Press Room

A river of pucks flows through Tap 25 in new Enoch casino

Las Vegas designers figured a hockey motif would score in Edmonton

Nick Lees, The Edmonton Journal
October 15, 2006

One Oilers fan was swimming in a river of 2,000 hockey pucks Thursday night and was unhappy he wasn't there to see Ryan Smyth beat Wayne Gretzky's record for the fastest Oiler hat trick.

"I'm a major Oilers fan and know Ryan works hard," says tile setter Trevor Moran. "To break a Gretzky record, he must have had a heck of a game."

Moran was putting the last pucks in place to form a "River of Pucks" that runs through Tap 25, a lounge at the $178-million River Cree Resort and Casino.

The resort on the Enoch reserve is scheduled to open Oct. 26. It will boast a 255-room, four-star Marriott hotel and state-of-the-art gaming facilities.

"It was designers in Las Vegas who came up with the River of Pucks idea," says Cameron Conn, who works for Las Vegas-based Paragon Gaming, the Enoch band's casino partners.

"They know Edmonton is a big hockey town and thought having pucks from 30 National Hockey League teams form a river would be a conversation piece."

The one-of-kind "river" meanders nearly 20 metres through the lounge and submerged the first 1,200 pucks so easily that more had to be ordered.

"There are of course more Oilers pucks in the river than any others," says Moran. "It seemed only right."

The bar also features three pillars that respectively hold 500 basketballs, 600 footballs and 3,000 tennis balls. "We wanted to fill one with soccer balls," says Conn. "But so many were unsuitable because (of the way) they were decorated ... At $60 each for a proper game ball, it would have been expensive to buy the many hundreds needed."

The glib chat Conn has developed with construction crews while working in Edmonton for eight months might qualify him for a degree in repartee.

"The ice rink the Tap 25 bar overlooks was so appealing I began playing hockey," he says. "But I fell this week and needed five stitches in my chin. Everywhere I go now in my red-and-white, Maple Leaf hard hat, people joke and tell me I fit right in as a Canadian."