This article examines the response to the 1 October, 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas by both the city and its National Hockey League team, the Golden Knights. In analyzing these responses, we argue that the Golden Knights’ memorialization efforts, while operating within a familiar public relations script of the sporting commercialization of memorial, productively turned T-Mobile Arena into a space, however sanitized, for the enactment of rituals and a discourse of renewal. This space was otherwise absent from the rest of the tourist-oriented confines of the Strip. Further, the rhetorical conjoining of the hashtags #VegasStrong, which emerged shortly after the shooting, and #VegasBorn, which was originally used to market the team, operated as simultaneous symbols for both the team and its community. This allowed the sporting franchise to move between commercial and civic uses, operating as both branding for the team and as an embodied act of remembrance for local residents.

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