Have the Golden Knights cheapened the Stanley Cup by reaching the Final?
Of course not!
Should fans in other NHL markets feel frustrated that Vegas fans gets to enjoy all this fun seconds after their franchise's figurative faceoff?
Of course!
Those two stances absolutely can coexist, which is why this whole Vegas debate that's been stirred up the past few days, and now will find a fresh crescendo with what occurred Sunday in Winnipeg, strikes me as being phonier than a Statue of Liberty on the Strip. Because one's got nothing to do with the other.
What Vegas did to set itself up entering the league was wholly legit.
That began with owner Bill Foley setting a fair return for an unprecedented $500 million expansion fee, one that was six times that of the two most recent prior entrants, the Blue Jackets and Wild, each having paid $80 million in 2000. Because of that massive price, the Golden Knights were able to enter the league alone and not have to share an expansion draft, as Columbus and Minnesota did. They also were able to set up slimmer protected lists for the rest of the league. Teams could now protect only 11 players in the expansion draft rather than 15. This was seven forwards, three defensemen and one goaltender versus nine forwards, five defensemen and one goaltender.
Good for them. Smart business.
But if anyone thinks that's solely why this team's in the Final while the previous four expansion teams were a disaster — the Predators (1998) and Thrashers (1999) went without a playoff victory in their first 11 years, the Wild still have only four playoff victories, and we all know about the Blue Jackets not having won a blessed thing — they're delusional.
What really happened was that George McPhee outsmarted no fewer than a dozen of his GM counterparts along the way, both by claiming undervalued assets and also by swindling even more assets through trades, not least of which are the bazillion draft picks the Golden Knights have stockpiled. In two striking cases, ripping off the Blue Jackets for William Karlsson and the Panthers for Jonathan Marchessault, McPhee should have been tried for high crimes. In another, it was a double-robbery in that McPhee got the Wild to give up Erik Haula and Alex Tuch — Minnesota willingly sent Tuch as compensation to ensure Haula would be Vegas' choice — and both those players are now shining on the same line.
That's not anyone gaming any system. That's McPhee being a hell of a lot smarter than the front offices in Columbus, Sunrise and St. Paul.
And let's not leave Jim Rutherford out. The Penguins and Golden Knights, we now know, arranged two months before the expansion draft to have Fleury be Vegas' choice. And to ensure that, Rutherford paid a second-round pick in the 2020 draft, mostly to make sure McPhee wouldn't take Bryan Rust.
Would McPhee have taken Fleury anyway?
Sure, based on what we know now. But Rutherford still gave up an additional asset to protect Rust rather than reading McPhee's tea leaves correctly, in that there's no way McPhee wouldn't have taken a face-of-the-franchise type player in Fleury.
All of that adds up, and there's actually much more.
So don't cry for the Penguins in this scenario, much less the dozen non-Vegas teams to have never won the Cup. Columbus hasn't gone without a playoff series victory for 18 years because their expansion draft allowed teams to protect two additional forwards and two additional defensemen. The Maple Leafs, an Original Six franchise, haven't won the Cup since the NHL doubled in size in 1967. Heck, Toronto hasn't even reached the Final in all that time. The Blues joined that same year, as did the Penguins, but there's no Cup in St. Louis. The Canucks, Sabres and Capitals have been around almost as long, and there are no (meaningful) banners in their places, either. And it's never a bad thing to remind that the Flyers haven't won since 1975, or so I hear.
That's on them. Boo-hoo for them.
But for their fans ... yeah, I'll find some sympathy there. It's got to hurt to be a lifer, particularly in passionate markets such as some of those just cited, to watch fans celebrate while still needing to bump their buddy to explain offsides and icing. That's got to be lousy, no matter the process or logic that led to it.
Again, these concepts can coexist.
• What's happened in Vegas won't stay in Vegas. Not by any stretch. When Seattle pays the NHL the same money to enter within the next couple years, that franchise will — and should — demand identical circumstances. And the same, you can bet, will apply across all four of the major professional sports. No expansion owner will want to put out roughly $1 billion to stink for half a decade.
