Well we can thank all the teams for hiring clown shoes hockey vets to be GM for this, at least they did something right
I love how the same people who laughed after the draft saying the Golden Knights would suck, are now saying it's rigged and the draft was unfair. Some GMs just made poor decisions for that draft (Florida not protecting Marchessault comes to mind), which led to Vegas getting some really good players. No superstars (except Fleury) but really good players.
Honestly it's not rigged. Vegas just built a great team. Kudos to them. The Jets gave away their first pick to keep the boys together.
The Golden Knights really had a perfect storm of everything go their way. From getting an ok to good goalie who had a turn around career year. They also had GM's giving away really good players while trying to protect not so good players. They also had some of these depth players have amazing seasons so it's worth seeing if it can happen next year. It's just a weird/cool time tbh.
Definitely as fair as one can reasonably expect, however the only argument I would make is that the league right now is designed for parity (salary cap) and all the teams are pretty close in skill level so it doesn't shock me that Vegas assembled a solid and competitive team because that's just a logical outcome. What is kinda wild to me is that came together so well with team chemistry. There's no real explanation for that except the "Island of Misfit Toys" kinda thing.
The revisionist history of (mostly) old school hockey guys on twitter is nauseating. I think it's important people remember that this team drafted Deryk Engelland...like, they by no means drafted a conference and possibly cup finalist team. Trying to make sense of what's happening in vegas isn't worth it. I will hypothesize that this Fleury is not all that different from the perennial playoff flop he was on the Penguins...he didn't carry the regular season load here that he usually did in PIT, he's more rested than usual...he's playing well.
The goal of the draft was to get a team that would be competitive from the start, instead of staying at the bottom for 10 years. I don't think anyone thought they would be THAT competitive though.
I read a take from an "old school hockey guy" on twitter yesterday that said Steve Yzerman was a bad captain and overrated player. He only won anything because of who he was surrounded by.
I know no one cares, but Leafs signed KHL defenceman Igor Ozhiganov to one-year ELC, and shortly to a 7-year, $31.5 million deal following an average debut season.
So I don't know shit about this, but I saw a lot of comments saying that Vegas had unfair leverage on trades. Is there any validity to that or not? @CobraKidJon (forgot to reply/insert quotes and now editing this comment haha.)
no, GMs just overthought everything instead of having Vegas pick 1 player and be done with it, some teams decided that they would try and get cute and try to make creative trades and it blew up in their face Florida, Columbus, Anaheim, and Minnesota come to mind
thankfully, NJ only lost Jon Merrill who stinks anyways if they keep the rules the same for the Seattle expansion, we will likely lose a good player though
Because he turns into a beast in NHL 18 and he knows he’ll never be that good in real life and he just can’t tear himself away from the promise and glory that virtual world provides.
some digging around Twitter/HF boards and a lot of people are saying Olli Juolevi there was a separate interview with one of his teammates that indicated he was obsessed with video games