Golden Knights’ Defining Moments: Firing Gallant, hiring DeBoer

By Justin Emerson

Wednesday, April 29, 2020 | 2 a.m.

Gerard Gallant won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year in 2018. The Golden Knights went to the Stanley Cup Final that season and were a controversial penalty call in Game 7 away from going to the second round last year.

Gallant turned the expansion Golden Knights into a Western Conference power, and seemingly had some of the best job security in the NHL.

Peter DeBoer, meanwhile, had been fired by the San Jose Sharks a year after taking them to the Western Conference Final and three years after taking them to the Cup Final.

Who would have ever thought that the latter would replace the former in Las Vegas?

Over the last couple of weeks, the Las Vegas Sun has looked back at pivotal moments throughout the season. The series covered everything from the obvious turning points to more obscure ones that went by without much fanfare at the time but turned out to be important.

Today we look at the decision Vegas made to fire Gallant as the team’s head coach and hire DeBoer.

Where the Golden Knights were

Vegas had just lost its fourth game in a row and dropped out of playoff position with a 4-2 loss in Buffalo. The Golden Knights had won the first four games of a homestand a week prior but followed it by losing the next three.

They fell into three-goal deficits in all of those games, including in a win over the Blues. The loss to the Sabres was the first contest in an eight-game road trip.

It wasn’t an ideal performance, but things had been up and down all season for the Golden Knights. They were three games away from the All-Star break and bye week, hockey’s chance to reset during a long season.

And with a game against the lowly Senators on deck, the Golden Knights were likely to rebound.

What happened

Golden Knights fans woke up to a 7:37 a.m. press release on Jan. 15 that Gallant and assistant coach Mike Kelly had been fired and been replaced with DeBoer. The team arrived in Ottawa after the game against Buffalo. Gallant and Kelly were told they were fired that morning.

It all came together quickly, with DeBoer boarding a plane from Florida where he was vacationing with family to get to Ottawa. He arrived Thursday after the morning skate in time for that night’s game. The Golden Knights won his debut 4-2.

How it was received

With a lot of surprise and even more confusion. I thought the press release announcing the move was a clever prank — and I wasn’t the only one.

There was no way they fired Gallant, and even if they did, DeBoer was just above Thanos on the list of people Golden Knights would have trusted to run the team.

“Fascinating” was underselling it. Remember that Gallant called DeBoer a clown before Game 7 last season, drawing the battle lines between the fans and DeBoer before they were blurred. Fans were furious, with some going as far as saying they couldn’t or wouldn’t support the team anymore.

I was scheduled to meet the team in Boston that weekend but ended up on a last-minute flight to Ottawa because of the coaching change. I arrived at 1 a.m. to a 10-degree snowfall and there was no electricity in my hotel room.

That was only the second-most jarring thing to happen that day.

How much it mattered looking back

It was, no matter personal feelings on Gallant and DeBoer, the biggest moment in the Golden Knights’ season and short of the Stanley Cup run, the biggest moment in team history.

The Golden Knights were one of the better teams in the league on paper but hadn’t gotten enough wins to show for it. Their underlying numbers were elite but they had just dipped under the mark of real .500. They were 24-19-6, the loss to Buffalo the night before giving them more losses than wins.

The Golden Knights won their first game under DeBoer but lost five of their next eight. Then the results started coming around.

They won their next eight, and at the season’s pause, Vegas was 15-5-2 with DeBoer as coach and had moved from out of the postseason picture into first place in the Pacific.

There’s a decent argument that more time with Gallant would have yielded the same results. The Golden Knights faced a similar situation in 2018-19 where they struggled out of the gate and didn’t find their groove until March. They went from fighting for a playoff spot to cruising into one of the Pacific’s three auto-bids. It didn’t help Gallant’s case that goaltending was struggling this year with Marc-Andre Fleury was going through his worst season as a Golden Knight.

But there is no arguing that DeBoer did produce results, doing so with the same team that wasn’t winning under Gallant. DeBoer changed the team’s style, emphasizing shot-blocking and defensemen joining the rush. He was also willing to put William Karlsson on a line with Max Pacioretty and Mark Stone, forming a trio that immediately became one of the best in the league.

The majority of the most memorable parts of this Golden Knights’ season were fleeting. A last-second goal or a winning streak or a trade all contributed to Vegas’ season but didn’t change the face of it. Firing Gallant and hiring DeBoer not only impacted this season, but every season in the foreseeable future.

It was, without question, the most significant choice the Golden Knights have made this season. Maybe in their history.