MONTREAL, QC – JANUARY 18: Vegas Golden Knights Montreal Canadiens (Photo by David Kirouac/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Exploring whether it’s possible for the Montreal Canadiens to use a system similar to the Vegas Golden Knights to become a Stanely Cup contenders.
The story of the Vegas Golden Knights is something the hockey world never saw coming. Imagine an expansion team coming out of nowhere in a market no one thought was a good idea and becoming one of the best teams in the league just like that.
This was the idea of one Bill Foley, who thought Vegas could be a hot market and finally give the city the sporting franchise it deserved. The best move Foley made was hiring George McPhee as their general manager and president of hockey operations.
McPhee automatically went to work on trying to build a team with an expansion draft. He was a very experienced general manager who, before taking the job in Vegas, had built the Washington Capitals into the team they are today.
The one element that made Vegas such a successful hockey team in their first year was, most likely, catching teams by surprise. No one in the league expected them to be that good, and let’s look at that for a moment.
George McPhee did a masterful job using trades and draft picks to draft a team that was already pretty much loaded with players that could take a team far very fast.
These were players who were doing well, but their respective teams, who didn’t choose to protect them, thought they weren’t. This actually became the theme of the Golden Knights for their inaugural season. They called them the Golden Misfits, basically players who weren’t wanted on their respected teams. The team decided then to show the league that getting rid of them was a big mistake.