Vegas is most successful expansion team in sports history

MINNEAPOLIS — The Vegas Golden Knights keep skating further into the record books.

The Knights are onto the National Hockey League’s Western Conference final, otherwise known as the Minnesota Wild’s mirage in the desert for the past 15 years.

In the process, the Knights have had the most successful first year ever for an expansion franchise — not just in hockey, but in North America’s four major professional sports leagues.

Each sport has teams that found success in their first few seasons of existence. There are multiple examples of teams such as the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971 and Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001 winning league titles shortly after their conception. But usually it takes a rocky first year of growing pains before a leap to championship contention can happen.

The Knights threw out that conventional wisdom, using the expansion draft to craft a contender under GM George McPhee. It’s easy to argue now the expansion draft rules may have favoured the Knights a little too much (one GM told TSN it was like he was “held hostage” by the Knights during the process), but no analysts were giving the Knights much of a chance when the season started.

The best expansion team in baseball was the Los Angeles Angels, who went 70-91 in 1961. In the National Basketball Association, it was the 33-48 Chicago Bulls of 1966-67. The Carolina Panthers went 7-9 in 1995 for the National Football League’s best mark, while the 1994 Florida Panthers previously held the NHL’s best expansion record at 33-34-17.

There are some historical caveats. Hockey heads might remember St. Louis made the Stanley Cup final in their inaugural season in 1968, the year the NHL expanded from the Original Six to 12 teams. The six new teams went in the West Division, meaning one of them had to make the final. St. Louis just happened to be that team after going 27-31-16 and eliminating Philadelphia and Minnesota on the way. Montreal swept the Blues for the Cup.

Given the Knights came into a fully formed league and had to take the discards of 30 teams, their run to the conference final is more impressive than what the Blues accomplished.

All signs point to Seattle as getting the next NHL expansion franchise and, given the Knights’ success, don’t be surprised if the rest of the league makes it harder for Seattle to duplicate what the Knights did.

But Vegas had to have a lot go right to get where it is. It hit a home run with a lot of its picks, identifying players like William Karlson and Jonathan Marchessault who were due to break out given larger roles.

Then there’s former Minnesota Wild players Erik Haula and Alex Tuch, both of whom have been instrumental in this playoff surge. It might sting for Wild fans to see the newbie have stunning success when the Wild has been stuck for so long, but it’s rare when you get to see history in the making, and the Golden Knights are certainly worthy of being called historic.