TL; DR: Nobody knows.
from: Home ice has been more of a disadvantage in this year’s NHL playoffs
Oh, I forgot: did y’all know that the Knights are now 5-1 at home in the playoffs?
Ouch. Tough loss, Caps.
Way to go Tampa Bay, tho. Showed a ton of resolve in the 2nd and 3rd.
Apparently playing well for one period is not enough to beat Tampa Bay.
All five of our Cups were won away from home. In fact, no Pittsburgh sports championship of any kind has been won at home since the 1960 World Series.
Why the Vegas Golden Knights should be ‘Canada’s team’:
There’s lots more; the piece is a lot of fun. 
woot
WOOT!
Well done, (Las) Vegas!
Congrats to the Golden Knights!
Congrats, Vegas. Quite a feat!
You have no idea how jealous I am.
Well done.
So will the next expansion team be formed in the same fashion or is it too much of a sweetheart deal?
I fully expect every major team sport to adopt the NHL’s model from this expansion. It is nearly inarguably the most successful expansion to date; certainly recent efforts pale in comparison.
I believe the GMs realise that the deal was too sweet and I’ll be surprised if Seattle gets as good a shake. That’s IF Seattle gets in, which should be confirmed next month. (I’ll be surprised if they don’t.) From the sounds of it, if they do get in, it will be a looooooooooooong time before the NHL gets another expansion team again. Franchises changing cities, sure, but no-go on any more expansion.
Bo - You are one very blessed individual to be living in a city where sports history is under way. (And to be able to go SEE those games, like, live, and everything!) (no fair! envy!) Some folks are comparing this to the ‘Miracle on Ice’ from 1980 with the US Olympic hockey team - not sure if I’d go that far. (heh maybe talk to me again if MAF is hoisting the Cup). Speaking of Fleury - like DUH for the Conn Smythe. He would have to recreate his play-offs in 2013 to seriously bungle up such an achievement. After LA, VGK got (I think) seven days rest, after SJ - 6, and against the winner of Caps/Bolts - at least another 5 or 6? Not often a team consistently gets that much rest between playoff series. I guess it helps going 12 and 3 so far.
Again, wow, and congrats so far, dude.
*I’m envious of any lucky bastards who can just go drive down the road to see an NHL game. I’m kinda stranded on this rock with water around it - to go see a Canucks game is one time-consuming, prohibitively expensive-as-fuck undertaking.
And it’s the Canucks.:dubious:
Hmmm, I don’t know how much of a sweetheart deal it was. I do think that Pittsburgh was short-sighted in the goalie they protected. Yes, Murray is the future, and he just won a cup, and Fleury can be inconsistent. But Fleury had won two cups, and I don’t know of a goalie who isn’t inconsistent. Other than that, Vegas made a bunch of picks that I would have made in the same position. I for instance, I was pissed when they grabbed Eakin. But that’s who I would have grabbed out of Dallas’ unprotected players, hands down. He wasn’t a scoring powerhouse by any means, but he was going to press and keep from doing anything stupid.
Basically, they really seemed to ask: "Who’s unprotected and doesn’t make many stupid plays?* Anyone who scouts the available players as well as they seemed to is going to do OK with a little luck. Of course, anyone who makes the finals has a lot of luck to thank, no matter who they are. The puck bounces in wild ways, it’s the nature of the game.
*Ok Fleury’s adventures behind the goal might make that theory hard to stomach, but that’s how the kids seem to play these days.
I’ve heard banter about Fleury as a future Hall of Fame goalie and I’m not at all convinced as of today. Sure, he’s been hot at times as well as maddeningly inconsistent, but that describes almost every NHL goalie. If he would have spent all his Penguins years with the Sabres, no one would even think of him as a potential Hall of Famer.
It’ll be interesting to see if winning a Cup with an expansion team bolsters his case. It’s impressive, for sure, but Vegas kept on winning even when they were down to a 4th string goalie earlier on in the season.
