Peters: Vegas taking a gamble in dealing top prospects, draft picks for Eichel
The Vegas Golden Knights are a product of their environment. “All in” doesn’t really begin to cover the way the Knights have operated since their very first year of operation. The wheeling and dealing predates their first NHL game and now they’ve made perhaps the biggest splash of them all by landing Jack Eichel in the blockbuster trade with the Buffalo Sabres.
For a team that had to build a prospect pool from scratch as an expansion franchise, Vegas has quickly filtered through a number of those prospects in a big-game hunting expedition that has brought back the likes of Eichel, Mark Stone and Max Pacioretty. When Eichel, Stone and Pacioretty are all healthy and they’ve gone through the salary cap gymnastics that will be required to make all the pieces fit, the Golden Knights should have one of the deepest, most threatening teams on paper, even if we’re still months away from seeing what that will actually look like in practice.
Owner Bill Foley has been borderline maniacal in his quest for the Stanley Cup. Get it done at any cost. It’s the kind of push that every fan base probably wishes for their own ownership. That quest has turned the Vegas Golden Knights into the real life version of playing franchise mode on NHL 22, getting bored with whatever roster you’re using and making blockbuster trade after blockbuster trade where draft picks and prospects are easily disposed of as part of the deal. Potential be damned. The time is now.
The Golden Knights are seemingly setting their own standard for team building in the often-conservative NHL where prospects are viewed as precious commodities. So many executives seem to not want to be the GM that lets a top-tier prospect get away and hoard them unless the absolute right deal comes along.
Oddly enough, Golden Knights President of Hockey Operations and former GM George McPhee had one of the more famous flubs in recent memory when he traded former first-round pick Filip Forsberg for Martin Erat while GM of the Washington Capitals. Forsberg became a top-line star for Nashville in the subsequent years, while Erat played 62 total games with the Capitals, then was traded away the following season and out of the league after the next.
That particular trade was so different from the ones McPhee and current GM Kelly McCrimmon have made with the Golden Knights since their arrival, though. No team has swung for the fences more in the last four seasons.
How the Golden Knights got here
Going from Vegas’s first ever NHL Entry Draft in 2017 to its status as a trade-happy juggernaut that has been to three conference finals and one Stanley Cup Final in four seasons of existence, this is a team that has bucked convention at every turn. However, when you consider the way expansion was set up, Vegas had no real precedent or road map to follow. So the Golden Knights created their own and so far it has created one of the NHL’s most consistently competitive teams and easily one of the most entertaining when it comes to transactions.
One of the many remarkable things about the Golden Knights inaugural season is that they built a contender, while also building a draft war chest through the many trades made for Expansion Draft considerations, which was a mistake by the rest of the league in hindsight. One that was not repeated for the benefit of the Seattle Kraken.
Vegas ended up with 12 total draft picks in 2017, including three first-round picks within the top 15 – Nos. 6, 13 and 15. Cody Glass was the franchise’s first pick at No. 6, Nick Suzuki was next at No. 13 and defenseman Erik Brannstrom was selected 15th overall. None of those players remain with the team.
Remarkably, Nicolas Hague, the team’s fourth draft pick at 34th overall in the second round, has played more games for the Golden Knights than any of those top picks and is now an everyday NHLer. Also remarkable is that each of the first six picks by the team have already played NHL games with Lucas Elvenes and Jack Dugan looking like guys that can play in the NHL down the road. That’s an insane hit rate for a first draft and set the table for Vegas to be able to make many of the significant moves it’s made in the last few seasons.
Prospects as trade assets
While none of the team’s 2017 first-round picks are with the team anymore, Brannstrom was a key piece in acquiring Mark Stone, now the team’s captain, and Suzuki was the key piece to bring in Max Pacioretty who, when healthy, has been a consistent scorer and playoff performer for Vegas. Glass, who was at one point reportedly deemed untouchable, has not yet come close to living up to his draft stock and was dealt for former No. 2 overall pick Nolan Patrick, who has had a hard time staying healthy. The jury remains out on that deal.
During that inaugural season, Vegas also traded away its first-round pick in the 2018 draft along with two other draft picks to acquire Tomas Tatar from Detroit, ahead of what would be a run to the Stanley Cup Final. That pick was used by Detroit on Joe Veleno, who just made his NHL debut last week. The following offseason, Tatar was included in the package to acquire Pacioretty.
Now Vegas has traded Peyton Krebs, who was selected 17th overall in 2019 after his draft stock fell following a severe Achilles injury sustained right before the draft during a training session. Ever the gamblers, the Golden Knights took a look at the risk vs. the reward and once again willingly took on that risk and, like usual it seems, it paid off for them.
