2023–24 NHL team preview: Vegas Golden Knights

LAST SEASON

Well, they won the Stanley Cup. What more do you want to know?

The Golden Knights defeated the Winnipeg Jets, Edmonton Oilers, Dallas Stars and Florida Panthers en route to the franchise’s first championship. They used five different goaltenders in the regular season and ended up needing two in the playoffs, with upstart Adin Hill taking on the brunt of the workload after Laurent Brossoit suffered an injury in the Edmonton series.

In all, 12 different Golden Knights players scored at least 10 points in the playoffs. Jack Eichel, Jonathan Marchessault, Mark Stone, and Chandler Stephenson each managed 20 or more, with Ivan Barbashev coming in fifth with 18. Vegas’ impressive forward depth meant the likes of Phil Kessel, Teddy Blueger and Paul Cotter sat out most or all of the team’s playoff run.

Simply put, the 2023 Knights were a well-oiled machine — and, right off the hop, the 2024 team looks very similar.

KEY ADDITIONS & DEPARTURES

Additions

Mason Geertsen, D

Departures

Reilly Smith, RW (PIT)
Laurent Brossoit, G (WPG)
Jonathan Quick, G (NYR)
Phil Kessel, RW (UFA)
Teddy Blueger, C (VAN)

OFFENSE

Even if Vegas doesn’t have the best forward group in the NHL (or even the Pacific Division), there are still a lot of very good forwards on this team. Jack Eichel is a top-tier center in this league coming off 26 points in 22 games in his very first playoff run in the NHL. Jonathan Marchessault is the reigning Conn Smythe Trophy winner. Mark Stone is a Selke Trophy-caliber winger who gives it his all in the playoffs. William Karlsson is an original Golden Misfit coming off a huge postseason. Ivan Barbashev is a gritty two-way winger who proved to be the perfect deadline add for last year’s Knights. Need we go on?

Reilly Smith is easily the biggest subtraction from last year’s Vegas team. The 32-year-old winger will undoubtedly be missed, but he also had the least impressive playoff run of any of the Knights’ higher-profile forwards. Smith spent six years in Vegas and cemented himself as one of the icons of the team’s successful early era, but he had to go to make room for Barbashev and Adin Hill to remain with the team going forward. It’s a business, and the Knights’ loss is the Pittsburgh Penguins’ gain.

Vegas boasts one of the more formidable forward groups in the NHL. Having Keegan Kolesar and William Carrier on the same line does a lot to ensure that the Knights’ opponents will always be looking over their shoulders. But the Knights lost a lot of scoring with Smith’s departure, and they’ll be banking a lot on Brett Howden or Mike Amadio completing that second line in his place. Both players performed well during the Cup run, but they aren’t exactly prototypical top-six wingers — but, remember, Chandler Stephenson wasn’t anyone’s idea of a top-six center before the Knights stole him from the Washington Capitals. And with Eichel, Stephenson, Karlsson, and Nic Roy all more than capable of running the show down the middle, the Knights can afford to make some sacrifices on the wings.

DEFENSE

Vegas’ system is incredibly stingy. Alex Pietrangelo is no Cale Makar, but the resume speaks for itself at this point: Olympic gold medalist, two-time Stanley Cup champion, five-time 50-point scorer. Pietrangelo logged a career-low (but team-high) 23:25 per night during the Knights’ 2023 playoff run, 3:17 more than anyone else in Vegas. He’s a workhorse.

Knights head coach Bruce Cassidy and his staff elected to distribute ice time pretty evenly among the team’s six regular defensemen during the playoffs, with per-game averages ranging from Pietrangelo’s 23:25 to Nic Hague at 18:34. That’s a disparity of less than five minutes between the No. 1 and No. 6 defenders. For comparison’s sake, Pietrangelo averaged 25:45 on the 2019 St. Louis Blues, while the likes of Carl Gunnarsson and Robert Bortuzzo were way down at 14:57 and 12:19. That’s a massive difference.

In any event, the Knights seem very comfortable with their three Cup-winning defense pairs. Pietrangelo, Shea Theodore, Alec Martinez, Brayden McNabb, Zach Whitecloud, and Hague are all back for another year in Vegas. And seeing as how the Knights won’t be able to keep that group together forever — Martinez, for instance, is a 36-year-old pending UFA — it’s worth keeping an eye on somebody like Whitecloud to assess whether he’d be capable of assuming more responsibility in the future. To this point, Whitecloud has shown himself to be a relatively solid third-pairing defensive defenseman, but the Knights signed him to a six-year extension in 2021 with the expectation that he might take another step forward. The same goes for Hague, who is 24 and entering the second season of a three-year deal. One of those two guys emerging as a top-four option would do a lot to ease the financial strain of Marchessault, Theodore, and Stephenson approaching free agency in the next two years.

GOALTENDING

The Knights rewarded Adin Hill for his stellar performance in the 2023 playoffs with a two-year, $4.9 million AAV contract extension in June. Taking home that kind of salary, Hill will start the 2023–24 season as the No. 1 guy in Vegas. But it’s easy to forget just how good Logan Thompson was last year before he suffered a season-ending lower-body injury in March.

