LAS VEGAS — Some expansion franchises enjoy success sooner, others later, the Browns never.
But none are spared a ride on the struggle bus. Before this year, the four major sports leagues had birthed 63 teams since 1960, and every one of them finished their debut season with a losing record.
Then there are the Vegas Golden Knights.
If you haven’t noticed, a hockey man from Bowling Green State University is authoring the sports fairy tale of the year.
Like Frankenstein, George McPhee — a former Falcons star and now the GM of the Knights — has assembled a roster of spare parts into an unintended monster.
The Knights (33-12-4) are not just good for an expansion team. They have the best winning percentage in the NHL, raucously threatening to bring down both their faithfully sold-out house on the Strip and the house. You see, with 500-1 title odds, the Knights began the season as the biggest moonshot bet in recent league history. If they win the Stanley Cup, one bookmaker told the Las Vegas Sun, “We’ll be cheering them all the way to the parade, with our resumes in hand.”
During a jaunt here last week, I found but one similarly unamused local. The reason? “All they do is win,” a casino worker said on the smoke-fogged Tropicana floor after the Knights licked visiting Columbus. “It’s not even fun anymore.”
As for the rest of town, they can’t get enough. The game on ice has become the desert’s hottest new show, with T-Mobile Arena over capacity every game this season.
“There’s no doubt that it’s a unique story,” said McPhee, who looks forward to hosting a group of his former BG teammates next month. “This is a town that craved a professional sports team for a long time, and there seems to be a love affair.”
For the 59-year-old hockey lifer, it has proven his unlikely masterwork.
McPhee has enjoyed many highlights, beginning with what he calls “the best four years of my life” at BG, where as a senior forward in 1982 he won the Hobey Baker Award given to the nation’s best college player. (His son, Graham, now plays for his old Falcons coach, Jerry York, at Boston College.) He went on to play seven years in the NHL, then moved to the front office, most notably spending 17 years as the GM of the Capitals.
But this, nobody has seen anything like it. Remember, the Knights were supposed to be terrible, their players culled from the scrap heap. In the expansion draft, each of the other 30 clubs was allowed to protect its top 11 players, and even that didn’t do the slim pickings justice. McPhee, focused on hoarding draft picks, made several side deals with teams in exchange for not selecting any of their reputedly useful players. With a few notable exceptions, he filled the team with third or fourth-liners.
You can guess what happened next. In this city built on optimism, McPhee’s moves kept coming up BAR-BAR-BAR. Take forward William Karlsson, who had 15 goals with the Blue Jackets the last two years. The 25-year-old Swede leads Vegas with 27 of them — a dozen more than Columbus’ leading scorer. He is just one of a perfect mix of underdogs who got their opportunity and ran angrily with it.
More than a mirage, the expansion Knights are suddenly a contender to raise the Cup and, yes, bring down the house.
It would be the biggest inside job in Vegas history.
Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.
First Published February 1, 2018, 8:48 p.m.
