Every year after the Stanley Cup gets handed out, it becomes hyper-obvious that GMs around the league haven’t entirely had their eyeballs on their own test paper. When the Los Angeles Kings won the Cup, everyone around the league wanted to get bigger and heavier. Then two Penguins teams won without world-beating defencemen and everyone started chasing speed and skill, which was presumed to be the direction the league was going.
It’s become inevitable – GMs pursue the look of the latest teams that’ve won…until that style of team doesn’t win for a year or two, and a new direction is proclaimed.
You heard it here first: Speed and skill and size and goaltending and coaching, they all matter. There’s more than one way to build a winner. A variety of styles can get the breaks and get it done in any given year.
None of that will stop what’s coming this off-season, though, where it will be implied there’s yet again a Formula To Win The Cup for GMs around the league to follow.
So what will teams try to emulate from this year’s Stanley Cup Final? Some of the takeaways will be useful, and others useless. Let’s take a look at the two teams that were left standing when it was all said and done, and what GMs should find that’s worth taking back to their own clubs.
USEFUL: A six-player deep, quality, healthy D-corps
Think of your favourite team and their bottom pair defenders. How often would they go back on this puck, and then just dump it back into the offensive zone…is it 95 per cent of the time? Zach Whitecloud hangs on to this with his head up, sees an opening, and goes tape-to-tape to create the opening goal in Game 3.
Whitecloud and Nicolas Hague make up Vegas’ third pair, and they averaged 18:48 and 18:29 per game, respectively, this post-season (I once again ask you to think of your own favourite team and how much the third pair would play). Alex Pietrangelo plays 23:33 per game, while the other three Vegas defencemen – Shea Theodore, Alec Martinez and Brayden McNabb – play between about 19 and 20 minutes per game.
They use everyone. Everyone can play meaningful minutes, and nobody is overworked. None of them missed even two games in this playoff run.
You can’t control that final element, but having a third pair that can and does play is huge, and something to strive for.
Florida’s usage is different, but five of their six D still played over 17 minutes per night. In the end, I think you can make the case that Vegas’ better D-corps was the difference.
USELESS: Goaltending is voodoo and it doesn’t matter who’s in net
“Adin Hill, Stanley Cup champion. Boy who even knows who’s good, you better not spend money on a goalie.”
I hate the mail-it-in culture of goalie analysis out there these days.
Look at the teams that were in the final four this year. You had Jake Oettinger, one of the established Best Goalies in the League. You had Freddy Andersen, a guy who’s earned Vezina votes in three different seasons, with a career .915 save percentage (.917 in the playoffs). You have Sergei Bobrovsky who, yes, hasn’t been lights out in recent years, but who is a two-time Vezina Trophy winner (and as we saw with Carey Price a few years back, the elite can find it again at times with the right motivation). And Hill didn’t make $2.175 million this year because Vegas saw him as a fourth stringer – he can play, and is about to earn a whole bunch more.
So for all the jokes when it was Hill and Alex Lyon in net (with Jonathan Quick and Bobrovsky on the benches), the lesson shouldn’t be “don’t spend on goaltending, you just need your guy to get hot!” The lesson is to make smart bets, which Hill was (plenty of analytics people liked him) among the cheaper goalies. (And sure, maybe not giving out gigantic eight-year contracts to goalies is a useful sidebar to this.)
Don’t talk yourself into your third stringer on league minimum just because you weren’t familiar with Hill before this season.
USEFUL: Seek out purposeful, role-specific depth players
The Vegas Golden Knights hadn’t used Phil Kessel on the fourth line in a while, because they see their fourth line as having a role that doesn’t play to Kessel’s strength. The want to forecheck and hit and defend with that group, so they lean into it with Will Carrier and Nicolas Roy and Keegan Kolesar.
But guys who do something unique — the way Sam Bennett is a wrecking ball on the forecheck, or even farther down the lineup, the way Kolesar and Ryan Lomberg can be effective with physical games (Radko Gudas too, if you want to include defencemen) — provide something without playing a lot. It’s nice to have a guy who can control a moment in limited minutes.
Whether it’s a spot in the lineup where you have your best penalty killers or physical players or faceoff guys or whatever, having specialists in the depth roles rather than “skill guys waiting for their turn” seems to be more effective.
USELESS: Teams that just miss the playoffs shouldn’t make changes
You can look at the Golden Knights, who just missed the playoffs last year, and say “This team barely changed a thing from that group to this one, they just stuck with it.” Heck, you can look at Florida, who snuck into the playoffs because the Pittsburgh Penguins threw up on their own shoes down the stretch, and say “see, teams that barely get in or barely miss can be good enough with a little luck.”
There are teams that live around the cusp with huge upside, sure, but that isn’t everyone.
This theory overlooks the massive changes the Knights had undergone prior to the 2022 off-season, just like it overlooks the massive changes Florida made to re-imagine their group after last year’s post-season failing. These were always far better teams than a couple weird regular seasons made them look.
You don’t want to make moves just to make moves, but “patience, we’re almost good enough if we just stick with it” — as I’ve heard some Buffalo Sabres fans claim — probably just isn’t true.
USEFUL: A fresh coaching voice can help a talented roster
The most unfair part of being an NHL coach is that sometimes you do everything right, the team gets unlucky, and the guys just want someone new. You get the most out of certain players by leaning on them, but people change. If a coach leans on the same guys for years (thinking that’s what motivates them), it’s possible they’d love the chance to show a new coach they don’t need to be leaned on so much.
Bruce Cassidy and Paul Maurice have been good coaches. They were both handed the rosters of already-good teams this season, and took them the distance. Were both of them in their fifth years with these teams, that may not be the case. A fresh voice with a new look and ideas can re-invigorate already great teams.
USELESS: Nasty is the key to success (but the useful part is that standing up for yourself is a necessity)
If you look at the Florida Panthers going the distance and think the key to their success was being a bully, you’re going to be disappointed when you try to replicate that. Yes, it helped them surprise and upset some teams in the early going. But the simple reality is that Vegas hasn’t gone that route entirely, they’ve simply showed they won’t just take the abuse and back down from it.
Say what you will about Pietrangelo’s brutal slash on Leon Draisaitl, after the punishment has been served, that sort of thing serves players well. It’s not awful for opponents to know there’s a limit to what you’ll take.
So running around and taking penalties and acting foolish isn’t the answer. Plenty of teams have tried to go that route and failed. Being the Broad Street Bullies isn’t the answer in the modern game.
But showing you won’t be pushed around still has merit.
USEFUL: Get elite talent, get elite talent, get elite talent
This is obvious, but it’s necessary to re-emphasize.
Florida got Matthew Tkachuk by making a monstrously bold trade, sending Jonathan Huberdeau out the year after he tallied 115 points and earned Hart Trophy votes. The Vegas Golden Knights moved heaven and earth to get Jack Eichel, and went in huge by getting Pietrangelo.
These are the central figures for their teams in the Stanley Cup Final.
Difference-makers are tough to come by. Maybe there are 30 in the league and some teams have a few of them. When you can get your hands on any of theses guys, hold on for dear life.
