What makes you 2 feel the Vegas owner is going down this road? Fill me in. Don't they still have plenty of draft picks in the hopper to wheel and deal? When your team is close you go for it. Give me a winner like that any day of the week. That's a normal cycle for a team to sell part of their soul to give the fans a winner. You guys are gonna make me do some research now on this breaking development. Enlighten me, please.
I was a day one season ticket buyer of the Knights, I have followed them from the first noise came out that a team could be in Vegas so I have a pretty lengthy knowledge of where they were and how they got here. The team did all the right things up until the first trade deadline when they traded for Tatar, a player that didn't really fit what they were doing and cost them a lot of draft capital. It was clear McPhee was shocked at how good they were, he really was planning on doing the normal expansion path of trading everything he could by the team's second draft and keeping just a few pieces to build on. Then they got good and he went crazy going for it as you say. But that meant taking the team they had which was good enough to win the West and completely changing its style and philosophy. He acquired some nice contracts and signed existing players to very good extensions, but they had loads of cap room which a smart GM would have used in a much different way. They had everything in place to be good for a decade and if things fell right with young guys developing or one or two free agents, they could win a cup or two.
Then the owner Foley got involved, insisted on giving Fleury an overpriced extension, they gave Reaves WAY too much for 2 years which is unclear if that was Foley or McPhee's doing, they gave away Suzuki for Pacioretty, not a horrible deal but not really necessary. Then they got Lehner which at first didn't seem to be a bad idea, but not moving Fleury to go with it was just a disaster. In a cap world spending 15% of it on goalies is not a proper strategy. They topped it off by spending way too much on Pietroangelo for much too long and giving away Schmidt and Stastny to accommodate the contract and keeping on two high priced goalies. To sum it up because the owner is old, they are like trying to buy a cup for him as soon as possible and that's a recipe for disaster if you don't actually get it. If they don't win it this year, watch Foley will demand another round of crazy moves getting someone like Eichel and giving away better value talent and every young player they got. And teams that were internally built like Colorado and Tampa will still be better and still be in position to be a serious threat for years to come. Meanwhile, they hired a coach with a vanilla offense that teams like the Wild can compete with, especially when he insists on using trash like Reaves when they have younger talent they could be developing on the third and fourth lines. I doubt DeBoer is around too much longer, his welcome is always worn out fast. I'd hope they get rid of McPhee as well, these guys are playing systems and strategies that were good a decade ago. The GM in name they have now has real potential and considering his background in the WHL I doubt he's of the belief that you win by buying top end talent at premium price. He's done pretty good in the draft, but this coach doesn't like rookies so few are getting much of a shot right now.
No doubt this has been a great story and unprecedented success, but they can be so much more. Seattle probably won't have nearly the year one success, but they see the blueprint the Knights laid out and if they are smart they also see the mistakes made in trying to buy a cup winner before its time. Playoffs in three and Cup in six turned out to be a very reasonable strategy, but along the way they forgot it.