Seven months ago, the Vegas Golden Knights didn’t have a single player and today they have the NHL’s third-highest-scoring offense.
The expansion Vegas squad might prompt other NHL teams to re-examine how they are building their teams. In theory, the Golden Knights were allowed to draft no better than the ninth-best skater on each NHL team and yet somehow they’ve put together a team that is averaging 3.44 goals per game. Only the Tampa Bay Lightning (3.81) and the New York Islanders (3.52) are better.
“It’s balanced,” Vegas general manager George McPhee told USA TODAY Sports. “We are not relying on any one line, or any one player, or any one defense pairing to score. We’ve had big goals from our fourth line and big nights from our third line.”
McPhee was widely praised for how he managed the expansion draft process, but no one projected that the Golden Knights would be able to score at this rate. The hope was they would be competitive. Instead, they're playing like a playoff team.
“We thought we would be all right in (in the scoring) department,” McPhee said.
The Golden Knights have scored four or more goals 17 times in their first 32 games.
The only heralded goal scorer the Golden Knights landed in the expansion draft was James Neal, who once scored 40 goals for the Pittsburgh Penguins. He leads the Golden Knights with 16 goals this season. William Karlsson is second with 15 goals. He netted six last season with the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Although Jonathan Marchessault scored 30 goals last season with the Florida Panthers, the hockey world wasn’t sold on him. But McPhee was, and Marchessault is the team’s No. 1 point producer with 29 in 29 games
Erik Haula has 12 goals in 28 games, and last season he had 15 in 72 games with the Minnesota Wild. He’s four points shy of matching his point total from last season.
“Sometimes your instincts just tell you something about a guy,” McPhee said. “We liked him a lot. We liked the pace he brought to the game. This season, he’s been more than opportunistic. He has created a lot.”
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The Golden Knights have brought a double-time pace to their games and that was always going to be the plan under coach Gerard Gallant. The Golden Knights are enjoyable to watch because they are always pushing the tempo.
“We don’t sit back and wait,” McPhee said. “We attack all of the time. We try to pressure the puck. But this has exceeded our expectations.”
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McPhee’s selection of Gallant was one of his best personnel decisions. Gallant is open-minded about taking chances to score goals.
“We skate fast and we try to move the puck fast,” McPhee said. “And we do take some risks trying to score. “
Gallant also like to roll four lines.
“You dress, you play,” McPhee said. “He keeps everyone involved. And if you play well, you play more. There’s real trust between coach and player.”
In terms of coaching style, Gallant gets more done through admiration than intimidation.
“In vetting (Gallant), what we learned about him is that players enjoyed playing for him,” McPhee said. “They just don’t want to let him down.”
At 21-9-2, the Golden Knights have the NHL’s fifth-best record. It’s been a remarkable start when you consider that it is generally held that it takes three to five years to rebuild effectively.
The 1925-26 Pittsburgh Pirates (19-16-1) are the only expansion team in NHL history to finish with at least a .500 record. The Golden Knights are on pace for 54 wins and 114 points.
“The marketplace is love with this team, and it continues to build and build and build,” McPhee said.
Unquestionably, the Golden Knights were aided by the most generous expansion draft rules the NHL has ever employed. The NHL tradition used to be to feed new teams table scraps. With Golden Knights owner Bill Foley paying a $500 million expansion fee, the NHL allowed teams to protect seven forwards, three defensemen and a goalie or eight skaters from any position, plus a goalie.
McPhee cautions against becoming overly excited about his team, noting it is still early in the Golden Knights' first season. But watching them thrive makes you wonder why the NHL wasn’t more helpful to past expansion teams. Helping the team be instantly competitive also helps grow the fan base and create excitement.
"They," McPhee said, "may have set the template for all pro sports with this (plan)."
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The latest addition to the NHL ranks, however, is the Las Vegas Golden Knights, who are charting a new course. Making their debut in October, they won eight of their first nine contests. Now, 32 games into their inaugural season, they remain well ahead of the typical expansion team′s path. Their record of 21-9-2—the NHL counts overtime victories as wins, but overtime losses separately—places them atop the eight-team Pacific Division, and ranks them among the top five clubs in the entire league. This is a far cry from the 1991-92 Sharks, who kicked off their franchise history with a measly 17 wins in 80 games. In a league in which no previous expansion team has posted a winning record in its opening season, Las Vegas’s results so far challenge the received wisdom about the potential of such a squad.
