Fresh off their stunning four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Kings in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Vegas Golden Knights were established Wednesday by the offshore book Bovada.lv as 9-2 favorites to win the Stanley Cup.
Yes, the Vegas Golden Knights — the expansion team that was given 150-1 odds last June to win the Cup, longest of the National Hockey League’s 31 teams — now face lower odds than the Pittsburgh Penguins, the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions. They are 8-1.
Bovada.lv has the Nashville Predators (5-1) now at second on the list, with the Tampa Bay Lightning (11-2) third. Prior to the playoffs, the Predators were favorites, at 15-4, followed by the Boston Bruins (11-2), Tampa Bay (6-1) and Vegas (15-2).
If the Golden Knights still faced 150-1 odds, of course, they’d be getting lots and lots of action. Kevin Bradley, the sportsbook director at Bovada.lv, said Wednesday that the Golden Knights were seeing just 5.34% of the action.
“There has been a real slowdown in betting on them as many bettors and fans of the team have them at much better odds from earlier in the season,” Bradley said. “So it's pretty safe to say that most people who wanted to bet on them already have, and now we are seeing a slight decline in action as their odds continue to drop.”
That the Golden Knights have been made Cup favorites by a bookmaker so late in the season — and with other favorites still in contention — is noteworthy and remarkable, however.
The Golden Knights were made a 23-4 co-favorite with Tampa Bay by Bovada.lv to win the Cup on March 2 and posted a 51-24-7 regular-season record to win the Pacific Division. Vegas had the third-best record in the Western Conference, behind Nashville and Winnipeg, but became the first team this year to post a playoff sweep, winning all four games by one goal.
The Golden Knights are now riding a hot goaltender, the 33-year-old veteran Marc-Andre Fleury, who was picked up in the NHL expansion draft from the Penguins. Fleury, known as "Flower," gave up only three goals in four games to the Kings and won one game in double overtime.
When the opening odds came out last June, the Golden Knights were the only NHL team facing odds of longer than 75-1. Pittsburgh was the favorite at 9-1.
The Golden Knights dropped to 100-1 when Bovada.lv reset its odds on Sept. 11 and fell to 66-1 right before their regular-season opener. Then Vegas won eight of its first nine games, a record for an expansion team, and won five in a row after losing six of eight.
And the odds kept falling, from 28-1 on Nov. 1 to 18-1 on Dec. 1 to 15-2 on Jan. 2 and then to 6-1 on Feb. 2. By January, Vegas’s odds were lower than those of any team except Tampa Bay.
The Golden Knights were the first NHL expansion team to win more games than they lost in their first year. Vegas became the first team in its inaugural NHL season to make the playoffs since the Hartford Whalers and the Edmonton Oilers, refugees from the folded World Hockey Association, made the 1980 playoffs.
Vegas still has 12 more games to win before Fleury and his teammates can hoist Lord Stanley’s chalice, as the Cup is lovingly known. The team could face the formidable San Jose Sharks, who have won their first three playoff games, in the next round.
But the Golden Knights have gained a lot more ground during the season not just in the eyes of NHL fans but in bookmakers’ estimation as well. From 150-1 to 9-2 is a long way.
Plain and simple, the success that the Vegas Golden Knights have achieved this season is unprecedented. The team that was just being formed 10 months ago has now become the first NHL expansion team to make the playoffs in its inaugural year, and, after Tuesday night’s 1–0 win over the Kings, the league’s first expansion team to sweep its first playoff series. Earlier this year, FiveThirtyEight even called the Knights “The Best Expansion Team In the History Of Pro Sports.”
But this success has led to some questions. Are the Knights in this position because of GM George McPhee’s ability to craft an exceptional team, or is it because the NHL changed its expansion draft rules to help Vegas succeed early? (The 30 existing teams could protect only nine or 11 players in last year’s draft, while in 2000 — the most recent previous expansion draft — teams could protect 12 or 15 players.) On Wednesday, The Ringer’s resident hockey fans joined together to discuss how the Knights got to where they are.
