For the first time in their five-year history, the Vegas Golden Knights are in danger of missing the playoffs.
On Thursday night, Vegas snapped a five-game losing streak in impressive fashion, with a 5-3 win over the powerhouse Florida Panthers. But they lost star center Jack Eichel to injury in the contest — the latest in a long line of health concerns for the team. And even after the win, the Golden Knights sit eighth in the Western Conference standings on Friday. They’re clinging to the final wild-card playoff spot with the Dallas Stars, Vancouver Canucks and Winnipeg Jets all in hot pursuit.
According to MoneyPuck, Vegas has a 55.8% chance of reaching the postseason as of Friday morning. If they stay in that second wild-card spot, they’d meet the Colorado Avalanche in the first round of the playoffs.
The Avalanche currently sit in first place overall in the NHL standings, and have their sights set squarely on the Stanley Cup. They also have a bone to pick, after having been eliminated from playoff contention by Vegas in the second round last season.
Stanley Cup Aspirations
Two years before his NHL expansion franchise played its first game, Golden Knights owner Bill Foley said in 2015 that he hoped his club could reach the playoffs within three years and win the Stanley Cup in eight.
His club was an instant success. The roster was more talented than it had a right to be, thanks to management’s savvy manipulation of the expansion draft rules. And after having been cast aside by their former teams, Vegas players shared a common desire to prove the doubters wrong. They immediately galvanized as the ‘Golden Misfits.’
Vegas won eight of its first nine games, and never looked back. Foley revised his Stanley Cup projection down to six years, then five.
And the Golden Knights didn’t just make the playoffs in their first season. They finished first in the Pacific Division with 109 points, then rode that momentum all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, where they lost in five games to the Washington Capitals.
Still on a high a few weeks later at the 2018 NHL Awards, Foley told Greg Wyshynski of ESPN that he’d shortened his team’s championship timeline even more.
“It was the playoffs in three years, the Stanley Cup in five,” Foley said. “Now we’re [in] the playoffs in one year, the Final in one, so yeah, it’s moved up. I’m not going to tell you what the new timeline is, but I intend to bring a number of Stanley Cups to Las Vegas.”
An Aggressive Pursuit
Now it’s Year 5.
Still no Cup, but the Golden Knights have reached the playoffs’ final four in three of their four seasons to date. The only other team that has also been there in three of the last four years is the Tampa Bay Lightning, which won the Stanley Cup in both 2020 and 2021.
Vegas’s braintrust is headed up by George McPhee and Kelly McCrimmon. McPhee started as the club’s first general manager. He moved up to president of hockey operations at the beginning of the 2019-20 season, opening the door for McCrimmon’s promotion to GM.
McPhee and McCrimmon have operated with a single-minded focus on winning a championship. Initially, with a blank salary-cap slate, they had the flexibility to fill the club’s void of top-end talent by attracting and signing stars that became available via trade, sacrificing draft picks and prospects along the way.
At their first trade deadline in 2018, the Golden Knights narrowly missed out on acquiring defenseman Erik Karlsson. Six months later, they landed Montreal Canadiens captain Max Pacioretty — with young center Nick Suzuki as part of the package that went the other way.
At the 2019 trade deadline, Vegas snagged Mark Stone from the Ottawa Senators. In 2020, they picked up defenseman Alec Martinez from the Los Angeles Kings and goaltender Robin Lehner from the Chicago Blackhawks.
Last November, they traded for Jack Eichel, a star center from the 2015 draft whose relationship with the Buffalo Sabres had soured after he was forbidden from undergoing his desired artificial disc replacement surgery to correct a neck injury.
The Golden Knights backed him on the procedure, which had not previously been performed on an active NHL player. Eichel went under the knife in mid-November, and made his debut in the Vegas lineup on Feb. 16. With the expectation that it would take him some time to get up to full speed after 11 months off the ice, Eichel put up 10 points in 15 games before exiting on Thursday night.
On Friday, the Golden Knights listed Eichel as day-to-day.
Injury Issues
Eichel joins a long list of key players who are already sidelined: fellow forwards Stone, Pacioretty and original ‘Misfit’ Reilly Smith; defensemen Martinez, Brayden McNabb and Nicolas Hague, and goaltender Lehner.
Vegas also dealt with a rash of injuries earlier this season, and spent the first several weeks in a non-playoff position. They righted the ship in December, going 10-3-0, and were comfortably back in top spot in the Pacific on Jan. 1.
They remained in first at the All-Star Break in early February, with a two-point edge over the Anaheim Ducks and Los Angeles Kings and a five-point margin over the Calgary Flames. But since then, Vegas has gone 6-10-1, for just 13 points. The Ducks have also faltered with a 4-9-2 record (10 points), but the Flames have been the hottest team in the league, going 14-3-1 for 29 points. The Edmonton Oilers are 11-7-1 and the Winnipeg Jets are 10-6-3 (23 points each) while Los Angeles, Dallas and Vancouver are all 10-5-1 (21 points).
Now, the Golden Knights are 11 points out of first place in the Pacific, and in a dogfight to keep their playoff hopes alive.
If they miss, or can’t make a meaningful run, this summer will be an unexpected reckoning for a franchise that has led a charmed life since entering the NHL.
Limited Cap Space, Shallow Prospect Pool
The club’s aggressive approach to building a champion has come at a price. Day to day, the club is forced to manage a tight salary-cap situation. The organization has also made tough decisions to say goodbye to a number of fan favourites — most notably original goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who was dealt to the Chicago Blackhawks last summer in order to free up his $7 million in cap space.
When navigating their expansion draft in 2017, McPhee and McCrimmon did an outstanding job of negotiating to acquire extra players and draft picks in exchange for agreeing to stay away from certain unprotected players or helping other teams out of cap trouble.
They started out with a deep pool of assets. But they have since traded away numerous draft picks and top prospects as they have pursued the stars they believed could help them win right away.
All three of their first-round picks from the 2017 draft are now with different organizations. Sixth-overall pick Cody Glass is in Nashville, exchanged for Nolan Patrick, No. 13 Suzuki is in Montreal and No. 15 Erik Brannstrom is in Ottawa, as part of the Mark Stone trade.
The Golden Knights’ 2018 first-rounder went to Detroit as part of a trade-deadline deal to bring in Tomas Tatar. Peyton Krebs was dealt to Buffalo as part of the Eichel trade after being selected at No. 17 in 2019. Their second-rounder in 2020 was also included in the deal for Stone. Their upcoming first-rounder in 2022 and a conditional second-round pick in 2023 belong to Buffalo as part of the package that brought in Eichel.
Add it up, and the Vegas prospect pool was ranked 22nd overall by Scott Wheeler of The Athletic in February — although Wheeler writes that a number of the prospects that are still in the Golden Knights’ system do have NHL potential. One of them, goaltender Logan Thompson, is seeing action right now due to Lehner’s injury, and earned the win against Florida on Thursday.
Wheeler’s top-ranked Vegas prospect, forward Brendan Brisson, was selected in the first round in 2020. He’s a sophomore at the University of Michigan, and could turn pro as soon as his college season ends in April — perhaps soon enough to give Vegas an inexpensive option up front as the push for the playoffs continues.
The Golden Knights have 19 games remaining on their regular-season schedule. Next up, they’ll host the Los Angeles Kings on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena.