Krebs developed into a high-quality prospect, returning to form after recovering from the injury, looking even stronger in the subsequent years. He put up 43 points in 24 games during the WHL’s shortened season in 2020-21. He appeared in a few games with the Knights last season, but made the team out of camp to start this campaign. Aside from a two-game stint in the AHL with the Henderson Silver Knights, where he put up five assists, Krebs has been part of the big club. His vision and hockey sense are high end, highlighted by strong two-way play and commitment to defense without sacrificing much by way of skill. He was, at the time of his trade, the team’s top prospect by a significant margin.
The only two players the Golden Knights have selected in the first round to still be with the team are their two most recent picks – 2020 29th overall pick Brendan Brisson who plays at the University of Michigan and 2021 30th overall pick Zach Dean, currently back in the QMJHL with the Gatineau Olympiques. So, uh, maybe don’t get too comfortable, boys. Though Brisson shares an agent with Jack Eichel — his dad, Pat Brisson.
Is this sustainable?
Setting aside the massive salary cap headaches that await the Vegas front office when everyone gets healthy, you look at their roster and have to conclude that it is better today than it was yesterday. How long will that go on?
The Golden Knights have lost significant future assets in the trades that they’ve made so far, but it’s not like they were shipped out for rentals. Pacioretty signed a four-year extension after he was dealt and is under contract for this season and next, Stone was extended and is locked in until 2026-27 and Eichel is on the books through 2025-26. You add those players to a core that already includes original Golden Knights William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault and Shea Theodore, plus free agent prize Alex Pietrangelo, plus starting goalie Robin Lehner and you know you have your best players locked for a minimum of the next three seasons.
Pretty much every other player has to be viewed as expendable given that the Golden Knights have a projected $78.5 million committed to just 11 players for next season in a flat salary cap system. So there’s going to be some more maneuvering in the near future.
Normally, teams would be filtering in prospects to fill those holes when they’re forced to shed salary. Players on cheap entry-level contracts that are under $1 million are suddenly at a higher premium. When you’ve been trading away all of those players that would conceivably be contributing on ELCs, you have fewer and fewer options.
The good news for the Golden Knights is that they’ve drafted very well, even outside of the first round. They have the two remaining first-rounders in Brisson, who is in the midst of a breakout sophomore campaign at Michigan and probably will be ready to sign either after this season or next. Then there’s Dean, who is kind of on a similar trajectory as Krebs was, as a middle-six, two-way center with good secondary scoring potential.
Also in the prospect pool, there’s Jack Dugan, who has been on the cusp of making the team for the last two seasons. The Golden Knights have already been using 2017 draft picks Jonas Rondberg and Jake Leschyshyn on their NHL roster while dealing with injuries.
The cupboard is not bare, by any means. Each of Ivan Morozov, Kaedan Korczak, Peter Diliberatore, Daniil Chayka, Pavel Dorofeyev, Lukas Cormier and a few others project very favorably to being everyday NHL players down the line that should come relatively cheap in the near term. The problems start coming when and if any of these players drastically outpace expectations and will command higher salaries before the Golden Knights have the cap space to accommodate them.
The Golden Knights also have the option of looking into the undrafted free agent market and being more aggressive on that front to fill holes left by departed prospects and draft picks. They won a huge recruiting battle for college free agent Zach Whitecloud, who has become an everyday defenseman for them. He’s now under contract at a very affordable $2.5 million AAV for six years after this one. It’s not the best way to build up a prospect system, but the undrafted free agent and European free agent markets can provide affordable, effective BAND-AIDS.
The question a lot of people have been asking, and rightly so, is what happens when the veteran players start fading? If you’ve looked at every single thing the Golden Knights have done since their inception – they don’t care about that until they have to. They don’t have to yet.
The Pittsburgh Penguins have had a very similar approach to their future, trading first-round picks with reckless abandon and it’s largely paid off given the fact that they’ve had two recent Stanley Cups. That window is going to close and the hole that they’ve left themselves is likely be very difficult to climb out of. But I don’t know if you’d find a single person in Pittsburgh that would say consecutive Stanley Cups wasn’t worth it. You’re also not going to consider your window closed until Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin are gone.
What Vegas is doing, beyond looking at the salary cap as more of a suggestion than a rule, is about to test the theory of how an organization values its internal assets. There are plenty of trades that have been held up in years past because a team wouldn’t part with this or that prospect. Few teams value prospects as much as the one that drafted them. The time and effort that goes into selecting those players, then monitoring and fostering their development is huge. The business approach, however, is one that views prospects simply as assets.
Sometimes you just have to look at it in the simplest possible terms. You can land long-term impact players with proven NHL track records or you can keep a player who might become that. Which sounds like the bigger risk in the end?
For the Golden Knights, the former is always the betting favorite.