Thompson, who repped the Golden Knights at the 2023 NHL All-Star Game, went 21–13–3 with a .915 save percentage in 37 games with Vegas in 2022–23. The Calgary product counts for just $766,667 against the salary cap for the next two seasons. And with Robin Lehner seemingly out of the picture for good, Vegas’ tandem of Hill and Thompson is defined as they come. (Both Laurent Brossoit and Jonathan Quick left the Golden Knights in unrestricted free agency over the summer).

Hill’s track record is a bit spotty. He’s never had an outright bad year in his tenures with the Golden Knights, San Jose Sharks, and Arizona Coyotes, but he also hasn’t really stood out to the extent he did when he posted a .932 SV% in 16 playoff games last year. Even with Hill making a lot of money, Thompson won’t be denied the opportunity to take a run at the starter’s gig in Vegas if he puts together a strong string of games.

COACHING

Bruce Cassidy is entering his second season as head coach of the Golden Knights. His first year with the team went about as well as it possibly could have, as he guided the Knights to four consecutive series wins while his old team shockingly bowed out to a heavy underdog in the first round.

Very few people could’ve predicted that the Boston Bruins would’ve posted an even better record after firing Cassidy in 2022, but that’s exactly what happened. Cassidy had led the Bruins to 51 wins in 2021–22, but he lost his job with the team after a disappointing loss to the Metropolitan Division champion Carolina Hurricanes in the first round. The following year, the Cassidy-less Bruins won 65 games … and lost to the eighth-seeded Florida Panthers in the first round. Ouch.

Vegas is Cassidy’s third stop as an NHL head coach. He previously spent parts of two seasons manning the ship with the Washington Capitals before the 2004–05 lockout before joining the Bruins organization in 2008 as an AHL coach. He eventually worked his way up to being named interim head coach in Boston midway through the 2016–17 season and never relinquished the job, leading the Bruins to the 2019 Stanley Cup Final and six consecutive playoff appearances. Finally, after suffering through many early playoff exits in Boston, Cassidy led the Golden Knights to glory in 2023. He enters the 2023–24 season with some of the strongest job security in the NHL.

ROOKIES

There aren’t a ton of top prospects on the up-and-up in the Vegas system, but the most notable one for the upcoming season is Pavel Dorofeyev. The 22-year-old winger followed up a strong 2021–22 season in the AHL by racking up seven goals and nine points in 18 NHL games with the Golden Knights last year. Dorofeyev is a decent-sized guy (6’1″, 194 pounds) who could be asked to help fill the void left in the top six by the departed Reilly Smith.

The other potential call-ups are defensemen Brayden Pachal and Kaedan Korczak, both of whom figured into games with last year’s Golden Knights. Pachal even appeared in a playoff game and subsequently had his name engraved on the Stanley Cup. Korczak is the younger and more intriguing of the two, having been a second-round pick of the team back in 2019.

Brendan Brisson is another prominent member of the Vegas system, having been selected in the first round of the 2020 NHL Draft, but he could likely still use some more AHL time after racking up 37 points in 58 games as a rookie with the Henderson Silver Knights in 2022–23. Vegas has plenty of centers ahead of Brisson on the depth chart.

BURNING QUESTIONS

1. Who steps up to replace Reilly Smith? We mentioned Dorofeyev already, but it could also be someone like Amadio or Cotter. Vegas has a history of turning relatively pedestrian players into solid gold — again, just look at what they did with Stephenson. Amadio already showed some signs of turning into that guy last year, notching 16 goals in the regular season and adding 10 points in the playoffs. He’s not a six-time 50-point scorer like Smith but could be a suitable facsimile.

2. Who’s ‘The Guy’ in net? Barring something completely unforeseen, it’ll be Hill or Thompson. Pick your poison. Both are bigger guys from Alberta in their mid-late 20s. Hill has had much more of a conventional development path, although it hasn’t been without its bumps along the way. Thompson emerged from relative obscurity to become a star in the AHL and, later, an NHL All-Star. It’s hard to go wrong with either guy at this point, but Thompson could run away with the gig if Hill struggles to recapture his playoff magic.

3. Can Mark Stone stay healthy? Stone hasn’t played a full season in a long time. He only just turned 31 in May, but who’s to say how much more his body has to give? Stone appeared to shrug off that heavy check he took from Hayden Hodgson in a preseason game the other night, but the fact is he’s missed more games than he’s played over the last two regular seasons. If Stone’s back can’t hold up, the Knights might be in serious trouble.

PREDICTION

Even with Smith gone, the Knights are a deep team with two strong goaltenders and a top-tier head coach. They didn’t luck their way into a championship. When everyone’s healthy, they have a star center in Eichel, a star winger in Stone, and a star defenseman in Pietrangelo. Mix in a support group of Theodore, Marchessault, Stephenson, Karlsson, and Barbashev, and you’re in business.

The Knights will most likely finish in one of the top two spots in the Pacific Division. We’ll say they repeat as division champs, although they might be in for a bit of a nasty surprise once they get into the playoffs. It’s so hard to repeat in this league, although they have the depth to give it a decent shot. My prediction: Vegas will fight their way to the second or third round before bowing out to a non-Oilers team.

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