Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Golden Knights’ aggressive roster-building again has them in Stanley Cup semifinals

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Steve Marcus

Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Nick Holden, right, celebrates with teammates after scoring during the first period in Game 6 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup second-round playoff series against the Colorado Avalanche at T-Mobile Arena Thursday, June 10, 2021.

There was a magic to the Golden Knights’ inaugural season that may never be recaptured in sports.

With the exception of Marc-Andre Fleury in net, there weren’t too many stars on the rag-tag group of “Golden Misfits” that captured the hearts of Las Vegas and the hockey world.

The thing about a magical season is that it’s hard to do again.

The Golden Knights haven’t been back to Stanley Cup Final, but they’ve twice reached the semifinals, where they host Montreal Monday in the third round playoff series at T-Mobile Arena.

The Golden Knights didn’t sit on their first-year laurels, and instead went out and acquired one big name after another to load up an already-strong roster. They’ve never been afraid to make a splashy move, and it has them once again eight wins away from winning the Cup.

“In that season most guys had their best career (year) ever, right?” Fleury said. “From there on I thought we had a good core, and we were able to get some experienced guys, some guys to help in the next years after that had a huge impact on our team since they debuted with us.”

Fleury was the face of the 2017-18 team, and several players — William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith — enjoyed breakout campaigns.

But that initial Golden Knights squad did feature some good players, even if they weren’t necessarily all-stars. James Neal came with more than 200 career goals to his name. David Perron was a consistent 40-point player. Even Tomas Tatar came with a strong pedigree when he came over at the trade deadline.

Neal and Perron both left to free agency, and while some would have elected to tinker around the edges with a team that was close to a title, the Golden Knights went hard in the other direction.

They signed Paul Stastny and traded for Montreal captain Max Pacioretty.

They were just getting started with significant acquisitions, dealing for eventual captain Mark Stone minutes before the 2019 trade deadline and signing him to an eight-year contract extension.

He is the best skater the Golden Knights have ever acquired, and the move established them as a Stanley Cup contender for years to come.

“From the time we added Mark Stone, that really, to me, moved us from being a nice story to being a contender,” general manager Kelly McCrimmon said.

The Golden Knights didn’t slow down after that, acquiring Robin Lehner and Alec Martinez at the next trade deadline, both of whom played key roles in helping the Golden Knights reach the 2020 conference final. Vegas lost that series and, never satisfied, pulled off another Stone-level splash with the signing of Alex Pietrangelo in October.

The Golden Knights do have players like Karlsson, Alex Tuch, Shea Theodore and others who, while not homegrown in the traditional sense, established themselves as NHL regulars once they came to Vegas. Look no further than the Game 5 overtime winner though — Stone from Pacioretty and Pietrangelo — as evidence that star power is a major key to postseason success.

“We’ve had a lot of situations in our four years where it would have been easy and justifiable to do nothing, and we’ve never approached it that way,” McCrimmon said. “We think we know what a championship team needs to look like, what’s required. It’s involved making hard decisions along the way, which, again, aren’t easy.

“If we just did what was easy we wouldn’t be sitting here today having beaten the Colorado Avalanche.”

In a sport with a hard salary cap, getting players like that costs money. Stone ($9.5 million), Pietrangelo ($8.8 million) and Pacioretty ($7 million, tied with Fleury) have the highest cap hits on the team, so when they come in, other players have to go out. Since the end of the 2018-19 season, Vegas has dealt away Erik Haula, Colin Miller, Nikita Gusev, Cody Eakin, Nate Schmidt and Stastny in moves spurred by the cap.

It’s the cost of dealing in high-talent and high-priced players, but the Golden Knights’ mere presence in the semifinals speaks to its effectiveness.

After all, letting those top players walk out the door hurts a team arguably as much acquiring them helps it.

Vegas coach Pete DeBoer remembers what losing captain Zach Parise did to the 2012-13 Devils, who went from the Stanley Cup Final the previous year to missing the playoffs the next. Ditto when he was in Florida and Jay Bouwmeester left. Joe Pavelski left the Sharks after the 2018-19 season, and DeBoer was fired two months into the season.

“The addition of one great player like that to anybody’s team makes a huge difference, or the subtraction of one great player,” DeBoer said. “The right player and those types of players change the trajectory of your franchise.”

Some players are harder to lose than others — the Golden Knights’ angst at trading Schmidt to make room for Pietrangelo was obvious. But Vegas has also done a good job of honing in on the players it believes can help deliver a Cup and locking them up. For instance, Stone, Karlsson and Pietrangelo are all signed for six more years after this one, while Pacioretty was handed a four-year extension the day he arrived.

The Golden Knights have never failed to acquire a star player when they have the chance. It makes for an interesting team to follow in the offseason and the trade deadline, but also a fun one for fans to cheer for, knowing how singularly focused the front office is on bringing the Cup to the Strip.

“Management has done it time and time again where they try, pretty much, to pick up the best player available whenever they get the opportunity to do that,” forward Reilly Smith said. “We’ve always had a winning mentality here and I don’t see that changing any time soon.”