The Vegas Golden Knights just wrapped up what might have been the most one-sided Stanley Cup Finals victory in years. The first “big four” championship in the Sin City’s history felt like an inevitability, not just in the midst of their 4-1 series win over the Florida Panthers, but ever since 2018 when that first group of Vegas “misfits” miraculously clawed their way to the Finals in their inaugural season.
The ensuing years – packed with attempts to acquire seemingly every high-profile name on the market, accusations of blatant cap circumvention, and weird admin tweets – didn’t exactly earn the Golden Knights any fans around the league. But one can’t deny the bold steps Vegas has taken were extremely effective. After all, they’ve made the playoffs five of the first six years of their existence (a reminder the Preds didn’t make their playoff debut until year six). Four of those five playoff runs resulted in at least a Conference Finals berth, and only the two-time champion Tampa Bay Lightning have played in more playoff games since Vegas came into the league.
It’s exactly the type of franchise Nashville Predators fans wish their team could become one day.
It’s up to the Preds’ new braintrust, incoming general manager Barry Trotz and incoming head coach Andrew Brunette, to make that happen. They already have a bevy of draft picks, cap room, and up-and-coming prospects they hope will get them to that point, but it won’t be an easy process.
So how can the Preds do it? They might just be able to steal some lessons from the Golden Knights’ run this past year.
Fortune Favors the Bold (When it comes to Roster Moves)
Chances are, a lot of you read the title of this article and thought “all the Preds need to do is re-enter the expansion draft, get a bunch of help from the NHL, and get other GMs to give us some star players for nothing.” And as someone who had to live through the 1998-99 Nashville Predators roster, I empathize with your bitterness, friend.
The Golden Knights certainly got more help than the Preds when they came into the league. But it took a lot of work from their front office to elevate that first group of “misfits” into a championship-winning roster.
When it was clear the Golden Knights needed depth up front, they swung big for Max Pacioretty and Mark Stone. When they were concerned about Marc-Andre Fleury’s consistency in goal, they brought in Robin Lehner. When they needed an anchor on the blueline, they tossed a big sum of money to bring in Alex Pietrangelo. And when it was clear they were still missing that go-to, number one franchise player, they found a way to bring in Jack Eichel.
And that’s not to mention all of the big swings that didn’t pay off… Paul Stastny, Evgeni Dadonov, Tomas Tatar, heck, even the aforementioned Pacioretty was moved before this season to clear salary space for other players.
The Golden Knights have been one of the NHL’s most proactive teams when it comes to player movement, bringing guys in who they believe improve the team, moving those who are no longer a fit, and moving contracts to make the cap situation work. They lost a bevy of picks and prospects along the way, but it wound up being worth it. They put greater value in current sure-things rather than future “what-ifs,” and they were willing to deal with cap headaches if it meant they could land a player who would make their team better.
It may be a while before Barry Trotz has to make those types of moves in Nashville. He’s still getting a feel of the current roster and will likely be patient in waiting for that initial “contendership” window to open. But if an opportunity arises to land a player (or multiple players) who Trotz feels is a sure-fire piece to build around, it would behoove him to take a page out of Vegas’s book and do whatever he can to bring that player into the fold.
It’s a “Four-Line” League Now
With as much talent as Vegas has stockpiled, it may surprise you to see the team’s stat sheet. Eichel was the team’s leading scorer in the regular season at just 66 points. That’s right, the leading scorer on the team that just won the Stanley Cup was tied for 70th in the NHL in scoring this season, behind such juggernauts as Pavel Buchnevich, Brock Nelson, and Andrei Kuzmenko.
But what put them ahead of teams packed with elite scorers was the number of players with points in that range. Six Golden Knights had at least 53 points this season, more than the likes of Colorado, Edmonton, Toronto, Dallas, New Jersey, and Carolina. In fact, only the New York Rangers had more 50+ point players on the roster. Twelve Golden Knights had double-digit goals, and twelve had 25+ points.
Rather than rely on one or two elites, the Golden Knights won thanks to depth, something the Predators are quite familiar with. In 2018, the Predators’ President’s Trophy-winning season, Filip Forsberg led the team with 64 points, but 13 players had double-digit goals, and 14 had at least 24 points. In both cases, the teams just needed players who were capable of winning their battles and putting up points when it was their turn to hit the ice.
A big trademark for the Golden Knights in the postseason was their ability to roll all four lines (and three defensive pairings) equally in any situation. It didn’t matter if it was Eichel’s line or Nicolas Roy’s line; whoever was on the ice was capable of both scoring timely goals or making a critical play in the defensive zone.
The league is transitioning away from the traditional line identities (scoring lines, checking lines, energy lines, etc.) and more towards a balanced attack where all four lines can be deployed in a variety of different situations.
A strategy like this might have saved the Predators some headaches over the past season and perhaps might have spared Eeli Tolvanen from being shipped out of town. Rather than trying to shoe horn a player into a line that plays a certain style, rolling out four lines gives new coach Andrew Brunette a better opportunity to match players based on chemistry.
Speed Kills
This isn’t a big shock. After all, “speed” has been one of the oft-repeated words used by Trotz and Brunette in their press conferences this offseason. Both have stated that speed is “where the game is going,” and that fact was evident in the Stanley Cup Finals.
The Panthers had no answer for the Golden Knight’s speed; whether it was their aggressiveness on the rush, the ability to keep the puck away from Florida’s defense, or the Vegas blueline’s ability to cover the defensive zone with ease, the Golden Knights skated circles around Florida all series.
The Panthers were a team built on physicality and aggressiveness, but as my colleague Shaun Smith once said during the Preds’ loss to the Colorado Avalanche last season, “you can’t hit what’s not there.” Yes, teams do still need to be able to play with a bit of a grit and size certainly helps, but speed is the first layer. Teams that can skate themselves into opportunities and out of trouble are primed to thrive.
Trotz knows this and seems to want to make it a team-building priority. There are already a number of speedy prospects on the roster, like Luke Evangelista and Phil Tomasino, but the Preds would love to add more across all positions.
Goaltending Is The Final X-Factor
So, you have a team with a lot of depth and a lot of speed… what separates you from the rest of contenders? Chances are, it’s your last line of defense; the goaltending.
As is the case in many finals, the Golden Knights had the superior goaltending. Adin Hill wound up becoming the statistical best goalie in the postseason, leading the league in save percentage, shutouts, goals saved above expected, and high-danger save percentage (the last two stats according to Natural Stat Trick.) Hill made several key saves in the series that likely steered momentum towards Vegas’s favor.
Hill was a case of a random goaltender having the heater of his life at the perfect time, but we’ve also seen the same level of performance from franchise goalies like Andrei Vasilevskiy, Jonathan Quick, and Corey Crawford in recent years. It doesn’t matter where that elite goaltending comes from as long as your team has it when it counts.
This is something the Predators have never had to worry about, but it may be something to keep in mind as the Preds contemplate future roster moves, for instance, the possibility of trading Juuse Saros. Goaltending is often times the hardest piece of the puzzle for contenders to fill; the Predators have that piece already filled. If and when that Cup window opens, having a game-changing goalie like Saros who can excel in the postseason may just accelerate the championship timeline for Nashville.
