Caps win, stakes high for Knights
It would have been fun to hear the non-stop non-cliches.
“It was such a short road to get here” … “to win a Stanley Cup without having to go through losing first was really relaxing” … “weird how it took other teams so long” … “we proved you don’t have to sacrifice to win a championship” … “it was exciting to prove the Cup wasn’t really the hardest trophy to win” … “tradition schmadition” … “we didn’t need to grasp the torch from any failing hands.”
Alas, Las Vegas couldn’t close the deal on what would have been the most improbable championship in North American sports history, so we never got to hear any of that. Instead, the brave Knights went out with a whimper in five games. It really was for the best. It really helped the NHL and all the long-held beliefs and pucks-in-deep, get-traffic-infront cliches that the Washington Capitals emerged with the Cup and immediately turned it into a giant beer stein. That way, the orthodoxy could stay in place, that the Caps had paid their dues and thus deserved it, that Alex Ovechkin had proved he wasn’t Dan Marino and could win a championship, that the Stanley Cup could only be awarded to a team that had tried and tried and failed and failed before finally breaking through.
Otherwise, all that would have been revealed as utter nonsense, right?
Having Washington win just causes so much less fuss. Nothing needs to be questioned. Nothing to be examined here except why all those young men are rolling around in that public fountain, and whether the D.C. squad and owner Ted Leonsis will actually show some principles and turn down the White House invitation that’s sure to come.
The Vegas championship that would have turned the NHL on its head didn’t happen, so those who just wanted hockey to never change don’t have to change.
Except Vegas did happen. It shocked everyone, including this writer, who only imagined an NHL expansion team could be awful because all NHL expansion teams had been awful. That was my inability to see other possibilities, my myopia, but at least I had lots of company.
The next intriguing storyline will be to see what the Golden Knights do next. Was this just a crazy blip that was finally put down by the establishment Caps? Or did George McPhee and Co. really reveal some new truths about hockey and the NHL that other clubs would be wise to both evaluate and possibly adopt?
It’s really hard to say, largely because no one has come up with an adequate explanation as to why Vegas was able to pull it off. There are lots of mini-explanations, from a team made up of castoffs motivated to prove themselves, to a dressing room made harmonious by the absence of $10-million stars, to an expansion draft formula that gave the Knights an unprecedented head start.
Those writing or embracing the narrative of why their team didn’t go as far as Vegas are more than happy to grasp the final explanation, because then they don’t have to question the geniuses running their favourite squad. But if Vegas did get the core of a competitive team in the expansion draft, they certainly didn’t get the core of a Stanley Cup finalist. Which means the true explanation, if someone can ever figure it out, is what happened to that group of athletes once they were assembled and organized under the watchful eyes of Gerard Gallant.
Now, it’s what magic trick McPhee and Gallant can conjure up next.
They’ve got a fan base that now believes this is how it works and is what they’ll get every year. The most significant obstacle stopping that from happening is that the NHL rewards lousiness rather than success, so Vegas is extremely unlikely to get a franchise player in the draft this month because they don’t have a first-round pick. In the past, that’s where new teams would get the high-end talent they needed to build a contender. But Vegas traded its firstrounder, and two other picks, to Detroit to get Tomas Tatar. Given Tatar often couldn’t crack the lineup, that was a sizeable mistake.
The Knights will draft in the second round this month, but not the third. So that’s one pick in the top 93, and none in the top 25. In terms of developing organization, that’s a punch to the solar plexus. Vegas had three of last year’s top 15 picks Cody Glass (sixth), Nick Suzuki (13th) and Erik Brannstrom (15th) so that lessens the blow to some degree.
Perhaps Vegas doesn’t need young talent like other teams do. After all, they skipped all the other supposedly necessary steps this season. But the guess here is that not having a topfive pick last year and not having a first-round selection this year is unavoidably going to have a long-term impact.
McPhee’s got Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith under contract for years, but has to figure out how to pay William Karlsson and Shea Theodore. James Neal is unrestricted in a few weeks, and local hero Marc-André Fleury has one year left on his deal.
The Knights could turn to free agency. They could sign John Carlson. They could pursue John Tavares. That, however, would alter that dressing-room equality dynamic that so many cited as a reason for the success of this year’s team. It would also likely improve the team to such an extent Vegas would be out of the running for the best draft prospects for years to come.
Vegas surprised us all this year. Good for them. Now they’re a team of interest, a team that will have to prove this wasn’t just about catching lightning in a bottle. Given what they’ve done, it won’t be easy to bet against them.