LAST SEASON

Now a little more than a year removed from winning their first Stanley Cup, the Vegas Golden Knights already look very, very different.

Almost all of the original “Golden Misfits” are gone, a fact exacerbated by the shocking departure of 2023 Conn Smythe Trophy winner Jonathan Marchessault in unrestricted free agency this summer. As usual, the Knights are operating at a deficit when it comes to their draft picks, but their most recent major acquisitions haven’t quite been on the same level as, for instance, when they stole Mark Stone from the Ottawa Senators five years ago. Noah Hanifin and Tomas Hertl are good players, but are they really worth not making a first-round pick in 2025 or 2026?

Last year’s Golden Knights already showed signs of coming apart at the seams, finishing a disappointing fourth in the Pacific Division with just 98 points and bowing out to the Dallas Stars in the first round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs. And that was with Marchessault, Chandler Stephenson, William Carrier, and a whole host of other long-term Knights who are now gone.

It’s always dangerous to bet against Vegas, but they look as vulnerable now as they ever have since entering the NHL back in 2017. Like a little white ball on a roulette table, they might just be one more ill-advised move away from bouncing out of the black and into the red.

KEY ADDITIONS & DEPARTURES

Additions

Victor Olofsson, RW
Alexander Holtz, LW
Ilya Samsonov, G
Akira Schmid, G
Zach Aston-Reese, C

Departures

Jonathan Marchessault, RW (NSH)
Chandler Stephenson, C (SEA)
Logan Thompson, G (WSH)
Michael Amadio, RW (OTT)
Anthony Mantha, RW (CGY)
William Carrier, LW (CAR)
Paul Cotter, C (NJ)
Alec Martinez, D (CHI)

OFFENSE

It’s difficult to understate just how deleterious losing Marchessault might be for this Vegas team. Despite being undersized in stature, the Cap-Rouge, Quebec product consistently dragged the Golden Knights into the fight over his seven-year tenure with the club, topping out with 42 goals in 82 games last season. He’ll turn 34 in December, so it’s understandable why Vegas might not have wanted to give him the five-year, $5.5 million AAV deal he got from the Nashville Predators, but Marchessault was the heart and soul of the “Golden Misfits” for a long time.

In a bid to replace some of the offense Marchessault provided, the Golden Knights went out and signed Victor Olofsson, who struggled mightily last season but once found lots of success while playing on Jack Eichel’s wing in Buffalo. Olofsson has long held a reputation as a player who doesn’t do much when he isn’t scoring, and that rang particularly true last year as he managed just seven goals in 51 games with the Sabres. However, the 5’11” Swede scored at least 20 goals in three of his first four seasons in Buffalo, including a career-best 28 in 75 games back in 2022-23. There might still be parts of his game for Bruce Cassidy and Co. to unlock, but at 29 years of age, Olofsson is pretty much a finished product.

The other big gamble Vegas made this summer was on Alexander Holtz, the No. 7 overall pick from the 2020 NHL Draft who fell out of favor in a big way over his last couple of seasons in the New Jersey Devils organization. The prevailing sentiment about Holtz among those in New Jersey was that, much like Olofsson, he was a bit too one-dimensional for their liking. Vegas has found success before with revitalizing those types of players, even for a brief moment (remember Brandon Pirri?), and Holtz won’t even turn 23 until January. Considering how little Vegas gave up to get him, they did relatively well.

The biggest X-factor in Vegas, as always, is Stone’s health. If he can finally play a full season for this Knights team after missing so much time in recent years, there’s a far better chance that this forward group will gel. If he misses a few months again? All bets are off.

DEFENSE

Unlike their forward group, Vegas’ defensive lineup remains relatively unchanged from how it looked down the stretch last season. It simply remains to be seen who will settle in as the top dog this year, with three potentially viable candidates for the role now in place.

Alex Pietrangelo has been the No. 1 in Vegas for quite some time. The two-time Stanley Cup champ is entering his fifth season with the Golden Knights since shocking the hockey world by leaving the St. Louis Blues for Sin City in 2020. At 34 going on 35, Pietrangelo isn’t quite the two-way menace he once was, but he’s still a plenty capable workhorse who can help any team at either end of the ice.

However, a new challenger for Pietrangelo’s job arrived at the end of the 2023-24 season. In Noah Hanifin, the Golden Knights acquired a big, smooth-skating defender who played the best hockey of his career both before and after his trade from the Calgary Flames in March. The 27-year-old Hanifin racked up 13 goals and 47 points in 80 games split between the Flames and Golden Knights last year and posted truly sparkling underlying metrics across the board, including a terrific 55.97 expected goals percentage at 5-on-5 in 19 games with Vegas to close out the season. The Knights signed Hanifin to a huge eight-year, $7.35 million AAV extension back in April.

The other top defenseman in Vegas’ rotation is Shea Theodore, who is approaching a pair of critical points in his career this season. Theodore is one of the few remaining original “Golden Misfits” in Vegas and is entering the final season of his contract, as well as the last year of his 20s. He was extremely productive last season, but he only played in 47 games due to injury. With Hanifin and Pietrangelo both under contract beyond July 1, 2025, will the Knights have room to retain the 29-year-old Theodore beyond this season? If the Marchessault situation serves as any indication, Theodore’s tenure with the organization won’t do him any favors in contract discussions.

GOALTENDING

Four goaltenders have their names on the Stanley Cup in recognition of their contributions to the Golden Knights’ 2022-23 championship team: Adin Hill, Logan Thompson, Laurent Brossoit, and Jonathan Quick. Just more than a year later, only one of them remains.

