Posted on 05/21/2018 3:44:13 AM PDT by airborne
Storybook season that started with tragedy is four wins from championship
They talked about it ahead of time, just in case. The Vegas Golden Knights didn't have a captain. They were the epitome of a team. So if they defeated the Winnipeg Jets and won the Western Conference, who would accept the Clarence Campbell Bowl?
It had to be defenseman Deryk Engelland, because this storybook season has been about more than becoming the greatest expansion team of all-time, more than establishing the NHL in a new market and more than giving Las Vegas its first major league sports team.
(Excerpt) Read more at nhl.com ...
At this point it looks inevitable that they will win the Cup. Their defense side is better than the Lighting or Caps. And they can score.
You won’t find a bigger hockey fan anywhere than me.
But Las Vegas odds makers gave 500-1 odds for them winning the Stanley Cup
You NEVER touch the Conference trophies.
Hockey people are mostly awesome. I loved living in a cup winning small hockey town. And I love how hockey players treat little boys who play hockey. So cute.
(My marrying a hockey player fleeting fantasy ended when I met an ex wife. Nope, not a great life for the wife.)
Omg, that would be awful. I paid for the hockey games this year through nhl, but we also have dish so I’d be seriously disappointed. The nhl package has kept me really entertained in reg season and I feel it was worth it. I could be stuck somewhere, pull out my phone, and watch a game. Or on my tablet.
I’ve stopped “hating” Fleury whom you can never get a puck past, and now I am the biggest fan. He seems really nice too.
Knights vs Lightning or Caps will be a great Stanley Cup.
Can’t wait.
Total sour grapes. Like any other expansion draft they basically got their pick of 3rd and 4th liners. Coming in to the season everybody thought they’d be lucky to not finish dead last. Most of the guys they got had been on multiple teams before, perennial scrubs making near league minimum. The big difference is advanced analytics. They actually figured out what they wanted before hand and built the team to that.
This is a great run. Vegas plays fun hockey. Avoiding this series is just plain dumb. And really the draft was the same as all the others, the only difference was the execution, they figured out which players they wanted to build a cohesive team and how to play them.
Except the Penguins celebrated the conference trophy the last 3 times they won. It’s not an ultimate taboo, it’s a bit of superstition.
LOL!
” I love how hockey players treat little boys who play hockey. So cute.”
I love that too. They seem to see themselves in the little hockey kids. As Crosby likes to say, “I used to be a Timbit.”
Once before practice I saw Trevor Daley overseeing his little son doing drills. Fleury came out and played goalie for him doing his signature windmills and letting the puck go past him. Daley’s son must have been about 5 and was so excited.
I would not imagine a hockey life is easy. Even good players get overlooked and coaches get fired all the time. Most of them don’t make a lot of money.
True. It's hard not to root for the VGK. (Of course I'm not a Lightning nor Caps fan) Really fun team to watch. Marc-Andre Fleury has been incredible during these playoffs.
Even tonight will be great hockey. How hard will the Caps fight? Can they hang on? Hockey at this level is so fun to watch.
That is a great story. What a thrill for that little one. My son was about 6 when he started playing, and when he switched to goalie and was goofing around in the crease at the open hockey ice nights, all the big guys would shoot at him (easy saves) and then hit his helmet with their sticks. If I hadn’t been married at the time I’d have grabbed me a hockey player for a husband. They were as a group the best guys around or so it seemed to me.
It is a new expansion team in the desert. The NHL has/had to build a loyal fan base really fast or they would be owning another team (I think Arizona is still owned by the NHL). If the NHL allowed only the lower quality players to be transferred to LV nobody would fill the seats and they would not wait ten or more years for the team to build up. It would have been a flop.
I want to see the NHL do well and expand a bit, not too much but a bit, so I am not only for what happened with the player transfers but am actively rooting for the Knights. My two favorite teams are out and it looks like my home team is being relegated to being the worst team in the NHL for at least another decade so I will gladly wish the Golden Knights well. If it gets the desert dwellers into hockey then I am all for it.
Clearly written by someone who doesn’t have a clue about hockey.
1. In the last expansion draft (2000), each existing team could protect nine forwards, five defensemen, and one goalie (or two goalies and ten skaters). In the 2017 draft each team could only protect seven forwards, three defensemen and one goalie (or one goalie and eight skaters regardless of position).
2. First-year and second-year players did not have to be protected, but each team was required to expose at least two forwards and one defenseman who played 40+ games in 2016-2017 or 70+ games in 2015-16 and 2016-17 combined.
3. The 2017 expansion draft only involved one expansion team, so the Knights could pick any of these players.
4. In each succeeding expansion draft the number of teams grows. So not only did the number of protected players shrink compared to previous expansion drafts, but the total draft pool was very large. There were 30 existing NHL teams that had to expose players in this draft.
5. Teams had to protect players with no-trade clauses. These usually tend to be older players with long-term deals that an existing team would love to get off their hands. Chicago was probably screwed worse than anyone else in this regard. Eight of their eleven players were protected because the team had no choice about it, including one player (Marian Hossa) who had to be protected even though he already announced he was going to miss the 2017-18 season for medical reasons and has since been classified as a "long-term injured reserve" player after he decided that he won't play anymore but will remain under contract through 2020-21.
6. The salary cap gave other teams big incentives to cut deals with Las Vegas even before the draft started. LV didn't just draft Marc-Andre Fleury because they thought he was the best goalie available. Pittsburgh gave up a second round pick in 2020 for LV to take him off their hands. LV made more than a dozen deals like this, and ended up getting at least nine additional draft picks in the next 2-3 years from teams who used this approach to get specific players off their rosters.
One problem I really have with the 2017 expansion draft was that the rules were established at a time when the NHL thought they'd be adding two teams (Quebec City was the second one). The NHL deferred a decision on Quebec and left the rules in place with just one expansion team getting first dibs on all of the exposed players.
The no other team thing certainly played to LV’s advantage. But other than that it’s deck chairs. The protection list is basically the same. 2 more teams to pull from doesn’t really change things, especially not with a 20 man roster.
No trade clauses are generally a bad idea. It’s good that the league made teams use their protection on them. You signed them on to stay, keep em.
As for the deals that was LV being smart. It’s not like previous teams didn’t have players under bad contracts they were hoping to get rid of.
The biggest advantage they had was new ways of analyzing talent. There’s a lot more numbers available to teams now, a lot less pure eyeballing. I know the old guard hate advanced analytics in all sports, but those numbers have meaning. You still need to know what you’re looking for but the data is there. Their line 1 forwards have combined to be on 11 teams, most of their players have bounced around the league, lots of near league minimum contracts. These were not high value players. But they were the right players to play together and the right players for the coach’s system. They drafted and traded smart. They built for success, not as much as they’re having, but they definitely weren’t going at it just hoping to not suck like most expansion teams. They executed a good plan well.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.