From the jump, the Vegas Golden Knights have been unique. I don’t know what terrifying story spread between the managers of the league at the time, but they became universally convinced that they’d have to prostrate themselves at the altar of the expansion draft.
Please, take our good players, and here, take another good player with him for the inconvenience of having to file that with the league. Paperwork is the worst, we’re sorry. Would you like a pick, too?
Expansion draft aside, they’ve been playing to win, which doesn’t sound shocking until you reflect back on how the league previously operated. I heard an awful lot of people saying players wouldn’t want to play there if they acted as they were acting — ruthlessly, efficiently, perhaps teasing the fringes of unethically when it comes to salary-cap manipulation — but that hasn’t played out, and won’t until they’re not competitive. As long as you win, or have a chance to win, players will come play for you.
They just fired the coach that won them a Cup in 2023 with eight games left in the regular season, for goodness sake. It’s about winning at all costs.
The league hasn’t always operated that way, but I’m here to make the case it’s shifting in that direction, and it’ll never come back.
It used to be that there weren’t so many teams in the league, so the whole thing was closer knit. The GMs seemed to have some unspoken agreement not to offer-sheet one another’s restricted free agents (cough, collusion, cough), longtime players got sunset contracts out of loyalty and respect, and money typically was doled out based on what you had done, not what it was hoped you would do.
Closer knit maybe, but not efficient.
Well, the Golden Knights aren’t pioneers, they’re the bellwether. It was always going to go this way.
With expansion, we’re up to 32 teams in the league, with 16 still making the playoffs. When my co-host Nick Kypreos won the Cup in the 1990s, there were 21 teams in the league. That’s 76 per cent of the league making the playoffs compared to 50 per cent now, in a league that seems to still judge year-long success using the age-old playoffs-or-not rubric.
You could have a lot more fat on your roster and still get into the playoffs in previous years, and given anything can happen in a few games (health-plus-goaltending is a big piece of who wins a playoff series), some of those not-so-great teams could still win rounds.
Teams are missing the playoffs with 95 points these days. Earning one or two more over 82 games means millions to team owners. It’s becoming harder to get in (and may get more difficult as more expansion looms), and in a gate-driven league when it comes to revenue, owners are pressing even more.
You’re also going to see a push for efficiency with the value of franchises skyrocketing to a perhaps cartoonish degree. Team values have roughly doubled going back all the way to … 2022.. These teams are less commonly going to be owned by some guy who owns the team because he loves the game, and more commonly by big businesses (including the inclusion of private equity investments) that are starting to pay more attention to the bottom line.
When you’ve got bean counters going through each line of your expenses, it’s going to get harder to justify the bloated contract to a struggling veteran, because you’ve got to make the post-season and earn those extra home dates.
For those on the inside, these jobs remain few and lucrative. For your chances of staying employed and your next job, you have to do whatever it takes to get those wins. For those at the top of the heap, there’s millions at stake, and if you get a couple cracks without success, you may not get another. So you’ve got to press every button you can, as hard as some may be to push down (like say, firing the guy who won you a Cup three seasons ago).
All of the above relates to stuff like offer sheets, too. In the past, one of the concerns between managers with offer sheets was that by signing players on other teams to these deals, the team will often match the contract rather than give up the player (it was assumed this would almost always happen), which means one team just jacked up another team’s payroll to the benefit of nobody.
That was something GMs just don’t do to one another, but of course, if you’re operating in a truly competitive marketplace, hurting your opposition is another form of gaining an advantage. You’re competing against them, so why should you sit by and allow them to sign guys for under market value when you’d be happy to pay market value to have them?
Are you competing or not?
What happened between St. Louis and Edmonton in the summer of 2024 ended up being a huge deal for the Oilers, who lost two players they’ve badly missed since. But even where we’re not seeing offer sheets happen, I know that the threat of them is often being used to leverage trades, as Carolina did to the New York Rangers for K’Andre Miller. We’re also seeing the threat of them used by one team force another into signing their own guy for a higher number than they’d like, even if that information doesn’t reach the evening news.
The fact that this has been out there as an option for teams, yet they haven’t been using the tool, has ultimately been anti-competitive. More harmonious maybe, but that’s the point I’m making here now: there’s too much at stake for managers and owners to let inefficiencies slide by because of common courtesy.
(Does this all reflect society at large, and perhaps in a negative way? Absolutely.)
To aid the ruthlessly efficient and ring out the excess, the analytics community has been ushered in. The days of a GM working without someone like this in their orbit are waning.
I’ve long considered myself someone who works to understand the numbers because they help us understand what’s going on out there (it happens fast and there’s a lot of moving parts). Our eyes lie, or biases blind us, and we’ve all got weak spots. It’s better to accept that there are things you don’t know and try to fill the gaps, rather than assuming you know all because you know how to play the game well.
At no point do I want any of this to read as an endorsement — it’s probably less fun for fans to see their rosters “optimized” as players come and go — but it’s not exactly criticism either. Once you know there are better ways to do things, it’s tough to leave those tools sitting at your feet and not pick them up.
So as Vegas has a series lead in the Western Conference Final, it’s tough to look at the way the Golden Knights have operated and not see it as the beginning of hockey’s next phase (along with every other sport). The Knights won’t be good forever, and even if you wanted to do it like them, it’s harder than it looks to do it well for a sustained period of time as they’re aiming to now. They deserve credit for the success they’ve earned.
But the days of teams carrying players due to loyalty, the days of hiring a GM who can’t read data, the days of not offer-sheeting good players as a courtesy, they’re coming to an end. Vegas is the most extreme example of the direction the league is heading. It’s a competitive sport, and you’re trying to win. Maybe it’s no longer trying to win at all costs, but rather trying to win with fewer. At the very least, with more efficient ones.