Take away the National Hockey League’s first expansion in 1967 and the WHA merger in 1979, and it is pretty easy to spot a pattern for first-year NHL franchises.
They struggle.
Hitting .500 early on is a victory. Missing the playoffs that first year is an inevitability. Making the post-season in year three or four is realistic.
It’s just the way things are supposed to go.
Teams like Atlanta and Columbus waited six and seven years before seeing the post-season.
The Vegas Golden Knights are looking like a different story.
And it isn’t because, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” It is because the NHL’s newest team is 13 games into their year and if the playoffs began right now, they would have home ice advantage in round one.
Give credit to the management team with the Golden Knights and give credit to head coach, Gerard Gallant and don’t miss a nod for fourth-string starting goalie, Maxime Lagace. He spent the past two seasons bouncing between the ECHL and the American Hockey League before getting the call from Vegas after Marc-Andre Fleury, Malcom Subban and Oscar Dansk all went down with injuries.
There is no way that the Golden Knights should be winning, but they are.
And you can check them for glass slippers, but you’ll probably find work boots. Nice ones.
Vegas might just be a product of the NHL’s expansion environment, which has given more and more choice to the incoming team through every era of expansion the league has gone blazing through.
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The first run-through can’t really be compared because six existing teams had to be used to stock six new teams.
Through the 1970s, the NHL settled into allowing teams to protect two goalies and 15 skaters. That left very little to choose from and probably goes a long way to explaining how the Washington Capitals won just eight games in 1974-75 and how their expansion cousins in Kansas City won 15 and lost 54 that same year.
That was Kansas City’s only year.
The league grew again in 1979 when the Oilers, Whalers, Jets and Nordiques merged from the WHA and then in 1991 when the Sharks pulled some players from the Minnesota North Stars and picked a few more from existing teams, but the next straight-up expansion came in 1992 when the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning joined.
As they prepared to enter, the NHL moved aside its disco ball and pulled out the old 1970s blueprint. Protection lists included two goalies and 14 skaters and the Senators and Lightning suffered for it. Ottawa won 10 games in their inaugural season. Thanks to Chris Kontos and former London Knight, Brian Bradley, Tampa Bay won 23. Neither was off to a rousing start.
That led to a change.
For the Panthers and Ducks a year later, those protection lists were down to one goalie, five defencemen and nine forwards. Florida landed John Vanbiesbrouck and found themselves in the Stanley Cup final in their third season.
Instead of win totals of ten or less or something in the low 20s, every expansion team after 1992 with the exception of the Atlanta Thrashers put up at least 25 victories.
They had a larger talent pool to choose from and a better core roster from the start.
By the time the Golden Knights got around to selecting this past summer, that 70s disco ball had been punted into the desert and the red carpet had been rolled out. Think back to the struggles every team had with their protected lists. Under the new rules, they were set to lose a top-four defenceman or a forward from their top three lines.
The Vegas roster had the potential to be better than any other expansion roster and General Manager George McPhee and his staff took advantage.
It still comes as a little surprising that they have been able to overcome the adversity they have and still sit well over 500 at this point in the season.
While Golden Knights’ fans can’t get enough, you would think that the organization would be rooting for a whole lot of losses to try to secure a nice, high draft pick for 2018.
That would seem to be a fairly basic part of any expansion team’s plan. Early lumps, leading to a draft home run and eventually a competitive roster.
But maybe Vegas doesn’t need to go that way.
Other teams, like Ottawa and Tampa Bay, had really awful first years, but when you look back at their top-end draft picks and find names like Chris Gratton and Alexandre Daigle, you realize pretty quickly that draft success was not a big part of maturing as a National Hockey League team.
They and other expansion teams after them built from their base.
When that base is allowed to be very solid, as it is in the case of the Golden Knights, they may not have to go through a whole lot of lean years in order to become competitive.
Vegas may not stay in a fight for first place, but they could be an above average team that grows into a very good team without having to lead the league in losses or put up ugly stats in things like fewest goals for and most goals against.
They have only been around for 13 games, but the nine wins that the Golden Knights have so far might not be as far-fetched and fortunate as they seem.
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