LAS VEGAS -- Kelly McCrimmon has a job to do. As general manager of the Vegas Golden Knights, he must put emotion aside and do what's best for the team.
"It's damn tough," McCrimmon said at Stanley Cup Final Media Day on Friday. "But at the same time, if you have these jobs and you want to avoid the hard decisions, you probably shouldn't have these jobs."
Well, after a series of hard decisions and bold moves, the Golden Knights are in the Cup Final for the second time in six seasons, facing the Florida Panthers in Game 1 on Saturday (8 p.m. ET; TNT, TBS, truTV, CBC, SN, TVAS).
Since making the Cup Final in their inaugural season of 2017-18 and losing to the Washington Capitals in five games, they've parted with popular coaches and players, pushed the limits of the NHL salary cap, and dealt with doubt and criticism.
But they've made major additions like captain Mark Stone, No. 1 defenseman Alex Pietrangelo and No. 1 center Jack Eichel, while making other impactful additions.
And they've gotten results.
They've won 267 games and earned 575 points in the regular season, fifth in the NHL since they joined the League as an expansion team. They have failed to qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs once, last season, and that was largely due to injuries.
They've won 50 games and 10 rounds in the playoffs, second only to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who have won 61 games, 13 rounds and the Cup twice in that span. Four times, they've advanced to at least the third round.
"A lot of teams would love to have the success that we've had, not just in my time, but in the whole organization's time," said Stone, who arrived from the Ottawa Senators in a trade Feb. 25, 2019. "But for us now, it's about getting over that hump here."
"It's been a process that's, I think, been calculated," McCrimmon said. "I think it's been based on good decisions made for the right reasons. Our goal is to win. Our goal is to win the Stanley Cup. That's what we're trying to accomplish, and that's what we hope to do."
The Golden Knights shocked the hockey world by making the Cup Final in their inaugural season. They also built a bond with Las Vegas, because they were the city's first major-league professional sports team, had so much success so early and helped the community heal after a mass shooting on the Strip on Oct. 1, 2017.
But for the Golden Knights to sustain their success, management had to take a hard look at that run, see it for what it was and maneuver for the future. Vegas had depth thanks to the expansion process but lacked high-end talent.
"We sure felt when we looked at the makeup of our roster that if we were going to be a contending team, we needed to make some changes to that team," McCrimmon said. "We needed to make it better. No disrespect or disregard to the Year One team, but effectively we felt in some respects we caught lightning in a bottle with that year."
In the years afterward, the Golden Knights went from Gerard Gallant to Peter DeBoer to Bruce Cassidy behind the bench. They said good-bye to goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, who still might be the most popular professional athlete in Las Vegas history, and other fan favorites like defenseman Nate Schmidt. (McCrimmon was promoted to GM from assistant GM effective Sept. 1, 2019, with George McPhee giving up the GM title and remaining president of hockey operations.)
"It's tough to see that a lot of the teammates that we had starting here in Vegas aren't here anymore," Smith said. "But you do realize that we have such an aggressive management group that they're trying to win every single year. We put such a good product on the ice the first year that the expectation has gone up every single year, and you had to lose teammates in the process."
Another way to look at it, though, is that six players are still left from that inaugural run.
"We've had tremendous loyalty to players," McCrimmon said. "We have six players from the original team, which a lot of people forget. When you look around the NHL and you go back to 2017-18, there's not a lot of teams that have more than six players from that core group."
This is the bottom line:
"We think we've built our best team," McCrimmon said. "We like the makeup of our roster. Bruce and his staff have done a tremendous job coaching that roster to the identity that we as hockey operations envisioned. We're a four-line team. We have those top players at all the key positions, but we also have very good depth."