Donnie Kwak: Is this a hot or tepid take: The Golden Knights are not some cute “underdog” expansion surprise story because the league loaded them with more talent than any expansion team in any league ever, and in fact we should hate them for that because they have an unfair advantage.
Matt James: Maybe the expansion draft rules were too kind — you can definitely make that argument. I’m sure the Arizona Coyotes (who haven’t made the playoffs since 2012) would love to just redo their whole team with expansion draft rules. Maybe even some mid-tier teams would like to do the same.
But you have to give Vegas credit. Even if the expansion draft is too kind, they still had to put together a team from nothing and navigate all of the intricacies of the expansion draft rules.
Megan Schuster: I read something about this the other day that mentioned McPhee basically fleeced the teams that were scared to give up a good player in the expansion draft through trades.
Smith: trade
Marchessault: trade
Karlsson: trade
Theodore: trade
Tuch: trade
Fleury: trade
Six of their, what, top nine impact players came via trade? It’s nuts. Seattle won’t get the same relief. https://t.co/FDD4BYOraH — Travis Yost (@travisyost) April 16, 2018
The Wild alone gave up Alex Tuch to get the Knights to take Erik Haula over some of the other players they had exposed, and Tuch and Haula have both been great for Vegas.
Kwak: Hopefully someone as good as McPhee will helm the Seattle project. Maybe the argument here is that the NHL got expansion right? And this should be the norm moving forward — creating insta-contenders?
James: We’ll know for sure once Seattle finishes with the worst record in the NHL in its first year.
Kwak: Atlanta United got their expansion right in the MLS, too.
Schuster: I’d be really curious to see what Vegas would have looked like this year under a different GM. I wonder whether it was just McPhee creating his own advantage, or that the Knights really got that much extra help from the rule changes.
Kwak: As a Capitals fan, I can say GMGM [McPhee] is one shrewd dude.
Rubie Edmondson: If the Knights win the Stanley Cup, they should blow up the NHL and let each team start from scratch. It’s the only solution.
Cory McConnell: Please, no.
Rodger Sherman: It’s also interesting just from the perspective of: What does a league owe an expansion team? Some recent expansion teams (the Charlotte Bobcats in the NBA and the Cleveland Browns in the NFL) have just been utter shit for their entire existence. They got the stench of losing on them early, thanks to unhelpful expansion drafts, and haven’t really been able to shake it. I think leagues do have an interest in avoiding a blighted franchise, even if it comes at the expense of the other teams in the league.
Kwak: The Knights do have some (somewhat similar) precedent — the Florida Panthers made the Cup the third year after joining the league. Though they’ve made the playoffs only four times in the 21 seasons since.
Schuster: The Wild and Blue Jackets had been the most recent NHL expansion teams, in 2000, and the Wild weren’t over .500 until their third season, and Columbus didn’t make the playoffs until its eighth.
Kwak: It doesn’t behoove a league to have an expansion team be crap.
Sherman: But any success comes at the expense of 30 other owners.
Edmondson: The Knights’ success makes the whole league better and (sorry) that’s especially important for the NHL. The league can’t really afford to have an expansion team become the Cleveland Browns.
James: RIP to the Atlanta Thrashers, and then years later Atlanta gets an MLS team that packs a football arena for every game.
McConnell: Here’s my nuanced Vegas take:
Schuster: My issue with that line of thinking is: I’d rather see Vegas win than a team like the Penguins for the third-straight year.
James: Well, certainly the Vegas fan base hasn’t earned a Stanley Cup yet, but as far as the players go, they’re all guys who weren’t viewed as important enough to keep. So I can’t hate them until at least next year. Too good an underdog revenge story on the player side.
How Capitals fans must look on with envy at the nascent hockey fans of Las Vegas. Quite simply, the Vegas Golden Knights are the most successful expansion team ever, in any major North American sport.
Defying the history of new teams struggling, Vegas wound up with the fifth-best record in all of hockey this past regular season. Fivethirtyeight.com crunched the numbers and found Vegas’s season far outshone such expansion successes as the 1961 Los Angeles Angels, the 1967 Chicago Bulls, the 1995 Carolina Panthers and the 1994 Florida Panthers.
