2026-27 NHL team preview: Vegas Golden Knights

Sep 25, 2026, 14:00 EDT

2026-27 NHL team preview: Vegas Golden Knights

Credit: Bob Frid-Imagn Images

LAST SEASON

Perennial contenders ever since they entered the NHL in 2017, the Vegas Golden Knights embarked on yet another deep playoff run this past spring, vanquishing the Utah Mammoth, Anaheim Ducks, and Colorado Avalanche before falling to the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Final. The Knights looked like a team of destiny when they swept the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Avalanche in the Western Conference Final, but after taking 1-0 and 2-1 series leads over Carolina, they just ran out of steam and ultimately lost the Final in six games.

Mitch Marner’s arrival from the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 2025 offseason gave the Knights the fuel they needed to reach the next level this past season. Long derided for his inconsistent playoff performances in Toronto, Marner genuinely put himself into Conn Smythe Trophy contention over his first 22-game postseason run with Vegas, putting up 10 goals and 29 points to get his new team within two wins of their second championship. The 29-year-old winger has seven years remaining on his deal with Vegas, which carries a highly reasonable $12 million cap hit.

In preparation for what they hoped would be a long playoff run, the Golden Knights moved aggressively to upgrade their roster during the 2025-26 season, acquiring Rasmus Andersson, Nic Dowd, and Cole Smith in mid-season trades while also signing free-agent goaltender Carter Hart to supplant a struggling Adin Hill. Then, just weeks before the playoffs, they cut bait with head coach Bruce Cassidy in favor of John Tortorella, who guided the team to three series victories. Two days after the Golden Knights lost Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final, the team announced that Tortorella would not return for the 2026-27 season; the next day, Vegas introduced Ryan Craig as its third head coach in a three-month span. Talk about a whirlwind!

Vegas had nine players with double-digit points during the 2026 playoffs, and that doesn’t include William Karlsson, who re-entered the lineup midway through the postseason and still managed nine points in 15 games. Top-line center Jack Eichel amassed 22 points but only two goals; nevertheless, Brett Howden and Pavel Dorofeyev more than made up for it with 26 playoff goals between them. It was a great story, but it’ll be difficult to replicate next year: Dorofeyev is gone, and Howden has never been much of a regular-season scorer (he managed 12 goals in 2025-26, compared to 14 in the playoffs).

Dorofeyev, who joined the New York Rangers in June, wasn’t the only Knight to seek greener pastures over the summer. Vegas boasted one of the deepest rosters in recent NHL history during its 2026 playoff run, and there simply wasn’t room for everyone to return in 2026-27. While the Knights successfully swung a deal with Andersson to keep him in Vegas through 2033, they couldn’t do the same for more than a half-dozen players who featured in the 2026 playoffs, including long-time fan favorite Keegan Kolesar, who was traded to the Detroit Red Wings on July 1. With so many familiar faces now elsewhere, the Knights will be forced to rely upon the likes of Alex Holtz, Braeden Bowman, and Dylan Coghlan to take on more of the load in 2026-27. If Karlsson and Mark Stone can stay healthy for a full season, even better.

KEY ADDITIONS & DEPARTURES

Additions

Parker Wotherspoon, D
Victor Olofsson, LW
Marc Gatcomb, RW

Ryan Craig, head coach

Departures

Pavel Dorofeyev, RW (NYR)
Keegan Kolesar, RW (DET)
Kaedan Korczak, D (PIT)
Colton Sissons, C (TOR)
Cole Smith, C (CHI)
Reilly Smith, RW (UFA)
Brandon Saad, LW (UFA)
Ben Hutton, D (UFA)
Akira Schmid, G (FLA)
John Tortorella, head coach

OFFENSE

Dorofeyev’s departure is certainly a blow for the Knights, especially considering they were already a middle-of-the-pack offensive team last year. It’ll be tough to replace a back-to-back 35-goal scorer, although it’s also fairly easy to understand why Vegas felt skittish about paying him $11 million a year through 2033. Dorofeyev is a fairly one-dimensional scorer who can run hot and cold with the best of them. The Knights will just have to do their best to make up for his loss in the aggregate.

Even without Dorofeyev, Vegas still has more than their fair share of highly impactful forward options. When healthy, Stone is one of the very best play-driving wingers in the sport. He’s 34, and he seems to miss at least 20 games to injury each year, but Stone is still the heart and soul of this Knights team and recently signed a contract extension to stay with the club through 2029. In all likelihood, he’ll be in Vegas for the rest of his playing days. At their best, Stone and Ivan Barbashev can be a pair of whirling dervishes on either side of the Knights’ top line.

