As part of the sweet looking upgrades to City National Arena, the scoreboard in the rink the Golden Knights normally practice on got a massive remodel. In typical VGK fashion, a complete castle was built with two giant pictures flanking the scoreboard in the center.
If you look closely, you’ll notice only two players are prominently featured on the graphics. Marc-Andre Fleury’s mask and a clear shot of the back of Shea Theodore. That was until yesterday, when the graphic on the left was changed.
Just 15 days from the opening of training camp, Theodore still does not have a contract. If he doesn’t sign one by September 13th, he’ll miss the start of camp. If he does, it would have undoubtedly been super awkward to have a giant picture of him overlooking the rink while he’s the only Golden Knight not out there.
The team, however, says Theodore’s contract and the removal of the photo from the scoreboard are not related.
We were testing out different design treatments with the backlit signage. We wanted to show more of our primary home jersey in the left panel. We have the ability to change those out if we want to throughout the year. There are still more plans that are under construction that will be fully revealed at the start of training camp -Golden Knights team representative
Certainly a perfectly fair reasoning, and if it was anyone but Theodore it probably would have gone unnoticed. But alas, it was Theodore, it’s now gone, and it’s only natural to jump to conclusions.
Avoiding the potential awkwardness or simply a weird coincidence, we’ll let you be the judge. But one thing we are sure of, Shea Theodore’s picture will not be hanging above the rink when camp starts, whether the real Shea is on the ice below it or not.
(Stick tap to @jakeck for the photo of the new graphic.)
Bob mesecher
Get Shea a contract…..Don’t negatively affect the team cohesiveness, morale and fan enthusiasm because of a little money. Every dog wants a bone, even a little one. GO KNIGHTS GO !!,
Jason
Should him not signing be a concern yet?
Vgk4life
Good. He’s not what I think most fans would consider a favorite, the face of the franchise, or a known stalwart for future team building. He has potential for all 3 but to place him up over Marchessault or even Engelland was a mistake. We might as well have put Schipachyov up.