Authentically Vegas: a lesson in roster construction
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas – unless it’s winning the Stanley Cup. Then you bring it back to your hometown.
Every year, piles of northerners flock to the Nevada desert city to take bold risks and play with the high-rollers. The Vegas Golden Knights are no exception.
Vegas general manager Kelly McCrimmon lifts the Stanley Cup (@MondayNooner/Twitter)
Of the thirty players listed on the team’s roster, the southernmost birthplace is Milford, CT. That’s Jonathan Quick by the way, who didn’t play a game all playoffs.
Fun facts aside, the Vegas Golden Knights used the clean slate of an expansion team to their advantage. The advantages of expansion teams in the modern NHL aren’t that they’re ‘gifted players’ – it’s that they have no obligations, which allowed the Knights’ front office to get creative in their early days as the rest of the league danced around the hard salary cap.
In their Stanley Cup-winning 2022-23 campaign, the Golden Knights’ top producers were: Jack Eichel, acquired in a blockbuster from Buffalo; Chandler Stephenson, who was acquired from Washington for a fifth round pick in 2019; and Conn Smythe winner Jonathan Marchessault, one of six leftovers from the expansion draft.
Running down the roster, we can see players acquired by all different means: William Karlsson, who was selected in the expansion draft by Vegas as part of an agreement with Columbus to take on David Clarkson’s contract from Columbus; Alex Pietrangelo, signed as an unrestricted free agent; Zach Whitecloud, an undrafted free agent signed out of Bemidji State University; Nic Hague, a second-round draft choice from the Knights’ very first draft; and Michael Amadio, claimed off waivers from Toronto in 2021.
If there’s one lesson that front offices around the league can learn from Vegas, it’s that there is no right and wrong way to acquire hockey players – there are only right and wrong players, and the right and wrong dollar amounts allotted to said players. The goal is not to ‘build through the draft’ — the goal is to build a winning team, by any means necessary.
In authentic Las Vegas fashion, that was the Golden Knights approach to constructing a championship-caliber team. They identified the players that were available and benefited their team most, they improvised, and they played their cards aggressively but wisely – never committing Vegas-sized money to Atlantic City-level talent, and hiding aces up their sleeve for the bigger pots that were worth playing (see: Jack Eichel, Mark Stone, Alex Pietrangelo).
Twenty-two skaters and two goaltenders saw action for Vegas in the 2023 playoffs. Of them, four were selected in the expansion draft, two were the result of trades related to expansion draft selections, four were unrestricted free agents, two were undrafted free agents (one out of college, one out of Canadian juniors), one was an entry draft pick, and one was claimed off waivers. Paul Cotter, who played 55 games and scored 18 points in the regular season was a fourth-round draft pick by the Golden Knights in 2018, and Logan Thompson, who started the most games of any Knights’ goaltender during the season (37) and held a .915 save percentage, was signed as a free agent out of the ECHL, having previously gone undrafted to the NHL. Thompson had played 24 USports games, 40 ECHL games, and one AHL game at the time of his signing with Vegas.
Other NHL teams often follow blueprints such as ‘build through the draft’ because they’ve put themselves in positions where acquiring good players is unrealistic – they lack cap space, their prospect cupboards are barren, or maybe their team isn’t good enough to attract talent.
In a league where so many teams put themselves in bad positions, maybe the lesson here should be this: being an expansion team isn’t so bad if you know what you’re doing. A baseline of zero puts you in better standing than most of your competitors when most of your competitors have hurt themselves more than they’ve helped themselves.
From there? As Kenny Rogers said – you gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, and know when to walk away — and the Vegas Golden Knights knew.