Long after the memories fade of what these Golden Knights are achieving, that'll be their real legacy.
• I'd written for years that Marc-Andre Fleury was a longshot for the Hall of Fame, for the simple reason that his statistics never allowed him to be a Vezina Trophy finalist, not even this past season because injuries cost him nearly a quarter of Vegas' games.
But man, that could be proven wrong within a couple weeks.
If Fleury wins a fourth Cup, and he's primarily responsible for that Cup, he'll be enshrined. This isn't like 2009, where he made the iconic save on Nicklas Lidstrom but was largely inconsistent. This isn't like 2016, obviously, where he was hurt, and this isn't even like 2017, where he pushed the Penguins through probably their two toughest rounds. This is the very backbone of a team that's built on feeding off his saves.
All eyes in the hockey world right now are on Flower. That counts so very much in Hall criteria.
• Ryan Reaves was underutilized by Mike Sullivan. Not because he scored the goal that put the Golden Knights in the Final. Not because he banged bodies all series long with, of all people, Dustin Byfuglien. He was underutilized while here, and I wrote that before he was traded.
• I can comfortably share this now: Ron Burkle told me last spring, well before the expansion draft, that he'd have gladly paid Vegas the Penguins' cut of the expansion fee — roughly $16.7 million — if it meant keeping Fleury. That, of course, was never an option, but let that also explain why I was writing in such strong terms at the time that the team's management, all the way to the top, was so exasperated by the process of having to choose just one goaltender.
• Fleury over Matt Murray?
Come on. We don't live in a hindsight world, certainly not based on a single playoff. Murray was 22 years old at the time, a two-time champion — on merit — and cost $3 million less under the cap. He also was the clear choice of a head coach who hadn't made a single incorrect decision in two years behind the bench.
Postulating what-ifs at this stage can be fun but also silly. The Penguins did what every team in the league would have done. Including Vegas.
• My personal affinity for the wonderful city of Winnipeg aside, it felt a little unfair to see any team anywhere cast as the underdog against a franchise based in the smallest metropolitan market in all of professional sports. In any other year, the Jets would have been the Cinderella darlings.
I communicated yesterday with a couple friends in Manitoba, and they spoke with pride of seeing their city on a continental stage, not least of which was being the main show on NBC yesterday. They spoke of the value in having images of the downtown area, especially the gorgeous new Canadian Museum of Human Rights ...
... shown in some of those shots.
I relayed back my own feelings about how Pittsburgh's benefited from a lot of the same, particularly in the Steelers' golden era when our economy was being ravaged by the meltdown of the steel industry. We still had a real presence on the national and global scene. Our name still meant something, and it was so much more than any amount of branding or marketing could ever achieve.
Sports can be pretty powerful that way.
• The Jets will be back. Core guys Blake Wheeler, Byfuglien and a couple others will be a year further on the wrong side of 30, but they're already loaded with young talent, headlined by the NHL's most underappreciated forward in Mark Scheifele and its very best young goal-scorer in Patrik Laine, and there's a good bit more on the way. I'd been predicting this group would rise up for years now, which even got me mocked in Winnipeg itself. It was cool to see that play out.
• It was cooler still to see the world's coldest big city warmly applauding Deryk Engelland upon the Golden Knights being presented with the Clarence Campbell Bowl as conference champs. That's how it's done, Trashville.
• The Pirates' loss Sunday was about as ugh as it gets. Super-reliable closer Felipe Vazquez has a super-rare blown save, and super-surehanded shortstop Jordy Mercer has a super-rare routine error. But losing the final three to the Padres was less about misfortune and more about missed opportunity, as I discuss in today's Daily Shot podcast:
• My focus will be on football in the early part of the week, as we're on the eve of the Steelers opening OTAs. After that, I'm going to take a handful of days down from writing columns. I'll still be around and doing all the daily little stuff, plus multimedia, but other priorities call this week.
