Wednesday afternoon at the 2016 World Series of Poker Daniel Negreanu recorded the third cash of his summer. But it was some non-poker news that day before that might have made Negreanu the happiest.

The Associated Press confirmed what many already knew, Las Vegas was officially getting a National Hockey League expansion franchise as long as prospective owner Bill Foley could come up with the $500 million expansion fee. The team is expected to begin play in the 2017-18 NHL season.

For Negreanu, who has been involved with Foley and his team since the early stages of the process, it felt like a victory for his adopted hometown of Las Vegas.

“I think it’s going to make this like a community. Vegas is an interesting city in that it feels like nobody’s from here. It’s a bunch of displaced souls,” said Negreanu. “People came from Chicago, they’re still Blackhawks fans, and now I think it will bring the city together in a new way. We’ll have something to rally behind. And I think it’s going to be successful.”

The city already has a brand new arena on the strip ready to house the new team, expected to be named the Black Knights – a nod to Foley’s time at West Point. And while the T-Mobile arena is the showcase for the team, Negreanu thinks other investments Foley is making around Las Vegas are going to have a big payoff when it comes to cultivating a fan base.

“The danger is obviously the team won’t be good for the first few years, will people get sick of just watching the team lose or will they latch on to hockey?,” said Negreanu. “One of the things that Bill Foley is doing to ensure that hockey becomes a hotbed is developing rinks around town. So he’s going to start at the grassroots level by having kids playing and creating a bigger community, skating rinks around town that really help make hockey a thing here.”

And while creating local fans is going to be a key to the long term success, the Black Knights might just give out of town hockey fans another reason to come to Las Vegas.

“We’ll always have tourism. Nobody goes to Columbus and says lets make a vacation out of that,” said Negreanu. “I think with Vegas people from LA, Phoenix, San Jose, Calgary – the Canadian cities – they’ll come out here just to make a vacation out of it.”

Negreanu met Foley a few years ago after Negreanu was asked his opinion on the likelihood of Las Vegas landing an NHL franchise in the near future. And while one might think it was hockey-made Negreanu who sought out Foley, that’s actually not the case.

“We met because I did an interview with ESPN insider and he read it so he reached out to me and asked if I’d like to get involved and help sell some tickets and stuff like that. So I did,” said Negreanu. “I like him. He’s a guy who has money already; he’s not doing this for the money. He’s doing this because it’s a passion. He’s got a good support staff people, he has good people around him and he’s a winner and he wants to win. He says eight years for a (Stanley) Cup.”

Now that the team is official – pending a vote by the other league’s owners on June 22 – Negreanu is exploring what possible roles he could have with the team including the possibility of buying a percentage of the franchise.

“We’ll see. Right now I’m one of the Founding 75, which basically just means I helped to get it started,” said Negreanu. “Whether I’m going to be a minority owner or not depends on what it looks like. It’s expensive.”

But for a kid from the hockey hotbed of Toronto, the possibility of being able to own even a small piece of an NHL team might be too good to pass up.

“That’s exactly it. I wouldn’t buy a piece because I thought it was a good investment or a bad investment really, I’d just do it because it’s cool for me to say I own a piece of an NHL franchise,” said Negreanu.