What Every NHL Team Can Learn From the Vegas Golden Knights' 2026 Stanley Cup Final Run
In a stunning turn of events, the Vegas Golden Knights have swept the Presidents' Trophy-winning, Stanley Cup-favored Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference Finals.
If we look back on the preseason, though, maybe this isn't as shocking as it seems. After acquiring Mitch Marner last summer, the Golden Knights were either Cup favorites or sitting right behind the Panthers on most prediction lists.
They were a favorite for many reasons: the Marner trade and extension, the correctly anticipated weakness of the Pacific Division, their veteran playoff experience, and management's willingness to do whatever it takes to improve the roster on the ice.
All of that and more led them past the Avalanche and straight to their third Cup Final in franchise history. Here are some lessons every NHL team can learn from the team that came on the scene in 2017-18 and has maintained playoff relevancy ever since.
Don't Wait to Fix a Problem
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The Golden Knights had survived well enough for most of the season, hovering around the top of the Pacific Division, but they really started struggling against the best teams in the league after the Olympic break. By the end of the season, they were struggling all around, with the league's second-worst record post-Olympic break.
While they were still in a playoff spot, it was clear something was off. The Golden Knights had one of the most talented rosters in the league and needed a spark. So in a stunning move, they fired Cup-winning head coach Bruce Cassidy just weeks before the playoffs, opting to hire veteran coach John Tortorella.
Tortorella has been known for providing a spark for veteran teams, and it was the right place at the right time. Perhaps a more conventional team would've held on to Cassidy: Vegas was in a playoff spot, after all, and they could deal with this next year.
When it comes to the Golden Knights, next year is far too late. This team operates with quickness, and it works.
Rebuilding is For Losers; Always Try to Win Now
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The Golden Knights have become notorious in the NHL for disrupting the status quo.
No team is more active on the high-end trade market than Vegas, and most of their best players have been acquired via trade: Mitch Marner, Jack Eichel, Mark Stone ring a bell? If they can't get the player by trade, they'll find him on the free-agent market. Just ask Alex Pietrangelo.
Just when you think this team is going to start "rebuilding," or building back up its draft capital, or standing pat on the market, you're wrong.
Here's a fun fact, courtesy of our friends from the B/R Open Ice social team:
The Golden Knights are always looking for ways to get better today, and you cannot deny the success of the aggressive approach. The front office fundamentally understands that with so much parity among playoff teams, you need to stay a few steps ahead of the game. Vegas has generally employed this approach on the trade market, and other contenders should follow suit.
Find the Bargain Gems to Fill Out Your Depth on the Roster
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Look, you need your stars. Marner is leading the entire playoffs in points, and Eichel is right behind him. Stone's return has already featured the brand of clutch goals he's become known for.
But in today's league among these elite teams, you absolutely have to optimize the rest of your roster at the right price. Brett Howden, acquired for a depth defenseman and a 4th-round pick, leads the entire playoffs with 10 goals. Guess who he is tied with in that lead: Pavel Dorofeyev, whom the Knights selected in the third round of the draft.
We keep wondering how these Knights are going to recover from seemingly insurmountable blows: parting with Jonathan Marchessault, Alex Tuch, the list of former star Knights goes on. The answer is the bargain gems that allow the team to trade for and extend the Marners and keep the Eichels.
It's OK to be Lucky, Too
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We absolutely need to give credit to the Golden Knights for this sweep, so don't take this the wrong way.
Despite the ups and downs early in the playoffs, they've dug in every time they've needed to, and they've seemed to grow stronger as the playoffs have gone on. Carter Hart has stabilized in net, and Tortorella's systems and motivations have sunk in now that he's been behind the bench for an extended period of time.
Still, it's hard to deny how banged up the Avalanche were. They suffered two games without the best defenseman in the league in Cale Makar, and if nothing else, we saw how far Makar's impact really extends. Nathan MacKinnon came back to play Game 4, but the injury he sustained in Game 3 pretty much solidified any chance of an Avalanche comeback going out the window.
The Golden Knights had to seize this opportunity, and they did. But it shocked pretty much everyone in the hockey world to see the Avalanche crumble as they did, due to their own mistakes and unfortunate injuries.
Again, it's not a knock on Vegas. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Stanley Cup Champion in NHL history that didn't run into a bit of luck at some point on the journey.
Just Win, Baby
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From the moment the Golden Knights franchise existed, it's been nearly a decade of "win now" hockey.
We've been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but instead it looks like a Marner signing and a Rasmus Andersson trade-deadline acquisition to boot. We wait for controversy to affect them, but they follow up a $100,000 fine for Tortorella and a forfeiting of a draft pick with a sweep of the Presidents' Trophy-winning team.
Will they one day pay for the trading away of their draft picks without a care in the world, for any perceived bending of the rules, for the bridges burned along the way? Maybe. But for the past decade, the Hockey Gods have favored the bold.
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