Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Tough for Golden Knights to turn page, knowing team was built for deep run

0423_AP_VGKSharks

Jeff Chiu/AP

Vegas Golden Knights center William Karlsson, center, is congratulated by teammates after scoring a goal against the San Jose Sharks during the first period of Game 7 of an NHL hockey first-round playoff series in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, April 23, 2019.

Days later, the Game 7 loss still stings — will for a long time, actually.

Golden Knights coach Gerard Gallant, even with time to digest Tuesday’s improbable loss, reaffirmed his sentiments from after the tough-to-stomach playoff exit: It was harder to lose in San Jose than it was falling in last year’s Stanley Cup Final. Vegas was on the wrong end of a controversial major penalty resulting in a five-minute power play for the Sharks, who flipped a three-goal deficit with less than 10 minutes to play into a lead.

It’s the way they lost, yes.

But it is also what the loss deprived the Golden Knights of achieving. They were a team built to win it all had they gotten past the Sharks. And they knew it.

“We still felt like we could have won the Stanley Cup this year,” forward Mark Stone said. “We have an awesome team — we feel like we’re a contender.”

The mood of the Golden Knights’ players was grim on Thursday for their locker clean-out, with the feeling of regret and disbelief still palpable. To a man, they weren’t ready to start the offseason, knowing they should have been preparing for the second round of the playoffs, and not making summer plans.

The path to the finals was there.

Vegas would have had home ice against the Colorado Avalanche in the second round, where another series win would have put them halfway to the Cup. And the top seeds in the Central Division both lost in the first round, as did both of the Eastern Conference’s division champs, opening the door for a lower seed like Vegas to swoop in and make a run.

Moneypuck.com gave Vegas a 20.3 percent chance of winning the Cup before Game 6, by far the best of any team in the league. San Jose was arguably the toughest draw for the Golden Knights, and they still outscored the Sharks in the series and had a 3-1 series lead before coming up short.

“You’re thinking for sure you’re going to be into the next round, just to lose in the game, we obviously feel that we deserve better and we feel that we played well enough to win the series. This is a group that could have gone very far and contended,” forward Max Pacioretty said.

This year’s team was vastly different from last year’s Western Conference champion, which had more regular season success and a higher playoff seed. Last year’s team had the Golden Misfits mentality, and this year’s had the mindset of unfinished business. This year’s team also had star power.

“The way things were falling into place and the way things were working out, we had a road to get to the Stanley Cup,” Vegas owner Bill Foley said. “After the San Jose series, had we been successful, we would have been odds-on favored to win the Stanley Cup.

“I felt our team was a better team overall this year than it was a year ago, and I believe we’ll be a better team next year than we are right now.”

It’s going to hurt for awhile that the Golden Knights lost the first Game 7 in their history, and it hurts even more that they lost in part because of a call for which the NHL apologized.

But, as players said on Thursday, it hurts the most that a team had the talent to play deep into June had its exit interviews in April.

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