By all indications, Oakland Raiders coach Jon Gruden has banned two words from his vocabulary.

“Las” and “Vegas.”

The reasons are pretty obvious. Gruden wants his players focused on the now, and many of them won’t be on the roster anyway when the franchise relocates in two years. Still, Gruden sidesteps any references to the team’s future home.

Michael Gehlken, who covers the team for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has kept a running count of how many times Gruden has mentioned that city in a formal setting. The grand total? Once. That came in his introductory news conference on Jan. 9, when he said, “I’ll let Mark talk about Vegas.”

Mark is Raiders owner Mark Davis, whose club is building a domed, 65,000-seat stadium just across the freeway from the Las Vegas Strip. He is wholeheartedly in favor of Gruden staying laser focused on the present, with the team kicking off the regular season Monday night at home against the Los Angeles Rams.

“He doesn’t need to talk about Las Vegas right now,” Davis said in a recent interview with The Times.

“We’re the Oakland Raiders right now, and we’re going to bring a championship here. That’s the mental aspect of what we’re doing,” said Davis. Whether we can or not, that’s a different story. But we’re going to do everything we can in our power to do it.”

A championship is a tall order for any franchise, but especially one that just traded away a generational talent.

To the dismay of a huge chunk of their fan base, the Raiders shipped All-Pro defensive end Khalil Mack to Chicago last week. The Raiders got two first-round picks in the deal, and the Bears promptly made Mack the highest-paid defensive player in NFL history, a pact that pays him an average of $23.5 million per season.

As for Davis, he is unflaggingly confident that Gruden can coach the Silver and Black back to annual relevance. Davis said he spent the past six years courting the coach, before signing him to a 10-year, $100 million deal.

“I spent a lot of time in the Dallas airport, because American Airlines went from San Francisco to Dallas to Tampa,” the owner said. “For six years, I traveled back there to meet with him. I noticed through those six years, the passion was never gone. His study of football. I’d go back there to his office in that strip mall maybe 15 times” — a nondescript office space Gruden deemed the Fired Football Coaches Association — “and just sit there and talk. I knew that if he came back, he’d definitely be prepared and fired up for it.”