New guys could go all the way
The Vegas Golden Knights have taken the hockey world on a multi-step re-education process this season. What began with surprise moved to disdain, and then on to disbelief and incredulity.
We have now arrived at the fifth step. Acceptance. We can only wonder how many more steps there are left. Lifting hockey’s most famous trophy?
Even if you want to grasp at the very last straw and suggest the Knights got the very best possible opponent in the first round of the Stanley Cup, the fading and punchless Los Angeles Kings, you must still accept that Vegas is continuing its season of historic accomplishment by wiping the mat with the Kings, not easy to do to any playoff opponent.
L.A. has the stars — Drew Doughty, Jonathan Quick, Anze Kopitar, Jeff Carter — and the massive contracts to go with them. For Game 3 on Sunday night, after losing Games 1 and 2 in Nevada, the Kings brought out the off-ice stars as well, with actor Margot Robbie, Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner and soccer icon David Beckham among the sellout crowd. That crowd roared as L.A. finally scored first and leaned hard on the Knights as if to communicate a message that the fun was over and it was time for the adults to take charge.
In the end, however, none of that mattered. The Knights still won. The momentum won in Vegas stayed in Vegas.
The Knights won with a dagger to the heart, scoring two goals in 21 seconds in the third period. On the second goal, the victim was Doughty, who just wandered away from where he needed to be, leaving the Knights most dangerous scorer, William Karlsson, completely alone. Karlsson hammered the puck past Quick to give Vegas a 3-1 lead, and the Knights ultimately registered a 3-2 triumph and now lead the best-of-seven series three games to none.
There’s really no disputing the success of the Knights any more. It’s certainly not a fluke. In the modern, parity-stricken NHL, they have proven you don’t need years to build a contending team. Just months will do, thank you very much. The NHL expansion model of 2018 is light years beyond what it was a quarter-century ago, when Ottawa and Tampa Bay entered the league with shaky investors and makeshift, tem- porary home arenas. It’s not that much more sophisticated than the expansion efforts at the turn of the century that brought Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus and Minnesota into the league, but by bringing in a salary cap system, the NHL has generated an environment in which excellence is non-sustainable and unlikely, thereby laying the ground for the success of Vegas.
That’s the hard, logistical reality. The exciting part, how- ever, is that the Knights are among the most interesting and enjoyable clubs to watch. Vegas attacks and skates, and in this series, haven’t just outsmarted and outskated L.A.; they’ve brought a higher level of energy and passion, as well.
In some ways, this is very familiar. It was in the spring of ’96 that the Florida Panthers captivated the attention of the hockey world in a similar way. But even that isn’t the best comparison. Florida was a third-year team, and had the benefit of being able to use young, talented draftees like Ed Jovanovski, Rob Niedermayer, Rhett Warrener and Radek Dvorak.
Vegas is a first-year team with no drafted players in the lineup. George McPhee just crafted a roster out of the expansion draft and hired Gerard Gallant to coach that group. That’s about it.
It seems likely that, regardless of how far the Knights go, their success is going to reverberate around the NHL. Why should the Islanders sign John Tavares if this kind of team success is possible without that kind of expenditure? Ditto for Ottawa and Erik Karlsson, and you can bet Eugene Melnyk is taking the success of Vegas as confirmation of his belief that spending millions buys you nothing in today’s NHL.
You can say the Knights had better expansion draft pickings than any first-year NHL outfit in history, but only Neal and Fleury were front-line players, and Fleury had been relegated to the backup in Pittsburgh. Marchessault wasn’t a core player. Alex Tuch and Colin Miller weren’t.
So McPhee, like a hockey version of Billy Beane, identified undervalued assets. Either that or he exposed the fact that the difference between stars and plumbers, between first rounders and other players, isn’t as substantial as we’ve been led to believe.
It seemed like Washington just had to keep Dmitry Orlov (second round pick, $5.1-million cap hit) rather than Nate Schmidt (undrafted, $2.25million cap hit), but apparently that wasn’t necessarily true. That’s the kind of individual case that could have repercussions when it comes to free agency and the trade market this summer.
That’s all for later. For now, we must accept Vegas as a serious post-season threat. Period. End of discussion. Whether acceptance now leads to congratulations, engravings and rings, we shall see.