Vegas Golden Knights head coach Peter DeBoer is shown during an NHL hockey game against the Nashville Predators at T-Mobile Arena Thursday, March 24, 2022. DeBoer was coaching his 1,000th game.
Thursday, May 5, 2022 | 2 a.m.
The Golden Knights failed to qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time in franchise history, making an offseason already heavy on intrigue even more complex.
Vegas was going to need to make moves because of a salary cap crunch regardless. It has $83.9 million committed to 18 players, already well more than the $82.5 million cap number set for next season.
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How many changes the Golden Knights ultimately make might come down to how team owner Bill Foley views the underachieving season. Does he see it as an unforgivable disappointment for a team that came into the year as a Stanley Cup favorite, or an unfortunate situation with hundreds of games lost between injured stars like Mark Stone, Max Pacioretty and Robin Lehner?
If it’s the former, the Golden Knights could look significantly different by the time next season starts. But there’s also a case to be made for the latter—the Golden Knights still look like a team that could make a run if healthy.
“This is a competitive league,” coach Pete DeBoer said in a news conference after the team was eliminated from playoff contention in its penultimate game of the season. “There’s a lot of parity, and you can’t take for granted playoff positioning, playoffs or playoff runs.”
As the Golden Knights head into a longer offseason than they’re used to, here are four of the most pressing questions they’ll face.
Is the front office on the hot seat?
General manager Kelly McCrimmon and George McPhee, president of hockey operations, have been extremely aggressive in building one of the most star-laden rosters in the league. They’ve gone to extreme lengths to add Stone, Pacioretty, Alex Pietrangelo and Jack Eichel over the past four years.
But those additions came with causalities, which might have finally caught up to Vegas this year. The Golden Knights traded former cornerstones Nate Schmidt and Paul Stastny for less than they were worth. And, of course, they shipped off Marc-André Fleury for nothing other than cap space, which was used to sign Evgenii Dadonov … whom the front office attempted to move at this year’s trade deadline.
The NHL voided that deal with the Anaheim Ducks as a violation of Dadonov’s no-trade clause. That ordeal might not have been entirely the Golden Knights’ fault, but it was another black mark on a front office that has largely fallen out of favor among the fan base.
Vegas has become known as perhaps the most cutthroat organization in hockey. The brass defends its approach as the best way to maximize championship chances but should also understand there are consequences when that doesn’t pan out.
Assuming he keeps his job, McCrimmon has a lot of tough choices to make this offseason. He’ll need to trade at least one player if the team wants to retain restricted free agents Nicolas Roy, Nic Hague and Brett Howden. There’s also the matter of Reilly Smith’s impending unrestricted free agency.
This will be the most important offseason in McCrimmon’s short tenure as GM, and he’ll need to make it count.
What about coach Pete DeBoer?
DeBoer should have earned another year to work with this core of players.
He did an underrated job this season considering the circumstances, one that should garner votes for the Jack Adams Coach of the Year Award. The Golden Knights’ bottom two lines were primarily composed of AHL players for most of the year, and DeBoer still managed to get them within a few points of the playoffs.
But the NHL is a performance-based league, and this is the same organization that fired original coach Gerard Gallant in January 2020 off a four-game losing streak.
McCrimmon said at the time that DeBoer “pushes all the right buttons” come playoff time. Now that the Golden Knights aren’t in the playoffs, where does that leave DeBoer?
He’ll certainly need to address the power play. The Golden Knights finished 25th in the league in converting only 18.4% of their chances with the man advantage, which emerged as the team’s primary problem for a second straight season.
DeBoer must improve that, whether by overhauling the scheme or moving on from assistant coaches like Steve Spott and Ryan Craig. Even if DeBoer gets another year behind the bench, the leash will surely be tight, and he could be the first to go should Vegas struggle again to start next season.
What happens with the goaltending?
It wouldn’t come as a huge surprise if Lehner’s last moment as a member of the Golden Knights was getting pulled from a must-win game after having stopped 12 of 13 shots in the first period.
There’s no guarantee Lehner, once viewed as the franchise’s long-term answer in net, will return. The situation is dicey, especially given his season-ending shoulder injury, which required surgery.
ESPN reported that the Golden Knights asked Lehner to hold off on the procedure for at least one game late in the season for salary cap reasons. Vegas apparently believed it was unable to call up Jiri Patera from Henderson to be the backup, but Sportsnet reported that wasn’t actually the case.
The NHL and NHL Players Association, it turns out, had previously agreed on an exception allowing teams to call up a goalie making less than $1 million if that was the only way the club could roster two healthy goalies.
DeBoer declined comment when asked to elaborate on the situation during the final week of the season.
Logan Thompson nearly led the Golden Knights to the playoffs in place of Lehner, going 9-5-3 with a 2.60 goals-against average and .918 save percentage.
Thompson, at the very least, has earned the backup position over Laurent Brossoit. The Golden Knights could try to trade Brossoit and his $2.325 million cap hit, or he could go through waivers to clear some money.
But Lehner is the wild card. If the relationship between him and the team is beyond repair, he could potentially push his way out of Vegas despite three years remaining on his contract.
Who’s on the trade block?
The obvious choice remains Dadonov—Vegas could try moving him again after the botched deadline deal. He’s entering the final year of his deal, with a $5 million cap hit.
Dadonov shouldn’t be too difficult to move, considering he finished the season strong and crossed the 20-goal mark.
The other obvious name would be a more unpopular choice among the fan base—William Karlsson. He’s a beloved original Golden Knight, but his offensive production has dipped each season since his 43-goal blitz in Year 1, down to just 12 goals and 35 points this past season. He has been more reliable than the Golden Knights’ other big names in terms of staying on the ice, though he did miss 15 games in 2021-22 with a broken foot.
A lot of teams would surely like to acquire a two-way player like Karlsson, but his five-year contract worth $5.9 million per season might not be easy to move.
This story appeared in Las Vegas Weekly.
