Golden Knights Successfully Navigate Rigidity of NHL to Claim Long-Overdue Stanley Cup

The Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup in just their sixth season of existence.
Despite being the second-youngest team in the NHL, the Vegas Golden Knights are loaded with experienced players despite the city’s misperception as being spoilt by early success and excessive spending.

The 111-point Golden Knights proved they are more than deserving champions during Tuesday’s 9-3 blowout victory over the Florida Panthers in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final.

They have the necessary experience, guile, injection of youth, and elite goaltending to thrive during the rigors of a gruesome postseason.

With a 7-2 victory in Game 2, Vegas established the three tenets of playoff hockey. On Tuesday, they played their last game of the season and won by a landslide because to their superior goaltending, experience, and institutional knowledge.

However, the first five minutes gave little indication that this would be a coronation.

Jack Eichel’s zone exit fumble gave Panthers winger Anton Lundell a breakaway, but Golden Knights goaltender Adin Hill made the save, as he had done throughout the playoffs. Golden Knights captain Mark Stone made two crucial turnovers.

Vegas Golden Knights Teaming Up

If you put stock in momentum, it would seem that the pendulum has turned in favor of the Golden Knights, who ran all over a Panthers club that was missing both Matthew Tkachuk and Eetu Luostarinen.

Some believe the Golden Knights succeeded in the NHL despite running counter to the league’s more subdued norms and because they took advantage of loopholes in player protections and expansion franchise regulations.

This idea is completely ridiculous. In Game 5, Stone scored a hat trick and rightly won the Cup.

However, the Golden Knights had to acquire him from the cheapskate Ottawa Senators, who weren’t prepared to pay him anywhere near the eight-year, $76-million contract he eventually signed with the Golden Knights.

Chandler Stephenson, Stone’s new linemate, was acquired in December 2019 in exchange for a fifth-round draft pick. Eichel, who led the playoffs in scoring with 26, was easily accessible after the Buffalo Sabres humiliated him by denying his request to have artificial disk replacement surgery.

This made room for Alex Pietrangelo to sign a seven-year, $61 million contract with the Vegas Golden Knights.

Kelly McCrimmon, general manager of the Golden Knights, made the most of a competitive but unforgiving league to lead his team to its first Stanley Cup championship in the franchise’s sixth season.

Stone opened the scoring Tuesday night, Nicolas Hague added to it, and Alec Martinez, nine years to the day after scoring the Cup-winning overtime goal for the Los Angeles Kings in 2014, scored his second of the playoffs.

Martinez blocked more shots than anybody else on the team, and he and Pietrangelo, both veterans, set the tone for the rest of the defense as the team’s best tandem.

On the other end of the spectrum comes 24-year-old Hague, a towering center whom the Golden Knights wisely selected in the second round of the 2017 NHL Draft. Despite his lack of attacking flare, he has scored in back-to-back games.

Vegas brought together seasoned veterans with up-and-coming professionals who were hungry for a shot at the big time.

Head coach Bruce Cassidy showed his appreciation for Jonathan Marchessault, the Conn Smythe Trophy winner, Reilly Smith, William Karlsson, Shea Theodore, and Brayden McNabb in Game 5.

These players, known as “The Misfits,” have been with the Golden Knights since the team’s beginnings and include William Carrier.

Theodore has become one of the finest defenseman in the NHL, McNabb excels at the little things, Karlsson and Smith (who had a beautiful one-two on the fourth goal) are legitimate scoring threats, and Marchessault had 13 goals and 25 points in the playoffs.

A championship in their first season might not have meant as much to these players after watching Stephenson and the Washington Capitals hoist the Cup in 2018. Compared to the rest of the league, the five-year break wasn’t that long, but just try telling that to the Misfits.

Hill could have won the Conn Smythe, and nobody would have argued. In the second round, he made his debut against the Edmonton Oilers and was never seen again.

Hill was viewed as another excellent component of a Golden Knights team that was stronger than the sum of its parts, while Panthers goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky played at a level few had ever witnessed previous to the Final.

Although this catch-all statistic performs better when used to a bigger sample size, Hill still finished the series with roughly two goals saved over predicted, while Bobrovsky conceded two more goals than expected.

A 111-point, No. 1 seed, the Golden Knights were scarcely recognized as such until it was too late.

It was generally accepted that the Eastern Conference was superior to the Western Conference; prior to the second round, few people had even heard of Hill; and the rival Oilers were labeled as the West’s favorite.

The Golden Knights had average underlying possession and shot creation metrics, according to proponents of advanced stats.

It wasn’t a given that Cassidy would return to his position as one of the NHL’s best coaches after being fired so abruptly from the Bruins. After all, the 2022 season was the first time in franchise history that the Golden Knights did not make the playoffs.

The Golden Knights routed a Panthers club that had just finished a grueling schedule against Eastern heavyweights, demonstrating the value of experience, resilience, a healthy dose of youth, and top-tier goaltending.

As summer progresses, it’s only natural that historians, journalists, and fans begin trying to determine where the Golden Knights will go down in the record books. The Golden Knights probably don’t give a hoot after rising to the top of the NHL in just six years.

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