Sharks know Golden Knights are no fluke
Peter DeBoer worked with George McPhee at the World Championships in the summer of 2015, before DeBoer was hired to be the Sharks’ head coach.
It was a brief encounter, but it gave DeBoer an inkling that this Vegas thing might work when the expansion team hired McPhee as its first general manager.
“This is a very intelligent guy,” said DeBoer, whose Sharks will play the Golden Knights in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. “Their assistant GM (Kelly McCrimmon), I worked with him, too, at Hockey Canada. They did a lot of planning, research and a lot of work to do what they did.”
What Vegas did was turn the expectations of an expansion team on its ear. And we’re not talking merely in hockey.
No first-year team in any of the four major North American team sports was as successful as the Golden Knights. Vegas burst from the gate by winning eight of its first nine games. It took control of the Pacific Division in December, did not let go, and now finds itself in the second round of the playoffs after sweeping a Los Angeles team that won Stanley Cups in 2012 and ’14.
Analysts trace the team’s success to relaxed expansion rules that made more talent available to the Knights than when the NHL added its previous nine teams, beginning in 1991 when the Sharks joined the league.
“I knew it was going to be a good team when they put out the expansion rules before they even played,” Sharks defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic said. “Take Nashville, for example. They would have wanted to protect James Neal. He’s a goal-scorer. Anyone would want to have him on their team. Name one guy on their team that’s not like that.”
Though teams in previous expansion drafts had been able to protect at least a dozen players and often many more, prior to last year’s draft, the NHL’s 30 teams could choose between protecting seven forwards, three defensemen and one goaltender or eight skaters (forwards and defensemen)
and one goaltender. Players who had “no movement” clauses in their contracts had to be protected. And all firstand second-year pros, as well as unsigned draft choices, were exempt from selection.
There’s more fine print regarding player-exposure requirements, but the primary result was general managers throughout the league scrambling to make side deals to protect as much as they could before making some very difficult decisions.
“They have the best chance to do something unique with the type of players they’ve been able to select in the pool they had,” Sharks captain Joe Pavelski said Sunday.
The two-time defending champion Penguins opted to keep 23-year-old goalie Matt Murray over Marc-Andre Fleury, 33, whom the franchise drafted No. 1 overall in 2003. Though both played in earlier rounds, Murray was the goalie of record in all 12 combined Cup Finals games against the Sharks in 2016 and Nashville last spring.
With its first pick in the expansion draft, Vegas plucked Fleury, who ranks 11th all-time with 404 career wins. He is making a strong case for Hall of Fame consideration. In addition, Fleury is one of the most affable and personable athletes in the game — not a bad way to attract fans in a nontraditional market. Fleury’s No. 29 jersey is the league’s fourth-best seller.
McPhee’s keen eye for talent, combined with selecting players who could mesh and perform with speed and skill as the way the game is trending, did not stop with a perfect pick in goal.
Others gems included:
⏩ William Karlsson, 25, who led the Knights with 43 goals and was a plus-49, had scored only 18 career goals in three previous seasons with two teams.
⏩ Jonathan Marchessault, 27, who scored 27 goals and had 75 points, was left exposed by Florida despite his 30 goals last season.
⏩ Neal, 30, with 25 goals and 44 points, had been a goal scorer in Dallas, Pittsburgh and Nashville, yet didn’t fit into the Predators’ plans.
⏩ Shea Theodore, 22, with six goals, has the look of a No. 1 defenseman with experience whom Anaheim opted not to protect.
“Obviously, the top 10 scorers in the league were protected, but there were a lot of great offensive players, great defensemen and goalies who were not protected,” Vlasic said.
And Vegas dominated. The Golden Knights scored a division-leading 272 goals (fourth most in the league), went 206-3 against Pacific foes and were 29-10-2 at home before winning two playoff games inside shiny T-Mobile Arena on the Vegas Strip.
“That’s an unbelievable team they’ve assembled and an unbelievable coaching job to buy into that kind of identity and to play the way they have,” DeBoer said. “Like I’ve said since Day 1, their game is real.
“And I don’t know if you’ll ever see this again. It’s quite a feat.”