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| How everyone (including me) got it wrong on the Vegas Golden Knights | |||
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| Topic Started: Jun 28 2018, 03:01 AM (73 Views) | |||
| Olde Delaware | Jun 28 2018, 03:01 AM Post #1 | ||
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How everyone (including me) got it wrong on the Vegas Golden Knights June 27th 2018 Have you ever seen the movie 'Major League'? If you haven't, I will give you the basic premise. The owner dies and the team is left to his shifty wife who wants to move the Cleveland Indians from Cleveland to Miami. To do this, she assembles a 30 man team of the worst, most god awful players so that they lose enough games to get out of their lease so they can move. The team however rallies and goes on to the World Series where they lose, foiling the plans of their new owner and proving once and for all, never sleep on an underdog. Does this sound familiar? If it does, its probably because you saw the same thing this season with the new expansion team the Vegas Golden Knights. Sans the owner wanting to move the team, every major sports publication in the country expected Vegas to do outright terrible. Not because they believed Vegas to not be a hockey city or because they thought the fans wouldn't turn out. But because through every expansion draft the NHL has had since 1992, the team that entered the year with those players more often than not set a new losing record for the league. The 1991 San Jose Sharks, 1992 Ottawa Senator and the 1999 Atlanta Thrashers come to mind for recent memory sake. Terrible teams that went nowhere for a decade or more. But Vegas was different and Vegas was different because the rules of the NHL had changed almost completely since the last expansion draft in 2000. The lockouts of 2004 and 2012 made teams favor speed and scoring over enforcers and slower, stay at home Defensemen. For example, the 2000 Columbus Blue Jackets selected grinder Lyle Odelein who had up until that point had only scored 150 points over his 12 year NHL career. By 2006, Odelein was out of the league entirely due to injures. Also on that 2000 Blue Jackets team were players who had barely cracked the NHL roster or were close to retirement such as Kevin Dineen and Dallas Drake. Quite simply, out of all of the expansion teams Vegas had the best chance because of the rules changes made as a result of the lockout. But Vegas stands alone in one point and one point only. Goaltenders. Vegas had the best choice of goaltenders that there has ever been in an expansion draft since 1979. Let me show you what I mean The Goalies The 1991 Expansion Draft was unique among all of the ones I listed above because it also held a dispersal draft. The Minnesota North Stars disbanded and moved its franchise to Dallas to become the Dallas Stars. The Sharks were able to select 24 former North Stars players in addition to selecting players in the expansion draft. The goalies they selected were: Jeff Hackett, Artrus Irbe, Brian Hayward, Jarmo Myllys and Bryan Schoen Of these goaltenders, only two had an NHL career past 1993, Artūrs Irbe and Jeff Hackett. Both goaltenders had middling success, often as backups after their stint in San Jose. Both played in the NHL playoffs, Irbe edging Hackett in games played. All in all, truly forgetable. Not more so than the 1992 Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning. I am not going to go in depth here but suffice to say Ottawa and Tampa Bay selected four goaltenders who were all out of the NHL by the 1998 expansion draft with the exception of Wendell Young and Fredric Chabot. Remember this last one, you'll be seeing it again shortly. Now lets look at another franchise before we move on to Vegas, lets look at the 1993 Expansion Draft featuring the Florida Panthers and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Both teams selected their franchise goaltenders plus several more. Florida picked John Vanbiesbrouck, Daren Puppa and Mark Fitzpatrick and the Mighty Ducks selected Guy Hebert, Ron Tugnutt and Glen Healy. Compared to the Sharks just two years prior, each goaltender listed had a long NHL career once they were selected by both teams with Vanbiesbrouck having won the Vezina Trophy in 1986 and Guy Hebert playing for the United States at the 1990 goodwill games. Tugnutt and Puppa both had careers as backups with the exception of Puppa acting as starting goaltender for the Tampa Bay Lighting years later and Mark Fitzpatrick retiring by the end of the decade. Now we make it to 1998, remember that Frederic Chabot guy? Yep, you guessed it, he is drafted by the Predators. Joining him is Mikhail Shtalenkov who would never suit up for the Predators, being traded to the Oilers by October. But now we are seeing a bit of improvement in quality. Mike Richter, drafted from the Rangers and who won a cup with them in 1994 decides to become a free agent rather than sign with the Predators. Mike Dunham signs with the Predators and complies a 36-50-9 record over two years backing up the other selection, Tomas Vokoun who stays with the Predators the longest of the other 10 goalies by staying 8 years with the team that drafted him. As we finally inch closer to the 2000s, we meet the 1999 Atlanta Thrashers. A team so bad they were gone by 2011. Atlanta selected Trevor Kidd, who was immediately traded away. Corey Schwab who was backing up Daren Puppa in Tampa Bay and then also immediately traded away and Norm Maracle who compiled a 6-32 record over 3 years. Lastly, before we move onto Vegas we have the 2000 Expansion Draft which saw both the Wild and Blue Jackets select 6 goalies, 3 a piece. Frederic Chabot, our three time draftee goes to the Blue Jackets. Rick Tabaracci joins him, lasting a whole year before retiring. The Wild managed to make out the best, drafting Dwyane Roloson and Jamie McLennan who both ended up being mainstays in the crease for the Wild for several years. If you are still with me after all of this, the point here is that in the decade between 1991 and 2000, the goaltenders that were drafted