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It's a Golden Era for These Knights |
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The novelty of a flabbergasting first season has worn off, reality has set in, and the harsh truth is that in Year Three the Golden Knights might have the best team in the
Western Conference. You wouldn’t’ have known it Monday night when Gerard Gallant gave Marc-Andre Fleury the night off in 6-2 defeat at Philadelphia, but Vegas’ speed, depth and attention to detail has become painful real world to most of the opposing managements in the league.
They have to come up with plausible deniability to their fans, and probably to their owners, how the Golden Knights could build in three years what some teams are perpetually selling as still three seasons away. This, on top of the 20-to-40 years their franchises already have been working at it.
“Year One was Cinderella, storybook, with how it all played out and it was a fascinating story,” said Vegas GM Kelly McCrimmon. “In Years Two and Three, we have thought we are no different than anyone else, contending for a Stanley Cup.”
Just another team, albeit better than most, and hardened now by a defeat, too. After they gave up an incomprehensible four power play goals in less than four minutes of a third period to blow a 3-0 lead in a Game Seven, it is fair to say the Golden Knights aren’t sprinkled with fairy dust anymore; indoctrinated into crushing disappointment like every franchise in sports that predates them.
Failure, however, is a rite of passage. And now that the Golden Knights have learned once the hard way, history has demonstrated repeatedly that setbacks are good for the soul.
Besides, Vegas has set the bar too high to lower it now. Two of the first three entry draft picks the franchise ever made –Nick Suzuki and Erik Brannstrom–were put into deals to obtain Mark Stone and Max Pacioretty. Their top choice in that 2017 draft, Cody Glass, already is up and has scored six points in his first 10 games. Players about whom you wondered whether they could do it again are now trying to do it somewhere else. Signs are posted: No petting of these puppies on the head for the cute trick they performed a couple years ago. They are grown now and will bite.
Eight players on the 20-man of the Golden Knights birth year already have been turned over. Ongoing is a speedy first line of William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith, a top six deepened significantly with the additions of Stone, Pacioretty and Paul Stastny, plus a top-four defense that will be as good as practically anybody’s but that of St. Louis once Nate Schmidt returns.
George McPhee, and then his then-assistant McCrimmon, didn’t conduct the best, albeit, most generous, expansion draft ever, just on a dartboard. As we await Seattle’s and Ron Francis’s turn in June, so much for any assumption that the talent is spread too thin over too many teams when a collection of the theoretical ninth-best players from 30 clubs turns into what it did instantly in Vegas.
But of course, protected goaltender lists of just one, has proven to have given the best jump start a franchise had since the Blues took the aging Glenn Hall and the Flyers young Bernie Parent in 1967. And, a month before his 35th birthday, Fleury, who on Saturday night tied the great Terry Sawchuk for seventh in career wins, still glues the Golden Knights together.
Fair to say he has lived up to being the first player taken in an entry draft. Fair to add, he is making a fair case for the Hall of Fame. His name is on the Stanley Cup three times, once for a year he won two playoff games, another for a spring he only took the Penguins a little past halfway, a third for carrying them all the way through 24 starts.
If that’s enough to get Fleury in. then Tom Barrasso, who won back-to-back Cups and still is waiting, will have a beef. In viewing the Flower’s resume in total, he has withered in four separate first round losses in which his save percentage was below the Beauregard line of .900.. That said, the only two retired goalies in the top 15 in regular season wins not in the Hall are Chris Osgood and Mike Vernon.
Based on how he continues to play, it appears it will be a while until Fleury’s case comes up, however. And the beauty of this second life Fleury is living in the desert is this real chance to add another championship to his resume.
“I feel very fortunate to land with this group of guys and have the success we’ve had,” he said.
Those sentiments are reciprocal, of course.
“It starts off the ice, just the way he handles himself,” said Marchessault. “When your best player on the team is so nice and polite to everyone, we are going to follow our leader, right?
“Same thing on the ice. He’s the guy who works the hardest, so we’ve got to follow that as well.”
Everybody who ever played with, coached, or interviewed Fleury has long waived any three-year moratorium to enshrine him in any Shrine of World’s Nicest Guys. The beloved victim in Pittsburgh of Father Time and Matt Murray entering his prime, Fleury could hardly have landed any better, nor could a new franchise ever have used its first-ever pick more wisely.
The last thing the NHL ever would have seemed to require was a franchise in the United States’ 28th most populous era. And the last item Vegas needed was another one-armed bandit, albeit this one using a catcher. But, a superlative coaching job by Gallant notwithstanding, Fleury, greater than anyone else, has made the Golden Knights more than too good to be true.
“He has given us popularity, credibility and leadership,” said McCrimmon,
“For sure, he is a very good person. We tried to get players in their twenties, but also were fortunate that any older players we selected were good people in terms of establishing an identity that we still try to maintain today.
“So he was important with that, but of course, it’s your play that ties all that together. And his play has been at a high level right from the time he arrived.”
As a result, the Golden Knights never were hitting on 16 to do all they did in Year One. And hardly have they been chasing their tails since. Coming off a Fleury shutout and their best performance of the season in Pittsburgh, highlighted by cherries-across saves by Fleury, they suffered a clunker in Philly, so consistency has been an issue. But that’s usually about depth as much as it is inattention, and Schmidt and the valuable Alex Tuch will be back.
Last week the franchise became fastest to 100 wins of any since the original Ottawa Senators, charter members of the NHL in 1917. Vegas will make it to 200 just as quickly. Fleury’s smile notwithstanding, they are beyond charming now, have moved on to intimidating.
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • 
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