I hate the Las Vegas Golden Knights.
Not the players. The organization.
As the longtime fan of an original NHL expansion club, it still bugs me that — overcome by his unbridled passion for getting a team into North America’s gambling mecca as quickly as possible once Sin City was deemed ‘legit’ — NHL commish Gary Betman breathlessly bent over backwards to give Las Vegas the most favourable expansion draft terms in the history of the league when the Golden Knights entered major league shinny in 2017.
It wasn’t fair then. And it isn’t fair now.
Expansion teams are supposed to stink for the first few years of their existence. Sometimes longer.
In the past, newcomers to the NHL feast were allowed only the crumbs left behind at the draft table by their well-fed established big-league partners. Third-string goalies, seventh defencemen, fourth-line forwards. Maybe the occasional burned-out former All-Star or two, but that was about it.
Making the playoffs? Forget about it.
That all changed when Bill Foley paid the NHL the whopping sum of $500 million to put a club in Las Vegas nine years ago. This time, the rules had changed. Big time.
Thanks to what Associated Press sports writer Greg Beacham would then call “one of the most generous expansion drafts in sports history,” the Golden Knights faced far fewer obstacles in assembling a Year One roster than any of their expansion predecessors. By a mile.
Existing NHL teams were allowed to protect seven forwards, three defencemen and one goaltender before Las Vegas made its expansion draft selections. Compare that to previous expansion drafts when established clubs could protect nine forwards, five defencemen and two goaltenders.
Big difference.
“Third-line forwards and top-four defencemen were available from almost every team,” said Beacham.
Sure, original Knights GM George McPhee did a masterful job building the Las Vegas team. But he had an unprecedented amount of help. He admitted that the revamped expansion draft rules “had a big impact.”
D’uh.
The head-start granted the Golden Knights to be competitive, right out of the gate, resulted in Las Vegas skating straight to the Stanley Cup finals — in the team’s first season — after setting an NHL expansion record with 51 wins.
Since then, LVGK has missed the playoffs just once in nine seasons, won the Stanley Cup in 2023 and is back in the NHL playoff final this year after a shocking sweep of the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference final.
Past expansion franchises could only have dreamed about the path Las Vegas was able to follow so quickly to success in the NHL. As Vancouver hockey writer Daniel Wagner said when the Knights were born, “past expansion teams got a raw deal.”
And the list of hapless records proves it.
The San Jose Sharks won less than 30 total games in their first two seasons. The Ottawa Senators won 10 times in Year 1. The Tampa Bay Lightning qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs once in their first 10 seasons. And the Columbus Blue Jackets have been an absolute post-season disaster since entering the league, winning exactly one playoff series in 25 years.
Raw deal? You bet.
So why did the NHL spoon-feed Las Vegas?
“It was important to the league and to Las Vegas and to Bill Foley that this franchise had a chance to work,” said McPhee.
And everybody else who’d come before was chopped liver?
“Vegas loves winners,” wrote Ray Slover for The Sporting News. “Expansion teams don’t fit the profile.”
So, the NHL changed the profile. That’s how bad it wanted Las Vegas to succeed.
Ten years ago, Betman fairly gushed when he declared that his league was “truly excited that an NHL franchise will be the first major professional sports team in this vibrant, growing, global destination city.”
It was obvious how badly Betman and his NHL cronies wanted to tap into a lucrative new market that had been previously off-limits. And it was equally obvious when the NHL changed the expansion draft process how badly Betman wanted this team to win, right away, to guarantee long-term success.
So that’s why I hate the Las Vegas Golden Knights. And, apparently, I’m not alone.
Mary Clarke, writing recently in For The Win, suggests that the Knights are the most despised team in the NHL. And, she says, the No. 1 reason cited by rival fans is because Las Vegas received special treatment from the NHL when it joined the league.
“It’s pretty rare for a young franchise to have such success early on,” writes Clarke, “but the Golden Knights have made an impact from the first moment they stepped out onto the ice.”
Indeed they have. But we don’t have to like it.
NEED TO KNOW: The Philadelphia Flyers were the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup when they captured the NHL playoff pennant in 1974, seven years after their debut.