by expansion teams had goaltenders who were either completely inexperienced, close to retirement or were traded before they ever put on their new sweater. Those who were left took at least two years to grow into the job (Vokoun, 1998) or saw themselves picked up by every team that entered the league (Chabot, 1993, 1998, 2000). Enter Marc-Andre Fleury Compare these names to those selected by the Golden Knights. Obviously, the biggest name selected by the Golden Knights at the Expansion Draft was the three time Stanley Cup Champion, Marc-Andre Fleury. Fleury had just come off winning back to back Stanley Cups and was, in comparison to those who followed him, not over the hill. Further, to ensure Vegas would take Fleury, Pittsburgh sent them a 2nd Round draft selection in 2019. This was to protect Matt Murrary, who subplanted Fleury in Pittsburgh. The Golden Knights also selected Jean-Francois Berube, a rookie Goalie in the Islanders organization and Calvin Pickard, a capable backup from the Avalanche who was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs when the Knights picked up Malcolm Subban off of waivers. With the exception of Pickard and Berube, every goaltender selected by Vegas in the expansion draft played at least one NHL game in the 2017-18 season and maintained a winning record. Subban went 13-4 and Fleury 29-13. Where everyone (and I) got it wrong The long story short of this is that since 1991, every expansion team that has come into the NHL has been terrible. Its one of those things that you expect. You see teams with guys like McDavid or Crosby and then you look at a team like Vegas who has no one close to that caliber. In the 90s it was Lemieux and Gretzky. In the 00's it was Sakic and Forsberg. There was no one like this on an expansion team. No one to rally around and cheer for. Unless you lived in that area, no one cared. You literally lived in a desert. But the rules changed, the lockout changed a lot of things. The game got faster, it got more streamlined. The players that were available to Vegas in 2017 would have almost assuredly been hoarded and protected. Because of the changes, fast players are in abundance. High scoring wingers and forwards are still few and far between but the speed and agility of the game is on display nightly throughout the winter. Because of the desire of the NHL to push into what would be known better as traditional Football or Baseball markets, you have championship caliber teams in Los Angeles, Dallas, Tampa Bay and Carolina along with teams that have gotten so close but yet still so far in Arizona, Nashville and Sunrise. Vegas was seen as the crown jewel, the place where a team needed to be so badly but the one thing stopping that other than the oppressive heat was the lack of an owner willing to put out hundreds of millions needed for a franchise. Would we be seeing an NHL franchise in Vegas had the Raiders or Rams moved there in the early 00s? I don't think we would. We were so used to the promises of the NHL that X expansion franchise's time would come. It didn't for Atlanta. It did for Tampa. It took the Sharks, Senators and Predators 10 years to compete in the playoffs and teams like the Wild and Blue Jackets nearly the same amount of time to produce anything close to a winning record. Lifelong fans like myself, while we say we are always on top of the latest news and goings on and trades and whathaveyou. We are still stuck in the nostalgia of the last century. Fans in their early 30s like myself were spoiled with greatness and big hits. Huge fights and stone cold goalies. We went with our gut, Vegas would be bad. We knew it because we had seen it all before. We thought we knew the "New NHL" better than the League itself did. But it looks like we don't know as much as we thought we did. Seattle will become the 32nd Franchise for the NHL, its only a matter of time at this point. Us boo birds will once again take to our computers and say that Seattle will be a terrible team, they won't make it. They will not be like Vegas. It will be back to the status quo. But some of us...well some of us will pause and remember we said all of this before. Before Vegas shocked the world and marched a team to the finals on nothing more than "Oh yeah, we'll show you." and it will be great. |
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Olde Delaware Occasional Gadfly Ut aliis sit vivere Never Forget Lt. Steven Floyd, Delaware Department of Corrections (EOW: 2-2-17) Cpl. Stephen J. Ballard, Delaware State Police (EOW: 4-26-17) Lt. Joseph L. Szczerba, New Castle County Police (EOW: 9-16-11) Current Europeian Positions Notable Former NS Positions ![]()
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| Rachie Arche | Jun 28 2018, 03:05 AM Post #2 | ||
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5 foot 3 and hella adorkable
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nerd | ||
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| Olde Delaware | Jun 28 2018, 03:13 AM Post #3 | ||
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No u |
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Olde Delaware Occasional Gadfly Ut aliis sit vivere Never Forget Lt. Steven Floyd, Delaware Department of Corrections (EOW: 2-2-17) Cpl. Stephen J. Ballard, Delaware State Police (EOW: 4-26-17) Lt. Joseph L. Szczerba, New Castle County Police (EOW: 9-16-11) Current Europeian Positions Notable Former NS Positions ![]()
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| Ervald | Jun 28 2018, 03:15 AM Post #4 | ||
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The Goldblum of NationStates
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Great article, OD! | ||
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| GraVandius | Jun 28 2018, 01:36 PM Post #5 | ||
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The Senate
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I don't know shit about the NHL and have never watched a whole hockey game in my life but this was very informative and easy to understand! Great Work OD! | ||
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