesday)," Johnson said. "Maybe it won't be a great crowd for us, the first time we do it. I would imagine the second year, the awareness would be infinitely higher than what we're doing this year. To create tradition, you have to start at the bottom."

The promotion will be accompanied by a toy drive for the Salvation Army. Fans who bring a new toy to the Orleans Arena will get a discounted ticket.

"Hopefully we do draw enough toys to make an impact with the Salvation Army," Johnson said. "I can't imagine anything more cool than five years down the road where we're just dumping truckloads of toys at the eleventh hour every year thanks to a midnight event."