LAS VEGAS — The line to get into the Golden Knights‘ practice stretched well outside the door at the rink, and Vegas fans have had plenty to celebrate in its team’s nine seasons.
Back in the Stanley Cup Final for the third time, the Golden Knights are two victories away from winning their second championship in four years.
Carolina will have plenty to say about whether the Golden Knights get there, and the Hurricanes will try to even the series at 2-2 and reclaim home-ice advantage when the teams meet in Las Vegas. A win by the Golden Knights puts them in a commanding position.
Hockey historian Eric Zweig said Vegas is on the short list of top expansion franchises in NHL history, and another Stanley Cup should put the Golden Knights in the conversation as the best.
“It’s hard to compare,” Zweig said. “Frankly, in a 32-team league — I guess it was only 31 when they started — anything you do now is harder than it had to have been before. It just is. There’s so many more rounds of playoffs to go through. There’s so many more teams that you have to be better than to get there.”
The Golden Knights have a locker room full of players who have lifted the Stanley Cup, and their experience especially is valuable when the goal of winning it again is so close.
“I think it goes a long way,” said forward Brett Howden, who has a playoff-leading 13 goals. “Just the experience that we have in his locker room, the leadership, the way we’ve gone through adversity, the way our team stays composed. It just speaks volumes to our locker room.”
Howden was on the 2023 team that won the Cup, but there are a number of notable players still chasing their first title. Players such as Mitch Marner, Rasmus Andersson and Tomas Hertl.
Hertl came close in 2016 with San Jose, reaching the Cup Final before losing in six games to Pittsburgh. The Sharks made the Western Conference Final in 2019 — along the way eliminating the Golden Knights in seven games — before falling to St. Louis in six games.
“In the third season when I got to the Cup, I was like, ‘I’ll be right back,'” Hertl said. “You have a couple of good runs. You have a couple of years missing the playoff. You’re like, ‘Will it ever come again?’ You come here and it’s a great team in the first two seasons. We’ve been in the playoff, but we never get far. And now we’re sitting there, we have two wins to the Cup Final.
“Hopefully, we finish this the right way and it will be remembered forever.”
And, likely, among the greatest expansion franchises.
Zweig said the Golden Knights already are in the company of the Flyers, Islanders and Oilers.
— Philadelphia entered the league in the 1967-68 season and made the playoffs in its first two seasons and three of its first four. The Broad Street Bullies won the Cup in 1974 and 1975 and lost in the Final in 1976.
— New York debuted in the 1972-73 season and began a 14-year streak of making the playoffs in its third year. That included winning four Cups in a row starting in 1980.
— Wayne Gretzky-led Edmonton was part of the World Hockey Association merger with the NHL in 1979 and made the postseason in each of its first 13 years in the new league. That included five Cups over seven seasons, though the last in 1990 didn’t include The Great One, who was traded to Los Angeles two years earlier.
The New York Rangers and Blues are other expansion franchises that could be considered. The Rangers began play in 1926 and made the playoffs in 15 of their first 16 seasons and won three Cups. St. Louis was part of a new six-team division in 1967, and by winning it the first three years automatically made the Cup Final. The Blues were swept in all three series.
“There’s been so much expansion since the ’90s,” Zweig said. “Vegas is head and shoulders above all of those.”
The Golden Knights aren’t overly concerned about history, but they are trying to survive what has been an unexpectedly high-scoring series against the Hurricanes filled with whiplash-inducing momentum swings. The Golden Knights just as easily could be down 2-1 or even 3-0 in this series, but they overcame an early two-goal deficit in the opener and escaped in double overtime of Game 3 after blowing a four-goal lead.
“There was no panic,” coach John Tortorella said. “The only way I can explain it is (the players) get it, they’ve been there. A lot of this team has won and gone through the process of going through playoffs, and they rely on that. I think they challenge themselves. It isn’t a physical skill, it’s a mental skill, and we have that. I don’t know if we win the series, but I know we have that in this organization.”
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