Marner isn’t far behind Stone in terms of pure puck possession ability, and he’s certainly ahead as far as durability is concerned. He proved last year that he can be a big-game player, both with Vegas and Team Canada, and we won’t pretend like it wouldn’t be funny to see him lift the Stanley Cup before any of his former Maple Leafs teammates.

Vegas is one of the stronger teams down the middle in the Pacific Division, with Tomas Hertl backing up the top-six duo of Eichel and Karlsson. Eichel is still one of the better centers in the league, having just posted his second consecutive 90-point season along with a plus-22 on-ice goal differential at 5-on-5. Karlsson’s return from injury in the playoffs made the Knights’ lineup even more formidable than it already was (and helped with some player slotting issues); Hertl’s tenure in Vegas has been somewhat up-and-down, but he really ramped up as the playoffs went along and should still be good for around 60 points this season.

The Knights no longer have the same level of veteran forward depth they did before, but it may be a blessing in disguise if it forces them to see what they have in some of their younger options up front. This could be a make-or-break year for Alex Holtz, who, at age 24, is coming off a year in which he scored just three goals in 28 NHL games with Vegas. Undrafted forward Braeden Bowman came out of nowhere to establish himself as a semi-regular presence for the Knights in 2025-26 and was rewarded with a six-year extension this summer. And then there’s Trevor Connelly … more on him later.

DEFENSE

Vegas allowed 250 goals last year, just three behind the Los Angeles Kings for the fewest in the Pacific. But in terms of shot and chance suppression, they were among the class of the entire league. The Knights allowed 2.27 expected goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5, fewer than anybody else, and they ranked second in shots against. If not for their 31st-ranked 5-on-5 save percentage, they’d have prevented a lot more goals and won a lot more games. Unsurprisingly, after their save percentage finally started to improve in the playoffs, they went on an incredible run to Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final.

The Knights’ blue line is largely unchanged from the group that took them on that run, save for one player: Kaedan Korczak, who Vegas sent to the Pittsburgh Penguins over the summer in exchange for Parker Wotherspoon. Aside from Korczak, the Knights are returning everyone of note, including 2026 trade deadline acquisition Rasmus Andersson, who signed a new seven-year, $8.5 million AAV contract with the club on July 1.

Upon arriving in Vegas, Andersson reunited with former Calgary Flames teammate Noah Hanifin, with whom he was frequently partnered over their six years together in the Stampede City. Unfortunately, Andersson and Hanifin were among the Knights’ weakest links during the 2026 playoffs, posting the worst underlying numbers on the team and combining for zero goals during the entire run. Both defensemen posted on-ice expected goals shares south of 45 percent in the postseason, far below anyone else in a Vegas sweater. Chalk it up to the change of scenery, perhaps, but the Knights will need far more from Andersson in 2026-27, whether he’s paired with Hanifin, Wotherspoon, or anyone else.

Fortunately, Vegas is still getting terrific contributions from their top pairing of Shea Theodore and Brayden McNabb, both of whom logged a ton of minutes and put up a ton of points during the 2026 run. The Knights posted a plus-7 goal differential at 5-on-5 with those two on the ice during the playoffs, and that was in addition to fantastic play-driving and shot suppression results. McNabb will be 36 in January, so a succession plan will eventually need to be in order, but for now, it’s tough to complain about any of it.

GOALTENDING

After running with four different goaltenders in the 2025-26 regular season, Vegas opted to deploy just one in the playoffs: Carter Hart, who joined the team early in the year amid considerable controversy — he was previously charged and acquitted as part of the 2018 Canadian World Junior team scandal — but ultimately became John Tortorella’s go-to guy. Indeed, Tortorella openly chafed at even the merest suggestion that he could’ve switched to Adin Hill at any point in the playoffs, calling a reporter’s inquiry on the subject “the stupidest question [he’d] ever heard.”

Hart, who turned 28 in August, went 14-8 with a .909 save percentage in 22 playoff games with the Knights this past spring, but he was far from the model of consistency during the run. His performances ranged from genuinely strong to jaw-droppingly awful, an example of the latter being his performance in Game 3 against Utah in Round 1, in which he allowed four goals on just 12 shots in a 4-2 loss. Hart gave up four goals in nine of his 22 playoff games, including five in a row against Carolina in the Stanley Cup Final.