Hill, 28, was just fine with the Golden Knights in the 2023-24 season, posting a 19-12-2 record, two shutouts, and a .909 save percentage in 35 games. But he was hardly the showstopping star he looked like he was blossoming into when he went 11-4 with a .932 save percentage during Vegas’ run to the Stanley Cup. It was more than reasonable to expect Hill to regress a little bit last season, particularly given his track record as a member of the San Jose Sharks and Arizona Coyotes, but it definitely didn’t lessen the shock of the Knights opting to trade Thompson to the Washington Capitals at the 2024 NHL Draft.

With Thompson out of the picture, Hill is now primed for another run at locking down the starting gig in Vegas. He’ll still have competition, however, in the form of ex-Toronto Maple Leafs netminder Ilya Samsonov, as well as Akira Schmid, who came to Vegas as part of the Holtz trade. Both Samsonov and Schmid have shown legit NHL starter upside in spurts, and they’ll have every opportunity to put up good numbers behind a robust defensive group, but it all remains to be seen. No, their goaltending tandem isn’t nearly as big a question mark as their winger depth, for instance, but Vegas doesn’t have Marc-André Fleury (or even Robin Lehner) anymore.

COACHING

Bruce Cassidy is back for his third season behind the bench in Vegas, and after winning the Stanley Cup with the team in 2023, it’s safe to say he has a lot more rope than most other coaches in the league. Cassidy is widely regarded as a hard-nosed and intense coach who is an expert at motivating players — although not all of them are fans of his. In any event, his tactics seem to have worked quite well for him in Vegas.

Before joining the Golden Knights in 2022, Cassidy spent 16 years as a coach in the Boston Bruins organization, starting out with the AHL’s Providence Bruins in 2008 before being promoted to the big club in 2016 as an assistant to Claude Julien and, less than a year later, as his replacement. Cassidy helped the Bruins reach the Stanley Cup Final in 2019, but they lost to the Blues in seven games.

Long before his tenure in Boston, Cassidy spent parts of two seasons as head coach of Jaromir Jagr’s Capitals in the early 2000s, followed by two seasons as an assistant with the Chicago Blackhawks, with whom he played 36 games as an offensive depth defenseman in the late 1980s.

ROOKIES

The Golden Knights have seldom relied extensively upon rookies over their seven seasons to date. That might just change this year, with the departures of Marchessault and Stephenson opening up a pair of big holes at the top of their forward depth chart.

One of the main candidates to break out in Vegas this year is Pavel Dorofeyev, who technically doesn’t qualify as a rookie but is still worth mentioning for our purposes. The 2019 third-round pick looked pretty solid in his 47 games with the Golden Knights last year, racking up 13 goals and 24 points. For the time being, we have him slotted in next to William Karlsson and Mark Stone on Vegas’ second line — a plum assignment for any young player.

The Knights also still have 2020 first-round pick Brendan Brisson kicking around. The son of NHL mega-agent Pat Brisson somehow survived all the roster turnover in the Golden Knights organization last season and even drew into 15 NHL games, collecting two goals and eight points. Brisson’s AHL production to this point has been just okay, and he’ll turn 23 in October, but he still has a chance to establish himself as a middle-six center at some point down the line.

BURNING QUESTIONS

1. Will Tomas Hertl find his game? The Knights gave up a 2025 first-round pick for Hertl last trade deadline — and, in a roundabout way, that deal also ensured that the 2026 first-round pick they gave to Calgary for Noah Hanifin has zero lottery protection. In short, Hertl better be worth it. He struggled to produce in Vegas’ first round loss to Dallas in the spring, generating just one goal (and zero assists) in seven games. Hertl also costs $6.75 million against the salary cap for Vegas until 2030. There’s a lot riding on him looking like the real deal.

2. Will Brendan Brisson break the curse? We talked about him a little in the previous section, but Brisson has a legit chance to become the first-ever Golden Knights first-round pick to blossom into a legitimate contributor for the team. Since their inception in 2017, the Knights have traded away almost every first-round pick they’ve ever made, including all three from their first draft class (Cody Glass, Nick Suzuki, and Erik Brannstrom). Peyton Krebs, Zach Dean and David Edstrom are gone, too. Will Brisson be any different?

3. Will Brayden McNabb be traded? Another one of the original “Golden Misfits,” McNabb is now 33 and has generally waned in effectiveness over the last few seasons. Vegas still needs an elder statesman on the back end, especially after Alec Martinez left in unrestricted free agency, but if they want to make any more major additions, McNabb’s $2.85 million cap hit might prove to be an obstacle — and it might be worth seeing whether someone like Kaedan Korczak can do his job for a third of the price.

PREDICTION

Look, the Pacific Division is still pretty weak. The Sharks and Anaheim Ducks both look like they’ll still be pretty bad, with the Flames potentially on track to be even worse. The Los Angeles Kings and Seattle Kraken can’t seem to figure out what they want to be. The Vancouver Canucks are as strong a regression candidate as any team in the league. That leaves the Edmonton Oilers, the only true contender in the division. The Knights are hardly a bad team, and if everything goes right, they should still comfortably make the playoffs. But that’s a big “if.” With Marchessault gone, their offense suddenly looks a lot more vulnerable than it used to, and their goaltending situation is still a big question mark. We’ll say they sneak in again, but don’t be surprised if the Knights end up falling out of the playoff picture at some point in the next couple of seasons.

Advanced stats courtesy of Natural Stat Trick and MoneyPuck

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