…as well as the better goalie, at the time Fleury parted ways from the Pens, (which was why Murray started the first ten games of last year’s play-offs) and which was all the reason that was required for MAF to find himself in different pastures. Even with no expansion scenario, I’d bet my Skittles Collection that Fleury would not be a Pen right now. Yeah the two Cups were nice, but definitely does not preclude what I already mentioned. And all 30 other teams in the league are probably seething just a little over the fact that the VGK were given a 2nd-round pick to take Marc-Andre Fleury, Jonathan Marchessault to take Reilly Smiith, Alex Tuch to take Eric Haula, Shea Theodore to take Clayton Stoner, and a 1st and a 2nd to take William Karlsson and David Clarkson’s contract. Teams that are trying to build their own franchises did not get those same opportunities.
I’m really happy for GM George McPhee, rebounding from setbacks in Washington, and Coach Gerard Gallant, rebounding from a somewhat ignominious parting form Florida*, and the city of Las Vegas, rebounding - right from the beginning of their inaugural season - from the shooting tragedy that occurred only days before opening season.
- There’s an excellent tweet out there showing the infamous photo of Gallant getting in the taxi upon leaving Florida, but with a meme saying “To the Stanley Cup Final, please”.:):p:D
I’ll bet my Second Hidden Skittles Collection that MAF is headed for the Hall. Even if he “2013’s out” in the final, he’s still good to go, especially with another three or four (I’d wager) more years left in him to round out his career . Speculating if he was a Sabre instead - heck, Hasek almost singlehandedly lifted that mediocre team back in the day (at least to make it to the finals in '99 anyway), so who knows what career he might have had with Buffalo.
Oops - that final line of previous post should say, “so who knows what career FLEURY might have had with Buffalo”.
And I realise when mentioning Hasek, that I’m not trying put them in the same quality category together, considering that I feel that MAF, in the end, will not eclipse The Dominator.
Thank you to everyone who offered kind words, on behalf of everyone in the Las Vegas valley.
Thank you and yeah, this is amazing.
It was exciting when I heard from an even bigger hockey fan than me that there was a movement to get a team and that there was an owner already on board. Over the next few years he kept me informed when I saw him and then, of course, it broke all over the news.
I was there at the name reveal. I was there for the draft. I was there for their first preseason game at home. I was there for a couple of regular season games.
At the draft, I was impressed with the picks: mostly young guys, fast guys, guys with talent who had struggled to find a place on other teams. And I knew that our team had picked those guys because they fit those-guys-sized holes in the framework that the coaching staff had for the team that they wanted to see play hockey. Getting Fleury was astounding from our point of view; you should have heard the arena when his name was announced (it was loud).
Going to the Cup at all is fucking incredible; for this team it’s godddamned fucking incredible. And for this city, for this valley, it is amazing. Knights logos are absolutely everywhere. I grew up in South Florida in the late '70s and early '80s and Dolphin paraphernalia was nowhere near as prevalent as Knights stuff is here. I mean, this is even giving late '80s & early '90s Tallahassee-&-FSU gear a run for the money; it looks like a gang took over the valley.
T-Mobile Arena is less than 5 miles from my house. If I park at MGM and walk across the strip, it’s a 10 minute drive and a 6 minute walk.
This has without question been the greatest hockey season I have ever experienced as a fan.
It is also the greatest sporting event I am likely to witness personally in my lifetime, IMO: A new team re-wrote the draft rules, re-wrote how expansion teams are going to happen, came out of the gate prepared and with a plan and then excelled at that plan. AFAICT, this has not only turned the NHL upside down, it’s gonna be applied to other professional sports leagues, essentially re-writing the playbook for an entire industry. That’s astounding.
This is history in the making, both for the team, for the NHL and for professional sports in general; sitting essentially front row for it has been a blast!
If you live in Seattle: get on board NOW. Get involved. Sign up. Get on lists. Go to events! You will not regret it once that first season happens!