As it stands, Vegas is still tied to Hill until 2031, and while he no longer has Tortorella keeping him out of the crease, he still has to prove he belongs between the pipes. The 2023 Stanley Cup champ appeared in just 27 games with the Knights in 2025-26, posting a 10-9-6 record along with a dismal .871 save percentage. Injuries undeniably played a role in Hill’s struggles last year, but he needs to take advantage of his extended break from game duty to come out strong in 2026-27.

COACHING

Cassidy and Tortorella are two of the most established and successful NHL head coaches in recent memory. By comparison, Ryan Craig is a fresh-faced newcomer aiming to make a name for himself in his first go-round as a big-league bench boss.

A reliable depth forward during his extensive professional career, which included 198 NHL games (mostly with the Tampa Bay Lightning), Craig has been a fixture in the Golden Knights’ coaching ranks since retiring in 2017. He served as an assistant coach with Vegas between 2017 and 2023, serving under the team’s first three head coaches (Gerard Gallant, Peter DeBoer, and Cassidy) and winning the Stanley Cup in his final year on the bench; immediately thereafter, the Knights reassigned Craig to serve as head coach of the team’s AHL affiliate, the Henderson Silver Knights.

Craig, 44, has helped the likes of Bowman, Connelly, and Korczak develop into solid pros in Henderson over the past three seasons. Now, he’ll be tasked with getting the most out of a Knights group that is already starting to skew much younger around the edges than in years past.

ROOKIES

Connelly, the Knights’ first-round pick in 2024, has a strong chance of making the team out of training camp this year — and if he does, he could be in line to achieve a downright hilarious franchise first. Since joining the NHL in 2017, the Knights have drafted nine players in the first round, and exactly zero of them have played in a full season’s worth of games (82 or 84, doesn’t matter) with the club. Nick Suzuki, Erik Brannstrom, Zach Dean, and David Edstrom never played in a single game with Vegas before being traded; Cody Glass (66), Peyton Krebs (13), and Brendan Brisson (24) each played extremely sparingly; and 2026 pick Juho Piiparinen obviously hasn’t played at all.

That leaves Connelly, who went to Vegas with the No. 19 overall pick in 2024 despite significant concerns about his off-ice conduct and character. The 20-year-old winger has spent the past two seasons trying to put that in the past, and he racked up 14 goals and 49 points in just 46 games with Henderson in 2025-26. In a recent media availability, Craig indicated that Connelly could get the “first crack” at playing with Hertl and Olofsson on Vegas’s third line to start the season. If he can live up to his full potential — and keep his nose clean — Connelly could help Vegas fans get over Dorofeyev’s departure pretty quickly.

BURNING QUESTIONS

1. Who gets the No. 1 job in goal? Hart was the default choice for Vegas in the playoffs, but his track record is as checkered as any, and his projected tandem partner was the guy who backstopped the Knights to their only Stanley Cup to date. Hill still needs to show he can bounce back, but Hart also needs to prove he can play at a high level over a full season. If Vegas needs to go with a tandem arrangement and run with whoever’s hot at any given time, so be it. We’ll see.

2. Can Andersson bounce back? The Flames traded two of their top defensemen last year, and both of them struggled to find their footing in their new locales. Andersson is three years younger than MacKenzie Weegar, who struggled to a far greater degree in 2025-26, but he’s also signed for two extra seasons. The Knights gave up Zach Whitecloud, Abram Wiebe, and two draft picks to land Andersson from the Flames, and then swapped Korczak for Wotherspoon to make room for the Swede’s new contract, so they need him to justify that cost. He hasn’t yet.

3. Will Stone stay healthy? Over the past five full seasons, Stone has missed a total of 148 games due to injury — and that doesn’t include any playoff absences. He’s an incredibly skilled player, but he’s also incredibly unreliable, and with the LTIR playoff salary cap loophole now closed, there’s no incentive for Vegas to keep him on the shelf longer than necessary. With two extra games on the schedule, can Stone play in 80 or more for the first time since 2014-15?

PREDICTION

The Golden Knights are the class of the West until proven otherwise. Their star forwards are still at the top of their game, and while there are some question marks around their defense and goaltending, they aren’t significant enough to overshadow their strengths. Dorofeyev is a big loss, but if Connelly gets a bit of runway to help make up for his departure, Vegas might even come out ahead in the end. The rest of the team’s subtractions are mostly negligible.

The Pacific is the weakest of the NHL’s four divisions, and Vegas is still comfortably its best team. We’ll pencil them in for another first-place finish and a couple more playoff series wins, but they won’t sweep the Central Division champs this time around — instead, they’ll be the ones sent home in four games in the West Final.

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