Golden Knights misfits no more
Free agent Pietrangelo is the latest addition to a star-studded roster
People kept telling Nate Schmidt and the Vegas Golden Knights that they wouldn’t be any good in their inaugural season, so they went about proving doubters wrong.
They were an expansion team, a group of self-labelled misfits that burst onto the NHL scene winning eight of their first nine games and making an improbable and historic run to the Stanley Cup Final in the first year. From inside the raucous arena out to the Strip, it was a story made for Hollywood lavished by the pageantry of Las Vegas.
“I don’t think you’ll ever replicate that,” Schmidt said. “The first year and the Vegas Flu and all that stuff that came along with it — the gals with the big feathers at the games — it was all wild. It was something we had never experienced before.”
That was just 2017-18 and yet everything since has changed. Underdogs no more, the Golden Knights have traded for or signed some of the NHL’s best players, gotten rid of some fan favourites from the original incarnation, fired their affable first coach and are now a perennial Cup contender laser-focused on winning now.
Trading Schmidt to Vancouver and signing big-ticket free agent Alex Pietrangelo this week finalized Vegas’s evolution as a franchise.
“We are trying to win a Stanley Cup,” general manager Kelly McCrimmon said. “We’re not going to apologize for that. We’re going to continue to work as hard as we can to be the best team we can be.”
A team that iced a blue line of Schmidt, Brayden McNabb, a young Shea Theodore, Deryk Engelland, Luca Sbisa and Colin Miller for Game 1 of the 2018 final — the biggest win in the organization’s history — now has Cup winners Pietrangelo and Alec Martinez making almost $13 million (U.S.) and Theodore in the discussion as one of the best defencemen in hockey.
The goal is simple now: Cup or bust. With Peter DeBoer in charge of a stacked roster that’s up against the salary cap, making the playoffs and winning a round or two isn’t good enough.