He said he settled on a name by the end of August, and team representatives have been working with Adidas on a logo since mid-July. It was not ready until late October.  “Everyone has an opinion, I can tell you that,” Foley said in an interview this month. “I was trying to do consensus-building for a while; then I stopped.”  If people do not like the name, he added, “it’s going to be on me.”  Foley at least has some company in decision-making now. After the Las Vegas ownership group, which includes the Maloof family, the former owners of the Sacramento Kings, received permission from the N.H.L. to conduct a season-ticket drive to gauge interest in December 2014, Foley worked with a small group of advisers and ticket representatives.  Now Foley has cleared out a floor in an office building in Summerlin, a suburb 15 miles from the Strip, for his growing staff, which he described as around 20 “poor people living in little cubes.”  He said he had not wanted to spend money or risk capital before the team was awarded, so the past five months have been a sprint.  The first major hire was that of General Manager George McPhee, who was the Washington Capitals’ general manager from 1997 to 2014. After assuming his position in July, he put together an hockey operations staff of nearly 40 people, including scouts, video specialists and an analytics department, in 60 days.  The franchise has just started building its business side. Kerry Bubolz, a longtime executive with the Cleveland Cavaliers, was named team president on Oct. 3. A chief marketing officer, Nehme E. Abouzeid, came aboard on Nov. 7.  The infrastructure of a major professional team also is becoming more visible in Las Vegas. The first ice sheet was installed at T-Mobile Arena on July 30 — a 110-degree day. In early October, the arena, which seats 17,368, hosted a fan festival and its first two N.H.L. games, preseason contests featuring the Los Angeles Kings.  In October, the team broke ground on a practice facility in downtown Summerlin that is expected to be completed in August in time for training camp.  The team website changed from VegasWantsHockey.com to VegasIsHockey.com. The team’s Twitter feed has been humming with updates, counting down the days until the name announcement, sharing hockey history and promoting local hockey scene, including Nevada-Las Vegas games.  Todd Pollock, the vice president for ticketing, and his staff spent most of the past six weeks trying to convert the nearly 16,000 season-ticket deposits into actual season-ticket holders, and managing online seat selection.  “Phones are ringing nonstop,” he said.  For a brief period, Pollock constituted the team’s entire ticket sales staff. Pollock, who has worked for the Los Angeles Kings and the San Francisco 49ers, has been part of the operation since Foley obtained approval from the N.H.L. for the ticket drive.  “It’s an education process for some of them,” Pollock said of Las Vegas residents. “They love hockey. They just don’t know much about it.”  Pollock’s ticket-sales staff has grown to 10 people. They have come a long way from cold-calling bars, restaurants and community centers to “invite themselves over” to sell residents on the team, Pollack said.  Foley said that sometimes only 15 to 20 people would show up at a bar. But when 4,000 deposits were made on the first day of the drive, Foley said he thought, “Wow, people really want this.”  The team converted a strong majority of deposits into season tickets, selling about 13,800 season tickets, Foley said.  “Las Vegas is so ready to have its own thing other than the Strip,” he said.  While he acknowledged his team may have to share the city with the Oakland Raiders after they recently reached a stadium deal with the state, Foley noted that the Raiders are not owned by local residents and come with a pre-existing fan base.  While others try to build a fan base, McPhee is try to build a team, with the expansion draft scheduled for June 17 to 20 and the amateur draft three days later.  He expects to spend the next several months dividing time between Las Vegas and the road, getting his staff together once a month to review nuts and bolts.  McPhee’s analytics group is pouring over statistics of every professional team and every minor league team to rate players and build a database. His crew of scouts are watching 25 games a night, canvassing all the N.H.L. teams and determining the best prospects in the amateur ranks.  “We do feel like we are in a good rhythm right now,” McPhee said.  McPhee and his staff are trying to do a mock expansion draft each month after doing their first in November, which produced questions for the league about the rules of the expansion draft.  With no franchise players expected to be available in the expansion draft, McPhee said, the goal was to put together a foundation to build on. The entry draft is “where we’re going to have to hit home runs,” he added.  McPhee has so far met with David Poile, who built the 1998-99 Nashville Predators, and Doug Risebrough, the first general manager of Minnesota Wild.  “The appeal of an expansion franchise is not having to dig out from problems on your arrival,” McPhee said. “You set the course immediately.”  Expansion team or not, Las Vegas or not, the goal is the same.  “It’s pretty simple: You have to win, whether in traditional or nontraditional market,” McPhee said, then ticking off the warm-weather teams that have recently won the Stanley Cup, like Los Angeles, Anaheim, Tampa Bay and Carolina. “We’re here to win.”  Historically, expansion teams have not won much. Of the nine N.H.L. expansion teams since 1991, only the 1993-94 Florida Panthers (33-34-17) had a point percentage even close to .500.  The N.H.L. also wants the Las Vegas team to be competitive right away and has tried to create more favorable expansion draft rules. The Las Vegas franchise must select one player from each of the 30 existing teams, which can protect fewer players than in the previous expansion draft in 2000.  “It doesn’t feel like pressure; it feels like an opportunity,” McPhee said. “We’re going to get a better base than any expansion team has had.”  But finding that base is still months away. With the name and logo taken care of, next on the team’s to-do list is completing sponsorship deals and negotiating TV rights.  “The next 11 months is going to go quick,” Foley said.  An earlier version of this article misstated the Nashville Predators’ first season in the N.H.L. It was 1998-99, not 1997-98.
The league’s newest expansion franchise will reveal its name and logo Tuesday night in a ceremony outside the new T-Mobile Arena.