And there has been no playoff swoon. On Tuesday, the Golden Knights completed a four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Kings, winning every game by a single goal and holding the Kings to three goals in the entire series.
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“When you think back to early October when the season started, we were thinking about competing and playing hard and seeing what we could do,” Coach Gerard Gallant told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Now all of a sudden, we’re moving on to the second round of the playoffs.”
Earlier Tuesday night, the Capitals were also involved in a playoff game, against the Columbus Blue Jackets. The omens for this series finally seemed good for the Capitals: The Blue Jackets have not won a playoff series in their 18-year history.
The Capitals had lost Games 1 and 2 of the series at home in overtime. Game 3 in Columbus on Tuesday went into overtime as well, then a second overtime. That unsettling feeling must have returned for many Caps fans.
But lo and behold, it was Washington that scored the game winner, by Lars Eller after 89 minutes of hockey. Braden Holtby, returned from a benching, made 33 saves.
“We got a break; it’s what we needed,” Capitals forward John Connolly told The Associated Press.
The Caps are still down in the series, two games to one. But perhaps Tuesday’s game may be the start of a new day for the team: an end to the jinx and the first step toward a banner hoisted to the rafters of the Capital One Arena. The more pessimistic Capitals fan — is there any other kind? — is probably expecting another false dawn.
If you asked me last summer which team would be the first to advance out of the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs this spring, one of the last teams I would have picked were the Vegas Golden Knights.
I didn’t think their expansion draft was that good, and didn’t think the roster coming out of it was very strong. Here I am eating crow, because the Golden Knights swept the Los Angeles Kings in Round 1, and while the games were extremely low scoring, the series wasn’t particularly close.
The goaltending was undoubtedly phenomenal on both sides, and because of that I don’t think Marc-Andre Fleury, as great as he was, was the difference in this series. Jonathan Quick was just as good as Fleury, perhaps even better, but the Golden Knights skaters dominated the puck.
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When I say dominated the puck, I don’t necessarily mean in terms of Corsi, though Vegas did lead with a 54 per cent mark at 5-on-5, or even possession of the puck in the offensive zone, where Vegas controlled 56 per cent of the zone time at 5-on-5.
What I’m talking about is that Vegas was able to make plays with the puck the Kings were not. In fact, the Kings weren’t able to all season. Let’s look at scoring chances to illustrate.
The Golden Knights controlled 62.1 per cent of the scoring chances overall in this series and 62.5 per cent of them at even strength. Over the course of the four-game sweep, they put nearly as many scoring chances on net at 5-on-5 as the Kings put on net, missed, and had blocked.
When you take puck possession time into account, on average, every minute Vegas had the puck in Los Angeles’ zone, Quick faced 2.8 scoring chances that he had to stop, while Fleury faced 1.9 per minute when the Kings possessed the puck in the Golden Knights’ zone. Nearly a full scoring chance more per minute of zone time shows how effective the Golden Knights were at penetrating the slot, and how much more difficult Quick’s job was than Fleury’s.
Shot locations weren’t the only area the Golden Knights dominated either; just look at offensive zone passes that lead to better quality shots.
Keep in mind that the Kings are one of the better teams in the NHL at stopping passes to the slot, but again the Golden Knights generated way more movement before their shots, both at 5-on-5 and in all situations.
On special teams, the Golden Knights love East-West movement, which forces goalies to move laterally on a ton of shots. Fortunately for the Kings, Jonathan Quick is an athletic goaltender who is explosive laterally, but his phenomenal performance only prevented blowouts and couldn’t steal the series if the players in front of him didn’t score.
The Golden Knights don’t have the star players to compare to Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty, but the Kings’ lack of depth both up front and on defence made them easy pickings for a Vegas team that plays a more modern NHL system focused on creating high end offensive plays throughout the lineup.
Los Angeles looked better in Game 4, and perhaps even deserved a better fate, but ultimately they were outmatched by Vegas in every offensive category.
