Vegas Golden Knights: How to Build an Expansion Team

The story of the Vegas Golden Knights will go down as one of the most bizarre real-life Cinderella tales in the history of North American sports

Seemingly every season, the NHL has at least one wacky story to tell. They happen in a variety of different ways. These unexplainable phenomena make the league worth watching every year. The 2017-18 NHL season saw the least likely success story in recent memory – the Vegas Golden Knights. No other sport can quite compare to hockey in this regard.

For example, in the NBA, fans can often predict who will win the championship at the very beginning of the year. Spoiler: It will be the Golden State Warriors. Even the NFL and MLB don’t seem to pack quite the same punch as the NHL when it comes to rags to riches success stories.

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In hockey, something inspiring, crazy and/or unlikely seems to happen every season. For example, the 2016-17 season saw the Nashville Predators‘ unforgettable ride to the Stanley Cup Final. In 2015-16, the San Jose Sharks‘ run to the Stanley Cup Final after years of failure stands out. Even when fans get one of those rare, tranquil years, they can be sure that there are many more stories yet to come.

The 2017-18 season was the most exciting in ages. In the Eastern Conference, the Washington Capitals tasted sweet vengeance, winning their first Stanley Cup after beating the dreaded Pittsburgh Penguins.

In the Western Conference, we saw something special – something really amazing. At the beginning of the season, people thought the Knights would be terrible.

Everyone knows the drill by now. The Golden Knights were amazing. They went passed stunning just the NHL. They stunned people all over the continent and world. The Golden Knights shocked everyone so badly, that ESPN took the NHL out of the ‘Other’ category on their website, at least for a while.

In the end, unfortunately, the Knights couldn’t quite get that fairytale ending, losing to the Caps in the Finals. Since the series only went to five games, it doesn’t seem very Hollywood-esque anymore.

A lot of people are rightfully asking how the Golden Knights got so far. How did they manage to climb as far as they did in only one season? Almost as numerous as the curious, many people have attempted to answer this question.

The sleeper draft

One thing the Knights were very good at selecting career-long sleepers. Oh, and the Florida Panthers are really dumb. Sure, they lucked into a few guys. But Vegas did a good job of selecting the right guys.

This is definitely important to address. It still remains a mystery what the Florida Panthers were thinking, going into the expansion draft. Jonathan Marchessault scored 30 goals for Florida in the 2016-17 season and led the team with 51 points. He was one of the few bright spots on the team.

They also gave the Knights forward Reilly Smith. Now, this turned out to be a really bad move, but it was certainly more defensible than Marchessault. Not many predicted a breakout season of this caliber. Nevertheless, the Panthers went beyond playing their part in building Vegas.

As we look beyond Florida, it’s remarkable how many sleepers the Knights selected. Before this season, William Karlsson had an NHL career high of 25 points. This season, he scored 43 goals and 35 assists for 78 points. And that’s not all. The Columbus Blue Jackets gave the Knights a first-round pick and a second-round pick (along with David Clarkson‘s hilariously awful contract) so they would select Karlsson.

David Perron looked like a decent second liner coming into this season. He scored 46 points with the Blues, but hadn’t really had a great season since 2013-14. At 30 years of age, Perron posted 66 points and was on pace for 77.

The Knights created a sort of reverse-Murphy’s Law. Everything that could go right did go right. Did anyone see a 50 point season coming for Erik Haula? Who could have guessed Colin Miller, who had trouble staying in the NHL for most of his career, would end up with 41 points?

Around this core, the Knights added Nate Schmidt, Alex Tuch, Deryk Engelland, and more sleepers. They just seemed to have some sort of magical formula for finding undervalued players.

At the beginning of the season, people thought that James Neal would be leading this team. Neal was fine, he scored 44 points. But he was just a short-term fix. The Knights have a ton of their team locked up for a while.

Well, how is this possible? How was this team so fortunate as to find so many undervalued, yet talented players?

Advanced analysis

If we look at the Knights’ Corsi and Fenwick percentages on hockeyreference.com, we can see that a lot of their successful sleepers are clustered near the top. Miller, Karlsson, Smith are all there.

Miller was a deliberate advanced stat selection. He finished with an insane 60.3 CorsiFor percentage in 2017, with a relative CorsiFor percentage of 7.1 percent. Even the season before that, he had a 52 CorsiFor percentage and a relative CorsiFor percentage of 2.5.

He finished the 2017-18 season with a CorsiFor percentage of 53.6, which should come as no surprise. The Knights simply identified that his points did not correlate with his advanced stats for whatever reason. This season, they certainly did.

Karlsson is a bit more difficult. His advanced stats have been very inconsistent over his short career, so it is hard to know what the Knights did there. It’s quite possible they merely got as lucky as Karlsson did when he scored on well over 20 percent of his shots.

Smith, on the other hand, has maintained consistently impressive advanced stats, and continued to do so in Vegas. He actually has a CorsiFor percentage higher than 50 percent since the 2012-13 season.

Looking beyond the main stars, we begin to see what kinds of players the Knights tended to target. William Carrier, Shea Theodore, Brayden McNabb, and David Perron – these are all guys who have put up impressive advanced stats in the past, but have gotten unlucky with their perceived ability.

The Golden Knights found underrated pieces that teams ignorantly brushed away, and gave them a new home. There are a few exceptions. Not every member of the Knights has put up fantastic advanced stats in the past. Pierre-Edouard Bellemare stands out, as does Engelland.

However, looking at their core and their advanced stats in the past, it’s clear they had a plan and they executed it to perfection.

How to build a great expansion team

Future general managers of all sports should follow the example of the Vegas Golden Knights. Even paying slight attention to advanced stats will bring you heads and shoulders over many other GMs.

Look for sleepers. Guys who appear ready to take on a larger role, but for whatever reason, aren’t getting that larger role. Teams who don’t pay careful attention to advanced stats will often assume that an underperforming player is a bad player. This gives you an opportunity to steal their best players away from them.

Sometimes, you’ll even run into a team like the Panthers, who will all but define themselves by ignoring the advanced stats. There’s no way any logical being could expose Marchessault just to get rid of Smith’s long-term deal. Sure, it’s not ideal, but Smith’s a legitimate top-six forward.

This may sound ridiculous, but having an advanced stats department, and following a good plan will make you one of the best teams in the league. The Knights executed this flawlessly, and that is how they got here.