The usual obstacle facing new franchises is a dearth of available talent. The Golden Knights’ ability to build a competitive roster is partly a testament to their management’s savvy negotiation of the expansion draft, and partly the result of an unusually friendly player selection process. The latter reason is no accident. The NHL has no plans to halt its expansion at the awkward size of 31 teams, which makes scheduling complicated. And the more success Las Vegas enjoys immediately, the more attractive the future 32nd franchise will be to potential suitors. There is already stiff competition for the slot: the contenders include Quebec City, which hosted an NHL team until the franchise moved to Colorado in 1995; Seattle, where over $500m has been committed to renovating Key Arena; and Houston, America’s fourth-biggest television market. For a potential owner, the economics of landing an expansion franchise look much better if they don’t involve suffering through years of on-ice futility.
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Unlike the many expansion franchises of the 1990s that debuted in pairs, Las Vegas did not have to compete with another newbie for the scrap heap’s best pickings. The expansion draft’s rules allowed George McPhee, Las Vegas’s general manager, to select one unprotected player from each of the existing NHL teams. It wasn’t exactly fantasy hockey, as Mr McPhee was denied access to hundreds of the league’s best players. However, the rules ensured that available players weren’t quite rejects, either. Mr McPhee did not make his selections with the goal of raising the price of a hypothetical 32nd franchise; instead, his choices largely prioritised the club’s long-term health at the expense of a borderline playoff run in 2018. Nonetheless, as it turned out, Las Vegas has wound up with the best of both worlds: the team is both a surprise contender this season, and has amassed a passel of blue-chip prospects around whom Mr McPhee can build future playoff campaigns.
Even with relatively friendly draft rules, nobody thought this would be a first-place club: its inaugural roster only appeared stronger than about one-third of NHL teams. And on paper, the lineup has gotten even weaker since the season started. Marc-Andre Fleury, the team’s goaltender and one of its few members with a long history of success in the NHL, suffered a concussion in his fourth game and returned only last week. The netminding duo that replaced him, Oscar Dansk and Malcolm Subban, quickly followed Mr Fleury on to the injured list, forcing Gerard Gallant, the Golden Knights’ coach, to give 13 starts to his fourth-string goalie, Maxim Lagace. Moreover, the Russian star Vadim Shipachyov, whose performance with St. Petersburg of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) suggested he could emerge as a force in the more competitive NHL, hasn’t contributed at all. After signing a two-year, $9m contract, he failed to make the Knights out of training camp, managed a mere 32 minutes of ice time, and has already “retired” from the NHL in order to return to Russia.
Yet somehow, this battle-scarred group of surplus players has outscored 28 NHL teams. And even with a goalkeeping corps patched together from the waiver wire, they have been better than half the league at keeping the puck out of their own net. Their current record probably overstates their strength: they’ve faced a relatively easy schedule and have enjoyed a bit of good fortune in overtime. But the Simple Rating System (SRS) metric, which takes into account goal differential and quality of opposition, still ranks them ninth in the NHL, and a hair out of second place in their division.
The Golden Knights have achieved their unprecedented early-season success thanks to an unlikely committee of contributors. Jon Marchessault, a 27-year-old top-line center drafted from the Florida Panthers, has built on a career-best showing last season to lead his new team with 29 points (11 goals and 18 assists). His linemate, the 25-year-old winger William Karlsson, has thrived in his new higher-profile role, tallying more points already this season than he did across 81 games for the Columbus Blue Jackets last year. Mr Subban, a once-touted goalkeeping prospect who failed to excel with the Boston Bruins, who selected him in the first round of the 2012 entry draft but let him go on waivers in October, has allowed a stingy 2.3 goals per game. His performance while keeping the net warm for Mr Fleury hints that one of Mr McPhee’s best acquisitions came long after the expansion draft.
The 8-1 record with which the Knights opened the season, along with the individual performances that contributed, could be written off as a freak run of luck better suited to a Vegas casino. But 21 wins in 32 games is something else entirely. This team is still nearly as unlikely to finish in first place as Mr Karlsson is to conclude the season with his current shooting percentage of 22.7%, more than the double the league average. Yet with more than two months of hockey in the books, it’s increasingly safe to say that the Golden Knights will post the first-ever winning season from an NHL expansion team. Of the nearly 500 team-seasons since 2000 (excluding the lockout-shortened 2012-13 campaign), 43 clubs have won at least 21 of their first 32 contests. Every single one of them not only finished the season above .500, but also advanced to the postseason. However long their inaugural season lasts, Las Vegas has demonstrated that expansion teams can do more than just lose. Prospective bidders for a 32nd NHL team have surely taken note, and with every Golden Knights win, the price of that franchise goes up.
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