The Golden Knights Weren’t Like Other Stanley Cup Winners

A team that started like no other was also constructed like no other.

I have to admit that I am obsessed the Vegas Golden Knights’ Stanley Cup run. This is a team that bucked tradition and convention at every stage — hockey in the desert??? — a team that went from not existing to winning a championship six years later (thereby adhering exactly to their owner’s predicted title timeline, somehow). And if the way they came into being as an insta-contender was unheard of for an expansion club, it only makes sense that they didn’t end up looking like other Cup winners in terms of roster construction, either. Everything about them is fascinating.

As I wrote about before the playoffs, Vegas received a surprisingly paltry amount of production from the top end of its roster for a Stanley Cup contender. Jack Eichel led the team in scoring with 66 points — the same as Nick Suzuki had in leading the 31-win Montreal Canadiens — making Vegas one of just six champs whose leading scorer had fewer than 70 points in a full season since the 1967-68 expansion. If we plot out the adjusted Goals Above Replacement the Knights got from each ranking slot on their roster, compared with the average Cup winner of the salary-cap era, we can see that the distribution of Vegas’ talent was a lot flatter than the championship norm:

That changed some in the playoffs, as Vegas had five players — Eichel (26 points), Jonathan Marchessault (25), Mark Stone (24), Chandler Stephenson (20) and Ivan Barbashev (18) — surpass Eichel’s points-per-team-game pace from the regular season. Getting that group healthy and building chemistry together was key for the Golden Knights as the playoffs rolled on. But it remains striking just how much more of a depth-based Cup win this was relative to other champs.

Another interesting factor was that the Golden Knights relied a lot more heavily on goaltending than the typical cap-era champion. They received 28.3 total adjusted GAR from their netminders during the regular season, nearly 50% more than the average champ since 2006, which made up for getting a slightly below-average amount of value from their skaters on defense and substantially less than average from their offense:

But the ironic part of that is the goalie who drove the plurality of that GAR total — Logan Thompson, with 13.3 — did not appear in a single playoff game for Vegas during their Cup run. Instead, the bulk of the starts (14 of 22) belonged to Adin Hill, who had good rate stats (a Save Percentage 12% better than average) but just 7.0 GAR during the regular season. A team built on goaltending was missing a key goalie, then won anyway.

And of course, there’s the expansion factor looming over everything Vegas has accomplished. While some complain that the NHL loosened up the expansion rules to make it easier for new teams to become competitive earlier — where was this for my Atlanta Thrashers??? — the Golden Knights were still a friggin’ EXPANSION TEAM just 5 seasons ago. It’s not like they were automatically going to be gifted superstars. Then-general manager George McPhee still needed to have a masterful expansion draft, use all the rules at his disposal and have a little luck, too.

That’s exactly what happened, of course. The Knights made the most of the players at their disposal, grabbed a much better initial roster than many expected, and were off and running from the start. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most expansion teams want to shuffle through their inaugural roster as quickly as possible, dumping the spare parts they were saddled with in favor of (hopefully) better players down the line. But Vegas nailed their expansion draft so well that 42% of the GAR on the first edition of the Golden Knights was generated by players — the “Misfits”, as they called themselves — who were still with the club 5 seasons later.

Among expansion teams with nonzero GAR since 1967-68, only the Minnesota Wild still had a greater share of their initial value generated by players who stayed around for 4 more seasons:

(Hilariously, the L.A. Kings apparently thought so little of their maiden roster — despite nearly finishing .500 and making the playoffs — that literally none of their expansion players were still on the team within 5 seasons.)

Add it all up, and this Golden Knights team was unlike any champion we’ve seen in NHL history. In a copycat league, that makes for a pretty difficult blueprint to crib off of — apologies to the rest of the league! — and we may never quite see a team come along like this again. But it reinforces just how special what Vegas did was, and secures their place in history as one of the most interesting Stanley Cup winners ever.

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