The Vegas Golden Knights Are Gearing up to Save Their Repeat Bid
Vegas took an unconventional path to the Cup last year, and action was needed to keep it from being even more unlikely this year.
After they won the Stanley Cup last June, I wrote about just how different the Vegas Golden Knights were from the usual NHL champion of the salary-cap era. They didn’t have a lot of star power — at least in terms of regular-season productivity — and they got less value from their skaters than the typical champ as well, particularly on offense, relying more heavily on a goaltending roulette that eventually landed on a starter (Adin Hill) who had zero previous playoff experience in his career.
Winning in spite of all that, the Knights actually came into 2023-24 with the hope that things might go more smoothly this time around. After all, they had more experience now — particularly in net — and were looking for healthier seasons from star defenseman Shea Theodore and winger Mark Stone, who missed a combined 66 games last year. But after a red-hot start (they won 11 of their first 12 games), Vegas lost Theodore again to a long-term injury, and they’ve been a sub-.500 team just about ever since. Here’s a plot of their day-by-day Elo rating this season, which contains a few subsequent peaks but mostly a series of downhill slides:
Because of this, my meta-forecast model on Wednesday gave Vegas a 21% chance of missing out on their repeat bid in the playoffs, putting them in at least some danger of becoming the first defending Cup champion to miss out since the 2014-15 Los Angeles Kings.
But Vegas has been making moves this week to beef up their chances at another run. First, they added winger Anthony Mantha from Washington — then reeled in an even bigger fish, prized D-man Noah Hanifin, who was acquired from Calgary in a blockbuster deal Wednesday night.
And the Golden Knights do already have a big edge in playoff odds compared with the other Western Conference teams they’re jockeying with for position, like the Predators and especially the Blues, Kraken, Flames and Wild. So Vegas will probably at least get a shot at another Cup — even if a wild-card berth would leave the team facing one of the West’s heavy hitters in the first round.
By the numbers, the Knights are now closer to the classic build of a championship-style squad than they were a season ago. Replicating the first of a few charts from my story last summer, here’s the distribution of Goals Above Replacement (per 82 team games) across the 2023-24 Golden Knights’ roster versus that of the 2022-23 version, in addition to the average Stanley Cup Finalist since the 2005-06 season:
(Note that, in this version of the charts, I have included full-season GAR totals for players who ended the season with the team in question, which means new additions such as Hanifin and Mantha are included in the 2023-24 Golden Knights’ tally.)
The 2022-23 Golden Knights had less star power than the usual Cup Finalist, but they made up for it with superior depth. (In fact, I argued that last year’s Oilers-Knights series was a referendum on building through star power vs. depth, with depth prevailing.) This year’s team has more top-end production than last season, especially after this week’s moves — though still less than the usual champ. At the same time, they don’t have quite as much in the way of depth this time around.
But let’s look at another updated chart from last year’s story — the amount of production the team gets out of various positions, relative to the average Finalist and champ since ‘05-06:
The ‘23-24 Golden Knights have a better group of skaters now than a year ago, especially on offense. Having already risen some in the scoring ranks, from 14th to 13th, the new additions should help that placement even further — as will the recent return of Theodore, the team’s most talented D-man, from injured reserve. And then there’s goaltending, the biggest area where the Knights are set up better than the usual Cup Finalist. This time, Hill has the experience of winning and he has established himself as one of the best statistical goalies in the NHL.1
Add it up, and Vegas looks better on paper than they did when winning the Cup last season. Their in-season upgrades, particularly to the D-corps, and their steady netminding have made it so that the Golden Knights no longer need to win with one of the weirdest roster constructions of any champion. (Not that they didn’t prove it could be done!) As always, Vegas is going to do it their own way — but what they have now is more in line with the typical way a champ is built, and that might be the key to bolstering their chances of winning another Cup.
Filed under: NHL
Albeit in a timeshare with Logan Thompson.